Bless Interior Heart Awash With Flames - Ghost Residue (2023)

This project is a strange one that has gone through some amount of versions before arriving at what you hear now.

The initial stage began with me recording on with phone mic the sounds of music being played in shops and cafés and then making songs out of those samples on my phone (Koala app) - i ended up making 16 of these songs.

The goal was not to release them as was but to mix and iterate them further in DJ software (i used Rekordbox), I then made 16 more versions of these taking two of the songs at a time and trying to ‘perform’ them, looping strange points, going a bit silly on the tempo sliders and scratching the platter and adding dumb effects. After this I was unfortunately not happy with where it was - they sounded cool but needed something more, and besides that, I had an upcoming live show for this project where the initial plan was me performing on CDJs doing chopped and screwed versions of the tracks, but I didn’t have any opportunity to practice this in the days upcoming so i made the decision to put together the songs in Ableton and form a long work which I was going to sing, speak and shout over. I added some bass, piano and bells (and a guitar part from the unreleased Goblin Librarian album) to this and then live I performed with voice, tin whistle and phone voice notes which I did duets with over the microphone. What you hear now is essentially that.

I listen back and it is chaotic and all over the place but when i try and interrogate the idea if I am fine with that I have to say yes - that was the nature of how i made it and im happy for that to be shown in how it sounds. I think it works :)