CAP Selects S2: listen to our student albums of the week

CAP Selects: Albums Season 2

We're back with Season 2 of CAP Selects: a weekly series dedicated to showcasing the outstanding work of our second-year Creative Audio Production & Sound Engineering Bachelor students. The task for the assignment is to write a seven-track album towards a creative vision from scratch. The only prerequisite: two of the tracks should be collaborations and another two tracks should be covers or reinterpretations of original work. Listen to and read about our season-two selections below.

"I want to create music to be used combined with other forms of art like video ( movies, artistic video, animations..), art installation or performances. The vision for my album was to use the primary art form, Earth and its elements, to push my sound design abilities.
I picked seven elements for the seven tracks of the album: Air, water, fire, earth, glass, wood and metal. Each track is being produced using almost only sounds from the associated element.

Making art, using “art”.

My concept is also to use elements in a way (mostly destructive in my case) that the original sound is hardly recognisable, and make something that sounds like my art, using any sound sources.

This album project was a very interesting exercise to push further my emerging artistic universe. I decided to use limitations to create a frame of work and explore new sound design techniques. Choosing my seven elements, and working with samples brought a whole new way of generating sound, and a lot of unpredictability which is also part of my artistic universe."

“The idea behind this album is to create a product, a rap album that goes from my typical production sound, and something more trap. Even in the lyrics I tried to change a lot from song to song, there are sad songs, and careless/funny songs. This is something that I really have difficulty with, I always tend to write in sad moments of my life, and the vibe and lyrics I record are really often sad. With this album it is different. In fact, for one of the two collaborations for example, I decided to go really soft and not deep with lyrics. But you can also listen to more trap sonority and sound in other songs. That’s how I can reinforce my artistic universe.”

"I wanted to create a concept album, but I also wanted the individual pieces to be able to stand on their own. I envisioned something obscure and dark, but not haunting. I portrayed fragility and playfulness. I achieved this by being very free in terms of song structure and instrumentation. 

The Story:

A being will be born from the depths of the ocean, the voice of the mother will be present before its own. After the being is born, the voice of the mother will carry on as they surface and set sail looking for something...

This story was for me, and my collaborators. It is not necessarily intended for the listener to follow, but more for us to hold on to something.

Special thanks to Artur Pasco for the drums."

"What I mostly want to express are stories, even though they are written both from a first and a third person’s perspective, they’re a combination of stories from my family and friends. But it’s all written in a way where it could be about anyone.

This idea comes from when my father told me his story and when I said that it was such an impressive and unique story he replied that it wasn’t unique at all, that most immigrants had to live through what he lived through to survive. And that became a main pillar of my album. While most songs are about love stories, I wanted to write them from a perspective of a second-generation immigrant."

"My vision was quite simple: dark, dreary, and drowned in mystery. I am naturally a “night owl.” I value anonymity. I much prefer the comfort of darkness then the sunlight of daytime. My goal was to simply express these emotions without any grand ulterior motive.

For the production phase of this album, I wanted to create a sound world drowned in darkness, decay, with a tendency toward the claustrophobic. To accomplish this, I relied heavily upon the scientific concept of Psychoacoustics and its effects on the perception of sound. The study of psychoacoustics has been an immense influence on my production, and my general view of sound design. Oscillator phasing techniques, feedback, microtonal tuning methods (such as just intonation) and careful navigation and exploitation frequency masking, all played a big role when considering how I wanted to layer my sounds."