Delusions

Delusions is a strange album for me. During this time I was knee-deep into developing Reality, which had this very clear direction and cinematic orchestral sound to it. But every once in a while I'd start to miss the carefree, low-stakes feeling of making fun electronic songs without a deeper meaning or story behind them. And ironically, by not having a story in mind for the album, it started telling the story of me, who I am, and what I find really fun in making electronic music.

Delusions & City Walk

The first two tracks are connected, in the sense that city walk just acts as an epilogue to Delusions, which itself already functions as a prologue to the EP. I know, it's all very confusing. As part of a project for school I got to know my friend Paweł. He was fascinated by my passion for music and we ended up collaborating on a song idea while out drinking in the middle of winter. We put together a quick demo which wasn't much and honestly also not very good (which, I should mention, was not Paweł's fault). I stumbled on it again over a year later, which is when I decided to finish what we had started, expanding on the idea while keeping the core vibe intact. Thus, Delusions was born.

After that came city walk, which was also inspired by a piano demo from the same time. During our time working on the school project, Paweł would take me through the city on what he calls "delusional walks". What this means to him is that he'd sort of lethargically walk through the city with no real sense of where he was going. It was during these kind of walks that we often stumbled across some of the most fun and interesting shops and cafes. And I think at this point you can guess where this album got it's name from.

Concerto for Harmonica

Paweł's influence on the project doesn't end with just the first two songs. As a fun musical gift for Christmas, he gave me a small harmonica to experiment with. I never learned how to play harmonica, but luckily I didn't have to practice for long as I realised they are diatonic (meaning you can play any note and it will never really sound "out-of-tune"). So off I went playing on it all day, trying to use different breathing techniques to get an interesting sound out of it. I was annoying the hell out of my classmates with it, but one of them saw potential and said I should make an epic EDM song with it, and then I did. So, Hannah, here it is in all it's glory.

misplaced announcement

Another silly project turned into full song. I've been working together with my friend David (Plurki) on various songs before, such as Epic Moment and Hyperdream. We started with a funny sample from TikTok we'd been quoting for a while, but while making the "meme song" actually stumbled on some very interesting sound design techniques. I dabbled a bit in granular synthesis and resampling, and that is what contributed to the rhythm and the funky drop sounds.

Shimmer

Shimmer was entirely developed in reverse, I started with a rought idea of what I wanted the very end to sound like and worked my way backwards through the song. The name was set from the beginning, as I wanted it to heavily feature the sound and the feeling of my favourite effect plugin at the time, ValhallaShimmer. The last half of the song was finished pretty early on. I'd written it and iterated a lot, gradually improved on my mixing technique until it sounded as absolutely massive as I wanted it. Then, the song laid dormant in my folders for a couple of months. Occasionally I'd listen to it just to see if inspiration would strike, but it didn't.

That is until one day I was biking home from school, coming up with tunes in my head as I often do. I imagined this effect of having a space expanding and contracting, creating a sort of sweeping warping sound. I had no idea if it would actually sound any good, so I tried it when I got home, and when I booted up ValhallaShimmer to experiment, it felt like all the puzzle pieces suddenly clicked into place. The song I'd been envisioning in my head was in the exact same key as my demo for Shimmer. After that I worked non-stop on the song until I was very happy with it. I'm still incredibly proud of this one.

As a fun bonus, here is a picture of the poster Paweł made about me for his project: