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I have a new album coming out in a matter of days, and I thought I'd pen some words to explain and contextualise what's in store, and how/why this new album will hopefully feel familiarly OSC-like, whilst also feeling new and fresh.
Looking back to look forward
Back in 2019 I released the album Ideality. This was something of a creative milestone for me, as I explored funk, electronica and synthwave in ways in which I hadn't previously done.
It was my most technically complicated work to date (both in terms of musicality and electronic-music production trickery). I proved several things to myself about what I was capable of, and in an a somewhat abstract way, felt as though I'd arrived (creatively speaking) on what I felt OSC was and/or ought to be.
A couple of years later (2021), I released Yume No Machi, another personal milestone of sorts as I strived to create something with the same level of polish and grandeur (as Ideality), but that stylistically stood apart from my previous work. This album relied much more on musicality alone, and much less on the production techniques I had typically deployed in my other releases; a simpler, more traditional, less-is-more approach to production.
Doubling down on this album's aesthetic, I also created a vaporwave version of Yume No Machi, that looked to do (with the source material) the same sort of thing that vaporwave musicians were doing with Japanese City-Pop and Fusion from the 1980s (the musical genres that had inspired this album).
Whilst I have released quite a lot of music adjacent to these albums, I consider Ideality and Yume No Machi to be two of my most creatively significant albums, as they were sizeable projects in which I pushed myself into new creative territories, and reached personal creative milestones.
Ambient music & unintended consequences
Adjacent to the above-mentioned releases I'd begun experimenting with ambient music. Completely by accident, and without any promotion or label association, I'd stumbled upon something of a relative success (in my own, modest terms). My ambient work gained notable traction on YouTube when compared to my other releases, and it was fast becoming my most streamed music on Spotify. Moreover, my social-media following and BandCamp followers grew to reflect my new ambient music audience.
Motivated by this newfound audience, coupled with my own creative whims, I got carried away creating a flurry of ambient music. Between 2020 and 2024, I released twelve ambient music projects, and aspects of ambient music found their way into other (non-ambient) projects such as The Alpine Suite.
Whilst wholly unintentional, I couldn't help but feel that I was distancing myself from my older, longer-serving audiences (the retrowave/synthwave crowd) in favour of the ambient crowd, and I felt a desire to create something new that delivers on the sorts of thing my retrowave audience would expect of an OSC release (i.e. something akin to Ideality, Yume No Machi, Girls on Bikes, Deuce, etc).
A move towards Future Funk
During 2023 I decider to create an album that was loud, brash, busy, and very, very funky. I started to ask myself, "what would the love-child of Ideality and Yume No Machi sound like?", as well as "what aspects of retrowave have I not yet dabbled in?" 🤔.
I came to the conclusion that if I was to fuse the electro-funk stylings of Ideality with the City-Pop inspired stylings of Yume No Machi I would most likely (sort of) veer into the territory of Future Funk, which is a genre I've not really dabbled in before. So, having decided upon a Future Funk aesthetic, I got to work on curating a sound-font of drums, bass, 80s-sounding digital-synth tones, and various production methods to achieve the hallmark Future Funk pump and tonalities, albeit with my personal twist.
My initial experiments were freeform, and whilst I had an aesthetic to work with, I lacked a meaningful direction in which to go. I reflected on what the core theme(s) of this album ought to be and my thoughts kept returning to the experimental electronic orientalism of Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO). They're one of my all-time favourite bands, they're the reason I gave my own musical persona a three-letter abbreviation, and their music is what first inspired me to step out and release my own music into the world.
YMO was most likely on my mind in 2023 as we sadly lost two of the three members of YMO that year. Yukihiro Takahashi passed away in early 2023, swiftly followed by Ryuichi Sakamoto two months later. It's not hyperbole to say that their deaths rocked me to my core. There are few musicians with whom I relate to and admire as much as them. After their deaths, I went through a notable period of musical malaise and lacked inspiration for a while. However, I worked to turn this malaise on its' head, and focus on creating something that Takahashi and Sakamoto would approve of.
A chance moment of inspiration
I began composing short passages of music in a (sort of) YMO vein, wrapped in a Future Funk aesthetic. They were shaping up nicely, but I was still looking for that final piece of contextual inspiration to tie everything together.
This inspiration came from an unlikely source. The TV was on one evening and there was a documentary on NHK World about sleeper-trains. I'm no train-nerd and wasn't paying it any mind, but when I saw a particular train called the Sunrise Express I was struck. It was the coolest looking train I'd ever seen. It had a retro-futurist style, like what people in the 1980s might have imagined a train of the future to look like. Furthermore, its name was wonderful; befitting of this Future Funk infused musical orientalism I was experimenting with. So that was it! My Future Funk album would be called Sunrise Express and would be peppered with train-related iconography and sound elements.
I designed a musical plan that would take the listener on a night-train journey from boarding in the evening, riding through the night, and arriving at the destination as the sun rises. With this necessary context in place, I spent several months (working in between commissions) fleshing out my initial ideas and experiments into a fully-fledged album.
What resulted was a ten-track album that deploys a Future Funk production aesthetic with technical trickery beyond anything I've done before. Musically, this album has also shaped up as some of my most melodically and harmonically rich work to date. Moreover, considering the above discussion about how Ideality and Yume No Machi were albums that progressed, improved and diversified my creativity and production-nouse, I believe that Sunrise Express is the next logical step on this journey; it's a step-up on all fronts of my workflow.
For the visual finishing touches, I commissioned artwork from Kiera Pixie in the style of a traditional Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock print. For uploading music videos to YouTube, I captured some video footage of some train journeys I took whilst on a trip to visit the in-laws (in Japan) back in April 2024. Sadly I didn't manage to video the actual Sunrise Express train itself, but broadly speaking, the footage is still thematically on-brand with the album.
Sunrise Express will release on all the usual streaming services on January 24th (Spotify pre-save available here), and physical merchandise will also be available via My Pet Flamingo. I hope people enjoy this album, and that it resonates with my audience as the rightful successor to Yume No Machi and Ideality (as per the intention). It has most certainly been a labour of love and hopefully that will be evident when it's listened to.