My album for the quiet details series speak, thou vast and venerable head is a plank in the hull of an imaginary ship that once set sail on a quest to uncover the meaning of it all. Think of it as an attempt to cause a glint in the surface of the waves. 

The album is out on Glass-mastered CD in a 6-panel soft-touch matte digipack on recycled heavy card stock, covered with a translucent quiet details wrap.

Includes fine art print of the album artwork and a special long-form edition of the album.

Why are you torturing us with esoteric nautical metaphors?

The title of the album is a phrase borrowed from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, as are many of the track titles. The novel is an allegorical ‘holy grail’ quest: exactly like music composition is to me; a puzzle to solve, a way to document and understand myself and the world around me, a medium of expression, and a conduit for other people’s projections.

The title is from a gruesome but almost comical scene in the novel where the narrator overhears Captain Ahab – who at this point has been possessed by his quest to kill the white whale, and has actually killed another similar whale, chopped off its head, dragged the head onto the top deck and is interrogating its severed thinker eye-to-eye – saying “Speak, thou vast and venerable head”. He means “Give up your secrets. I want to understand you.”

I first became interested in Moby-Dick when I followed a bot on mastodon / bluesky that spits out passages from the novel at random. I haven’t read the book and I don’t intend to. I actually adore consuming its highly dramatic and overblown language in this disconnected, nonsensical and non-linear way.

How does the idea of quiet details work into this?

I used the invitation from Alex as an excuse to use field recordings again (something I haven’t done since my debut solo release ysmysmysm in 2019 for Junted), and by extension to use a DAW to create the impossible.

The phrase ‘quiet details’ I hope comes across in the production, where field recordings are allowed to take centre stage over synths that, if left at the levels they were originally recorded at, would absolutely swamp them. I really wanted to lean into exploring the textural possibilities within the individual sound recordings, and create synth parts to complement them, rather than vice versa. And in tracks where only synths feature, I relished the chance to feel out as many rhythms and timbres as I could conjure in place of time spent developing melodies.

Can we have a quick run-down of each track?

Klangfarbenmelodie is a short sound art performance recorded onto my phone and then arranged in a DAW and processed through ShaperBox and Valhalla Supermassive. (These plug-ins were used to treat the sound recordings throughout, so I won’t keep mentioning them.) I wanted to centre the idea of texture over melody in the album straight away. 

Monolithic undertow I set up 3 oscillators and my sequencer to create a chord with a bass drone, and a patch stuffed with delay effects, filters, spring reverb, harmonics, and possibilities for bringing elements in and out as well as dialing the intensity up and down, and vibed it out instinctually for 13 minutes. The title is borrowed from a book by Harry Sword on the influence of drone music on 20th century Western recorded music, which I read at the back end of last year.

A beach of little stones I live on the shingley East coast of England. Here is the sea rushing over the stones (recreated using foley effects, some gravel and a huge metallic bowl full of water, processed and arranged in the DAW). The synth part is made with the Instruo Cš-L oscillator, one envelope, one VCA and a random timing moving a simple looping melody along its pathway. I love this kind of utterly stripped back simplicity: how it mirrors the topography of a completely flat, bare coastline. This time the title is inspired by Moby-Dick (‘a sea of small whirlwinds’) in place of a direct borrowing.

Matter tells spacetime how to curve Oh how I ADORED leaning into majestic drones in this album! And then … acid!!! I recorded a live session, splicing in a recording of the ticking of my kitchen clock to create a polyrhythmic curve in spacetime for the middle eight.

The stream sent forth such sallies of glad sound  This is a voyage I recorded on my phone: a walk down to the pipe at the end of the field near my house, a route I take most days. It was winter, a lot of rain had fallen, so much water was coming off the fields. The title is a line from a Wordsworth poem called Emma’s Dell. A man-made network of pipes gushing water into a ditch is about as close to a ‘dell’ as we’re going to get in this modern agricultural landscape – so sail we must! I created a light, ethereal melody using  3 or 4 very simple sequences with octave shifts and a random timing element moving them along, sounded using a sine wave oscillator, a filter, and a delay stuffed with modulation possibilities to create a whole new series of randomised melodies in the repeats. I really wanted to leave space to centre the divine natural swishing white noise of the waters and the footsteps through long, wet grass.

Lie dreaming, dreaming, still 

I wanted to make something nourishing and restful for the closing track: something you would want to take away with you. This is me rustling around in my garden back in early February when I was making the album: birds singing, cars passing, a human moving, lots of texture brought out by processing. The very simple droning synth line is two very slow sequences running in parallel. They have different lengths so they repeat internally but the way they overlap keeps changing; the ebb and flow to their timbres was created using control voltage modulation on filters and harmonics. The field recordings are the central image here, so the dry synths are kept really low in the mix, drenched in BlueSky reverb with some shimmery delay. The title is from Moby-Dick:

“… the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like some slumberers in their beds; the ever rolling waves …”

Thank you for listening,

Loula 🐳