It's been a long time since I've properly updated this blog. Please accept my apologies.

Much has happened during my online absence. I've spent some amazing nights in Berlin (Lots of love to all the wonderful friends I made there: Tara, Sophia, Chris from Blutengel, etc. xx). I've come near death under the unforgiving Australian sun. I've started my own club night (Isolation). And I have been working hard on the next Noir du'Soleil record.

This time I want to give you an inside look on the creation of this record. I intend to do so via semi-regular updates on this blog under the Studio Diary title (and tag).

So, let's get this underway with Studio Diary #1.

As some of you may know, another passion of mine is vegan cooking. I'm not terribly good at it, but it is something I enjoy immensely. On this particular morning I was in a cooking mood, thus I enlisted the help of Cabaret Voltaire and The Birthday Party (R.I.P. Rowland) to help me out with breakfast.

The end result: Mexican-inspired Tofu Scramble with Homemade Hashbrowns.

After breakfast I was very excited to start work in the studio. I had written down an idea in bed the night before that I wanted to try out in one of the new dance-focused songs I was working on.

Musically, the intention of this particular track is to blend a melodic EBM/Futurepop sound with strong influences from Tech-Trance and Psytrance. I knew that at some point in this track I wanted a huge build dropping to a solid kick and bassline. The idea scrawled in my book was perfect for this. I was going to use the Korg DS-10 (a music app based off the Korg MS-10 for Nintendo DS) and the inbuilt delay effect in order to create a rushing, out of time, delay-driven drum build.

The DS-10 has a very dinky little drum sound which was perfect as it would sit out as being different from the pounding drums of the main track. To accentuate this difference I programmed a beat that was not a 4/4 dance beat. I ran the beat through the internal delay effect on the DS-10, set feedback to near-full, delay mix to 100%, ran the beat with the track and gradulay brought up the delay time until it became a wall of sound. The effect was exactly what I was looking for!

It has been a few days of solid work now. The track still has a long way to go - but so far it is sounding great. At the moment I am very optimistic and I feel like the new songs, although they are young, are starting to sound like a new + much more sophisticated Noir du'Soleil.

Lots of love,
Koe. xoxo