Isa Gordon - Clyde Falls (2023)

These tracks were made early in 2023, the title track ‘Clyde Falls’ fell out of me one day after a walk in nature with a pal after having spent way too long in the city, indoors. It set me on a path of making and finishing music again, finding new ways to be playful and creative. I imagined them as a collection of tracks after a gig in early springtime, during which my computer fucked up and I had to play some recent tracks I’d made in Ableton. The twists and moods seemed to resonate with people, so I added a few more tracks to round that accident into a collection.

Making instrumentals is, I suppose, my way of expressing latent and blatant emotions and drives, reflecting the surroundings and influences that fuel them. Or, more simply, it's top tier escapism, an addictive wrestle of adding and subtracting ideas till you feel like you’ve captured ‘something’.

Over The Moon For You is post rave synthy air, part euphoria, part melancholia - it expresses the dilemma of, in love, sacrificing your own happiness for that of other people. It stemmed from the line “I’d jump over the moon for you”, I thought the poetry of it was part funny, part dark like the instro itself.

I wrote What I Meant to Say Was and We’re Made for my long term collaborator and creative cowboy, Jack Sheehan to vocal. He says of the tracks, precisely “What I meant to say is about saying yes when you meant no and we’re made up is about the drug ecstasy.”

Clyde Falls, Ban My Shadow and Reality is Cool are less summarisable in their meanings, these are instrumentals that tend to transform one mood into an entirely different one. Organic sounds to mechanistic ones, fours to the floor to melody laden passages, menacing and calm. I was experimenting with new instruments and programming ideas to give novel sounds to the urge to build and destroy.

The meaning behind ‘Luteal Phase’ is seemingly evident in the title. Though a notoriously difficult phase to describe. This track on one hand expresses a dark but powerful femininity but maybe it just expresses a wonky bassline that I really, really wanted to write.

As my pal Loris says “It’s like watching a building without the front wall and seeing that everyone is being sweet to each other but in front of the building there’s road works and pneumatic drills are going off”.