Have you ever wondered how the most perfect music falls in your lap at just the right moment?

Kin Leonn, a UK-based ambient and electronic music producer, and his music smoothly nestled themselves into my headphones this summer. I needed it, too.

I learned of Leonn from his work on the film The Breaking Ice. The movie follows three adults in their early 20's, living in contemporary northern China. Each character forms a deeper friendship with the others, while simultaneously, all of them work through their past traumas. It's billed as a bittersweet romantic drama, and it delivers.

The Breaking Ice forced itself onto my list of movies that I will watch twice. It has a solidity to it that I appreciate from good, independent movies. Besides, all I needed was to hear just a few seconds of Kin Leonn's musical score to know that this movie would slay.

I've since come to admire Kin Leonn’s work on a much deeper level. He has a way of creating music that surprises me, pushes me, and haunts my edge every time. I believe that his music effortlessly incorporates a wide and surprising degree of contrasts.

There are several techniques he uses to create this contrast in his music. And, I might do a deep-dive on that in the future. For now, I want to go deeper on how Leonn’s deliberate use of contrast in his music influenced the process I had on Lodern, the most recent release from Wicked Cities From A Distance. I also want to talk a little shop about Eurorack synthesizers.

Boring Synth Pads

In the past, I created a lot of ambient pads and soundscapes, droning out for dozens of minutes. The trouble appears when ambient music dangerously veers towards sameness, and slaps the listener with boredom. Drones can feel a little dumb, repetitive, numbing, and perhaps overdone.

This was why I felt so relieved to hear Kin Leonn’s work. It forced me to realize how important it is to think about variety, to insert some conflict inside of a song. Nothing wrong with having a little fight in you.

Discovering Leonn’s work compelled a deeper awareness of composing music that surprises and delights. I definitely attempted that with Lodern.

Creating Variety With Just Two Notes

Lodern has two notes: A root and a major third. It started as a simple drone piece. But this focus on contrast haunted me:

How on earth do I make a 15 minute long song interesting when it's just two notes, total?

To answer this, I need to nerd out about modular synthesizers. Fans of Eurorack are gonna love this part.

Granular Synthesis via Morphagene and Nebulae

The bulk of Lodern was created from two Eurorack modules, the Make Noise Morphagene and the Qu-Bit Nebulae. Both of these modules accept recorded audio and turn it into loops. Then, they can mangle those loops in so many wonderful ways. John Lennon would have flipped his wig had he had access to these two modules!

On the Morphagene, I had a piano loop running backwards. Using control voltage, I was able to change where the sound played inside of the loop (SLIDE on the Morphagene). Further, I CV’d (short for control voltage) the size of the loop (GENE SIZE), and I also CV’d the MORPH knob on the Morphagene. This formed a dynamic loop, one that changes, a lot.

The output of the Morphagene took flight after getting patched into a Hologram Microcosm with the MIX all the way up. I fiddled a lot with the Microcosm during the recording (TIME, ACTIVITY, and REPEATS). This part sounds pretty mellow just on it’s own:

On the Nebulae, using a similar piano recording but played in mono, I found a single section of the loop that I liked and froze it by turning the SIZE knob all the way down while keeping the START knob static. From there, I used my fingers to manually adjust the DENSITY, BLEND, PITCH, and OVERLAP controls.

The output of the Nebulae took on a very intense sound after I violently shoved it into a distortion pedal by DOD called the Gunslinger (Shoutout to Jerry Daniels for the pedal). This noisy loop dominates the dead center of the stereo field throughout the piece. During the mixing stage, I paired it with an EastWest Spaces reverb, a pretty slick convolution reverb, just to give it a little more breath:

These ideas were patched through to three separate tracks on my iD44 interface, and then captured in one take… One big, long, 15 minute take.

Adding Thickening Agents

I needed something to anchor the droney loops, something I could stand on with some certainty. I plugged a triangle wave output from the Pittsburgh Modular SV-1b into the filter section of the same module. I then took the lowpass filter out to the mixer. In one take, I opened the filter to get more volume when the song needed it:

Finally, I loaded up an ensemble string patch from EastWest's Hollywood Strings 2. I voiced a simple chord and mercilessly programmed it to repeat endlessly. If you've worked with orchestral samples, you know that the "sustained" sounds make interesting drones. Why? Players gotta stop at some point! The post production audio engineers who work on these sample libraries are often tasked with looping the end and beginning of a patch to create a sustained sound:

Aquiring More Contrast and Conflict

As I mentioned before, I do love long stretches of sound. But, drones need contrast to whack the livin’ hell out of a listener. I had to find places where sound could jostle things out of the ordinary.

A very good friend of mine Eddy Hobizal, who’s music you ought to check out, graciously allowed me to borrow his Fender Rhodes. I was able to plug that bad boy straight into the Hologram Microcosm. Without too much fussing about, I could play all sorts of chords and the Microcosm would throw everything back to me in a nice, twinkling way. An exemplar contrast to the lower foundational harmony.

Finally, I added some nature sounds. Why the hell not? Ambient musicians love nature sounds. Classic. Like a duck to water. Ha!

The entire session looks like this in Ableton Live:

Lodern in it's Entirety

Overall, I tried to make the elements of Lodern subtly contradict the next. I wanted each solitary minute to sound a tiny bit different than the previous. Sometimes the keyboard sounds would drift casually into the background, or lift up in the higher registers, or tinker with different harmony. Sometimes, the stereo field would hinge from balanced to dangerously out-of-phase. Sometimes, the thickening agents would just wreak a fever pitch of intensity.

I didn’t know what direction this music could take when I first started working on it.

My August this year (2024) held a plenitude of change. For one, I bought a new car. Having AC felt incredible as I had been without for about 7 years. I could actually drive places without having to bathe in my own sweat. I kept on getting the nudge to write and I began doing it. I decided to get new photos taken for my sites. And, Autumn felt closer than ever.

And once that change started happening, it manifested itself into Lodern. I ended up composing in that in-between place where I hadn't yet changed into something new.

I knew I had to pivot from old Dave to new Dave, as it happens from time-to-time. Lodern is music of that transformation, but specifically the space in-between, that liminal space, where we haven't yet figured out what's going on. Where we haven’t really finished the metamorphosis. That space has intensity. A good friend of mine said it's like taking a Polaroid and having to wait to see the picture clearly, later.

All I gotta say now? My-oh-my, thank god it's fall in Austin. That's a polaroid I've definitely been pining for.