Lotion: The Q&A

Hi friends! I'm excited to announce a new recording that is coming soon to Bandcamp, entitled Lotion. The official release date is February 20, but you can pre-order on the site now as well as preview two tracks, just in time for Bandcamp Friday!

In preparation for this release, I invited a few people to listen to "crumbling, covered, canned" and "this is where the separation starts" in advance and provide some feedback. In addition to their lovely comments and compliments (thank you!), they also asked a lot of interesting questions. Now I'd like to share those questions, as well as their answers, with you, right here on the blog. I hope this will provide some additional context and insight into the piece and into the process of writing and recording it. Of course many other questions will remain unanswered and other tracks unheard. To remedy that, you'll have to wait for February 20 when Lotion releases in full. But for now, please enjoy:

Q: Was this composed? Improvised? A little of both?

A: A little bit of both, with more improvised than composed. Basically I recorded most of the keyboard parts as improvisations, the same duration as each track. Then I added in everything else later with more of a compositional lens (extra keyboard parts, percussion, mouth sounds, etc.). There’s no written score or anything though.

Q: What instrument made those deep, melodic, grumbling sounds?

A: The melodic instrument of choice throughout is an emulated electric piano and I am improvising with various digital effects in real time.

Q: What is making that crackling/popping/pinging sound?

A: Various things I had around my home: paper, crumpled plastic, aluminum cans, etc.

Q: Did you use a looper?

A: No, there is some reverb and delay creating echoes throughout, but nothing I play is looped or sampled and repeated.

Q: At times, listening to this makes me feel uncomfortable, both mentally and physically. Was that your intention?

A: Not exactly. I was trying to connect with the title of each piece in an emotional and expressive way. Any experience you have as a result of listening to the piece is valid, interesting, and that in and of itself is partly the goal of a lot of my composition. It should be noted that I imagine some people might listen to the original source [explicit] and feel some forms of discomfort, as well as many other experiences. There are reasons why I kept listening to this song last summer.

Q: For the audible breathing, did you choose when to add that in or is it just your breathing while playing the keyboard part?

A: The former. I added the breath sounds later as a compositional choice. How I chose where to include these is hard to say. Like I said before, this part of the process is done with more of an eye to the composition as a whole but it’s still improvisation underneath. I’ve tried drawing and painting in this same manner too.

Q: Have you thought about composing for film?

A: A little. I’ve enjoyed working with artists on collaborations before (mostly musicians and dancers, occasionally visual artists) and the potential to create something more than the sum of its parts is very appealing. The key would be to find a filmmaker whose approach would mesh well with my approach and we were interested in the same kind of final product. Who knows!

Q: Is there any imagery that this music evokes for you or that you tried to bring out when writing/recording?

A: Sure, images come up but largely abstracts, stuff that would be hard to describe. Maybe that’s one reason I’m working with sound instead. But I do love this well-known chain reaction: that text can inspire feelings, which can be expressed in some way in sound, which can evoke imagery in some other person’s mind, which might then inspire certain feelings, etc. If I did want to try to paint any of this, it’d probably be a mix of fields of color, black ink lines, and messy swirls created by spilling some liquids on the canvas.

Q: Some of the music sounds meditative while other parts sound sinister. How does it feel to play this?

A: Being largely improvisations, I won’t ever feel the same way twice, even if I were to try and recreate them as closely as I could. But what I remember while recording it was trying to embody and express whatever I was feeling the best I could with the tools I had given myself to work with. With no judgment attached to those feelings, like good/happy or bad/ugly, just feeling them all. Then letting whatever came of that stand on its own.

I had no idea what “vibe” each of the tracks would take on until they were almost done. That’s much of the fun of this kind of thing for me. It’s actually maybe more like taking a big slab of granite and whacking it with a hammer a few times, then using a chisel to work out the details of whatever is taking shape. Sometimes it’s hard to know when the piece is done, but inevitably you feel it and then you just let it be.

Thanks for reading! You can preview those two tracks as well as pre-order Lotion now on Bandcamp: https://justinbulava.bandcamp.com/

-Justin

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