Olly Flaig
These pieces all come from my EP that I made as a final portfolio for my course.
I took advantage of the time available for the project and the support of my supervisor and tutors to explore all the musical avenues I'd always wanted to try but never felt I was able to spend time working on. As such, it is sonically wide-ranging and shows off my technical abilities, but still feels very personal.
This track starts the EP.
I wanted to begin with something that used structures and sounds that I was more used to using in my personal projects, to then mark the following tracks as a clear departure from the music that I'd made before, even to those that hadn't heard it.
Having the space to work on a longer project than I had previously made me feel more comfortable exploring a wider variety of sounds under the same title, and using them to complement one another, or in the case of this track and the one that follows it, harshly juxtapose one another.
All of this music was made on my laptop, from recording and synthesising to mixing and mastering.
I'm always amazed by how many different directions you can take after starting an empty Ableton session - and how quickly you can create unique sonic material. Particularly, many of the tracks on this EP heavily rely on manipulations of the same few samples of waves, rivers and radio static, and yet through digital processing, all end up with their own sound.
This is what I love about technology in music. Apart from Ableton, I use Max MSP, and coding environments like JUCE for the finer details. The moaning fish tank on display in the music section of the graduate show is a technological project that I have been a part of recently.
This was inspired by a nightmare set in a cartoonish landscape filled with sentient planes.
Because I wanted to build a diverse and slightly uncomfortable soundscape, Loosing the Grasp is a pretty full-on demonstration of my technical abilities in synthesis, sound design and mixing. It was also by far the track that was the most fun to make, which to me counts for a lot.
I have a number of other personal projects available on Bandcamp, Spotify and Soundcloud.
Aside from this, through my course I have focussed on the musical possibilities of audio technology, and have scored silent film and animation. I have also recently provided the soundtrack for a short animation called 'Chaos', made as a graduate project at the University of Dundee.
Alongside all the emotional impact music can have, it can also have a very real physical effect on you.
Ambient music, and other similar genres of slowly-evolving textures and harmonies, are particularly good at this. After falling in love with how powerfully calming this music can be, Loving the Wind was my attempt at achieving this for myself. It finishes with a more lively section that uses random compositional processes to explore finding calm amongst quickly changing surroundings.
Please get in contact if you have any questions!
- Olly
Olly Flaig
