the mystery of it all

i’ve always been a bit skeptical of writing a diary about what i’m working on. while i love discussing it verbally with close friends who get the nuance, putting it out there can feel a bit much. i think because in its rawest form, i’m not really sure if what i write one week will even be valid the following week (at least to myself.) but i guess that’s sort of how this business works, you put shit out there, some of it sticks, some of it doesn’t. 

one thing i do enjoy about this format is an attempt to de-mythologise a lot of the stuff that goes into creating. i think art often gets put on an unfair pedestal that makes it daunting for others to just get started. art can become iconic and therefore mysterious and therefore impossible to imagine that it was created in normal circumstances. but i hate to break it to you, all of it got made in generally the same fashion. a person or a couple people sitting in a room thinking “what if we tried that,” and then they did it, and then the world decided if they fucked with it.

feel less was a potpourri of ideas i’d just wanted to try. i think i had exhausted myself with a typical verse-chorus structure, and had asked Lights to just send me some vocal ideas that i could try arranging over a beat. the form doesn’t really make sense tbh but it feels right to me. i loved how Lights’ vocal with a vocoder sounded on Love Me and i wanted to follow that more on this record. with the bridge i pushed it into a more Bon Iver direction, i think 8 vocal stacks, all her voice, just pitched to different octaves and formants. a fun experiment. the lead synth line took me weeks to get just right, each note moving accordingly with the chord changes. all with intent. i felt my previous records had lacked depth melodically, and i was trying to improve on that.

i don’t really remember the amount of work that goes into songs once the track is out. maybe this diary is an attempt to remind myself of that. i am proud of this record. i hope to make things that aren’t fleeting, that could be played for decades, or at least have the potential to. maybe i’m a dreamer for that, but hey, you can’t reach your dreams if you don’t have any ;)

-felix

btw, lots of shows announced! including a massive NYC one. hope to see u there.