Silk Screens is a behind the scenes look at the making of a track.

In this edition, the Chicago-based producer Gilligan Moss—a Portals favorite—dissects the creation of his debut single, “Hemlock.”

In the fall of 2011 I moved to Philadelphia without really knowing anyone. For the year and a half that I lived there, I was writing a lot of slower, more ambient music. I moved back home to Chicago in the spring of 2013, and right around the time I moved back I started pushing myself towards more beat-oriented songs. It was around this time that I started putting together some of the early pieces of “Hemlock.”

The first part of the track to come together was the middle section. As I’ve gotten more into using an MPC, my approach has shifted towards starting the writing process with sample chopping. I’ll usually begin by just chopping up a bunch of samples and playing around until I find patterns that I like. In the case of “Hemlock,” the first pattern that I liked was the part that starts at around the 2:45 mark. Rather than just looping the pattern, I like to play the entire passage on the pads so that I can slightly vary the lengths of the samples, giving it a more live feel. From there I started building out the other parts of the song.

For the synthy-thereminy part around the 4:45 mark, I was initially thinking I would buy a build-your-own-Theremin kit and record a crazy Theremin solo – turns out I am terrible at playing the Theremin. In the process of working on a synth patch to replace the Theremin, I wound up with the synth that ended up in the final version of the song. In my head I pictured myself being able to play Theremin like this:

The final pieces of the track to really take shape were the vocal parts. I am one of those people that is drawn to vocals above all else, and I knew I wanted this track to feature a prominent vocal part. In putting together the vocal samples, my main inspiration was the vocal part from “Sing” by Four Tet. I love the way he leaves in a lot of the breaths in the sample:

As I was working on the song, I had this image of either a weird garden party or a party in a secluded tree-house village. After adding the main vocal passage of the track, I started thinking of the track as something that would be played in an Ewok discotheque:

From start to finish, this track took me about 3 months to finish. In hindsight, I really hate the way it was mixed/mastered. The drums are way too punchy, and the whole thing is over compressed. I hope to release a newer version soon.