Silk Screens is a behind the scenes look at the making of a track.
In this installment, Bryce Linde aka Fortune Howl breaks down the creative process that led to the song “Kodiak” from the beatsmith’s latest album, Earthbound.
High school was a terrible place for me, most of my friends had graduated a year before me so my senior year was kind of lonely. Every day went by slow. I was almost finished, but the last few months of school dragged super super hard. I felt stagnant and depressed and coped with it by trying to make music that would put my head in a different place for a little while. I was up late one night just recording some stuff and the next day in study hall I put all the recorded pieces together and the song just kind of happened.
It starts with a sample of bird sounds from the previous song on the album, some weird vinyl hum and a pulsing synth made with Ableton’s analog. There is also a shaker that I heavily phased and filtered so that it kind of wanders around. The main beat at 0:19 was made by layering some percussion with samples I recorded from a piece of shit acoustic guitar with a Blue Snowball usb mic (attached wav “kodiak guitar/drum track”).
For the scraping, bassy sound I pitched one of the guitar plucks down a few tones and layered close to 20 different effects on it. The main descending melody is played with Ableton’s electric synth. It was dialed to sound like a shitty toy rhodes piano. I processed it with an auto filter, some different delays, overdrive, a phaser, and some heavy reverb.
I wanted the main synth melody to sound very distant and lonely. Something about descending, washed-out sounds is sad to me. There is some frequency modulation, chorus, and phaser that I applied to the master periodically throughout the song in order to give the whole track an uneasy feeling. The slight melt around 0:24 is an example.
For the bridge section at 0:57 I recorded some simple vocal harmonies with the Snowball. The following part at 1:16 was inspired by jazz music, in that I didn’t want it to sound less like one voice singing a melody with accompaniment, instead i wanted it to sound like a bunch of different voices all having a conversation, or taking turns with different parts of the melody.
The main synth was made using Ableton’s Operator with a very weird filter effect that I use a lot in my music. It kind of reminds me of bubbles or something.
The last thing I added to the track were the vocals. I had initially intended to have singing throughout the whole song, but every time I would add something to the first section it would just be too much. I decided I would use the vocals as an emotionally exposed climax.
The whole first couple sections of the track were made by essentially taking something familiar (acoustic guitar, rhodes, voices, birds) and putting it through a sort of dehumanizing amount of effects and modulation. After enduring the confusion of all the sounds I wanted the vocals to drop in out of nowhere and sort of introduce a human element to the song.
I usually write and record my lyrics very quickly because I tend to over think them if I look at them too much, so I wrote a quick few lines about how far away graduation felt and how everyone else had made decisions for me when it came to my education. I quickly recorded them with the Snowball, doubled them up with Ableton’s vocoder (using a crunchy saw wave synth as the source) and finally added some arpeggiating bells made with Ableton’s collision synth.
I think the track sounds very cold and kind of lonely, but also a little bit loud and weird. I decided to call it “Kodiak” because it’s one of my favorite words, it brings to mind images of being alone and cold, and I love bears.
You can listen to Fortune Howl’s Earthbound in it’s entirety at his Bandcamp. Stay tuned to the Relief in Abstract website for news on the physical release of Earthbound.