it's my birthday and i have an album
In place of your standard Ghost Down newsletter, I'm doing a track-by-track breakdown of my debut album, Mr. Mist, that is out today, Tuesday August 26th. Today is also my birthday. I know it seems hard to believe, but it wasn't planned that the newsletter day fell on my birthday this year! We love a happy accident. Thank you for reading and listening! We'll be back to your normal recs and a blog and all that in two weeks. :)
You can listen to the album here, or by clicking on the cover below.
So Over (Intro)
Similar to how most of these things start, I was making a fun fast little beat on my drum machine. In the process thought of my friend Pablo whispering "should I...make it worse?" which is why it evolved into this out of control katamari, picking up rumbles and squelches along the way. A real tone-setter.
Suitcase
I just wanted to be home. I had spent an entire week upstate recording the Overheard record, and was then catapulted by bus back into the city that never sleeps. Going from a remote Palenville, NY home studio to the most chaotic subway station in the city had a serious impact on the ol' noggin, and rather than try and shut it out, I recorded it. I pressed the action button on my phone, which I had set to make a voice memo, and recorded myself rolling my suitcase through Times Square Station, from Port Authority and the A/C/E line all the way to the Q stop (about two long blocks). The cacophony of the suitcase wheels on tile started to sound like heavy metal drums, and all the announcements and buskers and jingling of bells informed and crooned and rung their way into the recording. In trying to mirror how is was all hitting me, I took to Ableton to cut the recording up, slicing some samples and putting others in the onboard granular synthesis engine. However, all of these noises didn't exactly account for the panic attack I was experiencing all through it, so I set up panning swirls of filter resonance on an analog synth. I was told by a friend that their dog started freaking out when they listened to the song for the first time.
Unbutton
Honestly, just an idea I had in the shower. "What if a bell chimes and then there's a bzzzt right before the bell chimes again." More bells, two baoding balls my sister got me from China, and the wailing of dueling guitars soon followed and turned this into 'the cathedral is actually a dungeon' sounds. The jingling noise that precedes the bell is also drawn from the previous subway panic attack recording used on Suitcase!
This Is My Job
This one is quite old. One day, I was riding the train home with my then-coworker from a Manhattan site visit for my previous job. This Metro North train, the Hudson Line, gets its name from following the Hudson River from New York City to Poughkeepsie, NY. This coworker pointed to a giant communication tower across the river, sticking out like a sore thumb from the Palisades along the New Jersey side of the Hudson. He said our company did entirely confidential government work on it, and refused to elaborate further. My mind went to all sorts of terrible places thinking about what kind of [REDACTED] is happening when those signals are relayed. I wrote several poems and crafted a few soundscapes based on this idea, but this one I feel successfully evokes the most 'factory of evil' vibes, all the worst pings that the tower pongs.
The title of this record is actually inspired by a line in a poem from the same creative fountain as this track, about the idea of a drone-strike-brandishing surveillance state:
"mister
of course I know your name, but
I’d rather call you
red mist"
Parking Lot Milky Way
When you're lucky to see a couple of stars in Prospect Park, to look up at a Catskill Mountain night sky and seeing the literal fucking Milky Way, eternity staring you in the face, it might as well be swallowing you whole. When I got home from that trip, it felt less like I was constructing this song and more like it was spilling out of me. The process was sloppy, the guitar was recorded in one take, the analog synth tracks were played and manipulated live, every sample of Kenny Thomas's cello playing was dropped in almost at random. My longtime friend and collaborator Evan Thomas (no relation) did wonderful work mixing and mastering several of the tracks on this record, but I wanted to highlight that he truly brought this one to life. What I was once considering tossing aside as a frenetic experiment now feels to me like the centerpiece of the album, and not just because it's smack in the middle of the tracklist.
Tough Crowd / Crickets / Unbutton II
There's this Blanck Mass song called "Minnesota / Eas Fors / Naked", a track that starts as harsh noise, evolves into a more ambient sound collage, and eventually ends on a peaceful little lo-fi beat. It's one of my favorite songs of all time, and I have always been enamored by that sort of three-act idea. A while back I created a noise track on my analog synth just to see if I could, but over the course of its creation the track slowly started to evolve its way into cricket sounds. But like, thousands of them. I had recently written a poem called "TOUGH CROWD" that described fascination with crickets representing silence, and I liked making this track as a mirror! That said, it only felt like the first half of a song, and I can't think of crickets without thinking of the calm of night time, so I recruited my friends Maeve Schallert and Kenny Thomas to record me string parts on their violin and viola, respectively. The strings were supposed to fade out and close the track, but I still didn't quite feel like it was done, so I decided to close the loop with the peace that was promised by the opening of the earlier track Unbutton, via a little bell-chime sequel. Solace to complement the stress, chords to offset the discord.
Is Burned
It ain't always noisy experimental sound collage 'challenging' anxiety music. Sometimes I just like to make a four-on-the-floor banger. After attending anti-ICE protests and watching the 80's QTPOC documentary Paris is Burning in June (whole thing is on YouTube!), I felt inspired by people's fervor, friends and strangers holding space, community, and each other through extremely dark times. They were and are creating, for me and for everyone, then and now, some much needed fucking catharsis.
So I hit the bleeps and bloops and fat kicks and fat bass and no one's gonna stop me.
Prevention / The Whip II
It approaches self-parody how much I write about the ocean, but this really is the track that kicked this whole record off. I’ve written a more fanciful version of this story before, but in June of 2023, I was in Mexico, and couldn’t sleep because I was hearing extremely loud voices telling me to walk into the Caribbean Sea. Anyone who knows me knows I’m not a very woo-woo person, but I felt entirely hypnotized and like I was fighting off actual, almost tangible ancient forces, and it was maybe one of the scariest mental experiences I’ve ever lived through. I brought my laptop out onto the beach at 3 AM and, after staring at the sea, glittering in moonlight, pondering the sea turtles I’d get to swim with again if I just walked in, I opened Ableton and recorded the ocean. I created a synth sound that evoked a buoy floating way out at sea and its lonely song, and the track ‘Prevention’ was born. Much like the earlier track Suitcase, it didn’t quite feel like the message of the track would come across without the excitement of a beat and the panic of a noise/mental breakdown. I dug out a very old soundcloud recording of me whipping a floor tom with a guitar cable while bowing a bass through a bunch of effects, ran it through an MS-20 filter plugin to create this fun, er, ‘suctiony’, percussive element for the dance-y part of the track, and then turned the filter off to let two distorted guitars (that i put off recording for almost two entire years) take center stage and battle it out over the unleashed wall of noise. I did, eventually, go back to my hotel room and manage to sleep that night, I did not walk into the ocean like I wanted to, which is why I’m here writing this, and why it felt appropriate to return to the intro and reflect on what I managed to prevent.
Compass
This is a song originally by Disasterpeace. I re-created it in Ableton almost beat-for-beat because a). I don’t feel the need for much artistic license when C418 already created the perfect cover of this track, and b). because I love and have always been fascinated by this track as it exists, and how no matter what mood I’m in, it fills me with fascination with the world, an unshakable sense of boundless opportunity and adventure. I guess I wanted that optimistic note to end the record, because these days I’ll take optimism wherever I can get it.
Thank you to Evan Thomas for mixing/mastering most of this record and being my ‘do it bang’ consultant, Kenny Thomas (no relation) and Maeve Schallert for their string performances, Paul Coleman for additional mastering, and Rich Vreeland for letting me publish a cover of his song!
Additional thanks to my other bandmates Erin Barth-Dwyer and Kenny Hauptman in Overheard, my idea-bouncer-offers Dan McKeon, Colton Cox, and Brendon Bigley, and my partner Em for their boundless support and also being that person enshrouded in white in the cover art.
See ya soon.
-Will LaPorte (aka Ghost Down)