Let me preface by saying I don’t think my methods have been all that great or healthy, but I can definitely tell you how I worked, it was more or less the same for both albums.
I let things come about quite naturally, typically waiting for some kind of inspiration or heavy feelings to motivate me to try and write/record. For me it is an incredibly draining process- as 9/10 times when I go to work, I’m totally dissatisfied with what I come up with, which only augments whatever heavy feelings I was having at the time.
I keep to no schedule and I rarely just force myself to work, as then the personal dissatisfaction rate goes up to about 9.9/10. It’s often a slow, frustrating waiting game. I doubt I’ll ever be someone who can pump out an album or two a year. I also need lots of time after a project to distance myself from creating at all. When I finished this one in January, I hardly touched my synths or piano for months.
As far as the actual moments of creation, there’s lots of aimless improvisation and experimentation, waiting for something to surprise and excite me, and then honing in on that and going from there. Very important to me that I preserve and remember that first moment of excitement on a track- because it can so easily be eroded by hours and hours of work on a track, but a listener isn’t going to feel that exhaustion. The way I see it, if I got excited about a sound or progression or whatever at first, it’s probably pretty likely someone else will too.
To a certain extent it’s in keeping with the name I chose for the project. The enso is a symbol that can represent a very pure moment of creativity, just letting the emotions steer the body, while being open to whatever happens. Not a lot of intense cerebral calculus going on when I’m in the early stages of a track. As the track develops and kind of reveals itself, I then let myself play with things on the production in a more deliberate way.
I’m constantly jumping between tracks. The seeds for much of this album came from leftovers of stroke of blue written years ago, which I then developed and altered to suit the album. In this way too I think I’m able to bring the tracks together to form a whole, as I’m really developing them all parallel with each other. I definitely don’t think all albums need to be a totally unified thing with fancy seamless transitions etc., it’s just the way I like to make albums and it always excites me as a listener when albums do that.
