The Electronic Music Label

Paul Ellis - Panoramas CD-1 (MP3)

1. Misty Mountain Hideaway - [32:00]
2. Crown Point Under The Milky Way - [30:32]

Press Information:
When I was young and in very quiet, natural settings, I could hear a kind of music in everything. This was an experience that was so common to me that I assumed everyone also heard this sustained, evolving sound, but I was quickly disabused of this notion that it was common when I tried to explain it to anyone. Later in my teenage years I bumped into a few early electronic music albums that seemed to reflect and generate that feeling I had and the inner music I used to hear. This led to my fascination with synthesizers and how, with them, I could create an environment and explore a kind of music that was inherently free on all levels: the form of the music, the timbre and tone. It was the freedom that really got me hooked, with the ability to paint my own sound worlds.

With Panoramas I am injecting a certain amount of chaos into the compositional process to emulate the randomness in what you hear when you're in the middle of a forest. I would deeply listen and realize that every bird, insect, wind, or water sound would happen with their own independent rhythms and melodies yet somehow this chaos did not really produce any discord. So for Panoramas, I took random musical expressions a step further than I had before, I laid down several initial tracks and as each one was added I muted all the other tracks so I could only hear what I was recording at that moment. So, it forced me to pay attention to each individual sound during its creation which made each sound arise in its own unique way. Next, I would layer another set of music and textures over the top while listening to the earlier tracks, which made part of the music conscious and reacting to the other sounds. I spent a long time working on these environments to get the balance between chaos and order right.

This is my transmission of the inner sound of the Pacific Northwest.

Paul Ellis

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