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.
