BLUE CITY
BLUE CITY is the FIRST track on RICHELE’S second EP, Eladia UNDER HER MUSICAL MONIKER, HELE.
A R T I S T ‘ S N O T E S
by Hele
IN THE STUDIO, HOURS PASS IN AN INSTANT. It’s one of the reasons I came back to music. That and because the act of composition is undeniably therapeutic. A bit like hoisting a shipwreck from the ocean floor; an experience of both presence and distance in which you are somehow allowed to float alongside and watch.
The fact that Blue City exists at all is still a complete surprise to me. In 2020, I had been away from music for over a decade. I wasn’t sure I’d return to it ever, in fact.
But then—
A piano and violin ambient album, Aidan, my musician friend announced one day via transatlantic text. Let’s do it. (He had been away recording in Iceland and was understandably inspired.)
Haha, I texted back.
All the best things are jokes that went too far, he countered.
the County Kildare set-up | summer, 2020
And so they are.
We spent that summer in Ireland and Wales, writing an EP while he taught me the basics of engineering. The composing process was bliss but it did not escape me that I was a classical string artist attempting to suddenly morph into a recording engineer.
“But I play wooden things,” I told Aidan when he sat me down in front of the laptop for a tutorial session on how to create a digital drum line. “I deal in strings and pegs. Ivory. Horsehair.”
“This is … not that,” Aidan countered, forehead furrowed as he leaned forward to click his way into a console of digital knobs and sliders. I was quite far out of my depth. Every “science of sound” discussion that went way over my head and every painful moment of Ableton interface dumbness drove this point home further. But somehow, in the end, we came away with a mountain of material for the joint EP, and I returned to the US, ready to try my hand at a solo project.
Back in the Pacific Northwest, as the first flakes of snow hit the earth, I moved into a mountaintop refuge in the San Juans owned by Don, an 80-year-old day-trader and vinyl aficionado who was thrilled that I would be using his weird, lunar hab of a house to record my first EP. It was the perfect place to set up a new studio and start writing. I was excited. And impatient. All I wanted to do was release the music inside. To move it out of my brain and clear the decks, so that I could write more.
the Orcas Island studio | winter, 2020
But even with my newfound engineering chops, the path forward felt murky. I surfed around, listening to what felt like a zillion random, indie artists a day, chatting with ambient composers and DJ’s from Brooklyn to Berlin. Somehow, I managed to connect with an amazing British producer, Andy, whose particular set of skills had made me a die-hard Quebec Antique fan back in 2009.
And so, as islands glittered below in the sound and the snow began to fall, I settled in to record a spate of demos. The first of these was inspired by a series of vivid dreams in which I visited a city inhabited solely by orphaned children with freakishly sharp social intelligence, weapons-grade mental stamina, and carpentry skills that would put the hardiest Latvian woodsman to shame. They built homes from the ruins of abandoned subdivisions and created their own government. They considered adults to be largely unreliable. They painted everything blue.
I eventually sent a rough version of Blue City to Andy, and he set to work crafting the perfect setting for the track: granular electronica, ornamental piano, all tethered to a seabed of mellow beats. He also entertained my creative vagaries with the patience of a saint—
“More shofar!”
“Is the downbeat a teeny, tiny, hair behind?”
“Can it sound more ‘submerged?”
And thus, with much rejoicing (and a fair amount of elbow grease), we finally shepherded Blue City from the dream world into this one.
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P R O D U C E R ‘ S N O T E S
by Andy Dollerson
I love the many different paths you can tread under the title ‘producer’. I think every producer probably has a slightly different definition in their head but mainly, I see my role as helping artists get from one point to the next on their journey. If they’re stuck at
a certain point, I’ll do my best to help them solve and move through. That problem solving can take on many different shades, which, as someone who can get bored doing the same thing—I love.
As for Blue City, for a long time, we just weren’t feeling the intro. We kept coming back to this track through to the end of the project. Richele said she kept hearing a kind of ‘shofar’ sound in her head, so I played around with the sounds that we already had and found that by slowing and pitching the violin down and adding a filter that took off the top end of the sound, it created a really haunting ‘calling’ tone. Not exactly a shofar, but definitely ear grabbing!
Another challenge on this piece was balancing the slow movement of the melodies with the faster-paced arpeggios, and building the piece over time, allowing both elements room to breathe. As the piece progresses, more instruments gradually adopt the arpeggio, helping it grow without overpowering the melody.
It starts with just a simple sine wave on a synth, and then a piano, then another, higher synth, followed by a piano an octave higher. We loved the ‘shofar’ so much that we returned to it at the end of the piece.
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