Looking back on the summer of 2016 from the vantage point of spring 2021 seems like a lifetime ago. It was during this simpler pre-Trump, pre-Covid time that I travelled to Iceland with my wife and her parents. We rented two camper vans and took a wonderful road trip that circumnavigated the country over two weeks. The route that we took is nicknamed the Ring Road because it provides a full loop around the outside of the island, but its official name is Route 1, which is where the name of my album comes from. Each of the seven songs are named after one of our stops along the way and feature a recording from that place. This blog will be split between a travelogue of my visit to Iceland and an explanation of how the music was made. The two are quite intertwined, so I’m hoping that learning about both will help make the music more exciting, meaningful, and memorable for you.
During our drive we naturally had a lot of time to listen to music, and my wife had just discovered a bunch of new albums that she shared with me along the way. I’ve made a Spotify playlist with some of the music we were listening to as it definitely provided inspiration for the atmosphere I tried to create in my own music. We found that deep spacey groovy electronic music suited the epic otherworldly landscapes quite effectively.
As usual I brought my recording kit, which consists of a Zoom H6 Portable Recorder, a Rode NTG-3 Shotgun Microphone, Roland CS-10EM Binaural earbud microphones, and a hydrophone and coil-pickup from Jez Riley French. While it might sound like a lot, it actually doesn’t take up much room and is fairly light, so it’s easy to pack all of this into a small backpack and still be able to fit whatever other essentials I need to bring with me. It also gives me a great deal of flexibility to pick up whatever sounds I notice as I’m wandering around. However, I quickly learned that Iceland is actually a fairly quiet country. There’s not a lot of insect life, so as a result there’s not a lot of bird life, at least compared to what I’m used to in Canada. It’s also quite windy, which often makes outdoor recording difficult. As a result, I recorded a lot of waterfalls, but also captured some really interesting things that are unique to Iceland, such as geothermal activity or the squeaking and tinkling of ice in a glacier lagoon.
The album first came together as a live set that I gradually refined as I played it out at a few shows. I wanted to make the music as spontaneously as possible, so I created almost everything by jamming on my live rig. This consists of an Elektron Octatrack, Analog Four, Analog RYTM, and a Novation Nova. All of the drums come from the RYTM, and all of the synth sounds from the Analog Four and Nova. The leads are from the Analog Four and the pads are from the Nova, while the bass and arps are split between the two. The Octatrack is the nervous center of the whole thing. It controls playback and pattern selection for the other sequencers and sequences the multi-timbral Nova on six separate tracks. The field recordings play through the Octatrack cue output into the modular for processing. Then all of the audio from the modular comes in on one input pair, and the other set of inputs is everything else (the Nova goes into the A4, the A4 goes into the RYTM, and then the RYTM goes into the Octatrack). The advantage to this is that I can then sample and loop the live input, which is useful when transitioning from one track to another. While performing my live set, I needed to set up a patch on my modular that would give me the most flexibility to work with the various field recordings. Later when doing the individual songs I was able to make a unique patch for each recording, but I used a lot of the same techniques and processes.
Hveragerði kicks off the album with an ascending arpeggio. While it may sound like it came purely out of a synthesizer, that sound was actually made using a recording of a geothermal bore hole. Geothermal activity is very important to Hveragerði; they have a geothermal park in the middle of the town and even bake bread in geothermal ovens. Unfortunately, an earthquake in the 90s stopped the geysirs in the park from spraying, but the bore hole I recorded was still steadily belching steam from deep underground. It was by running that recording through Rings from Mutable Instruments that made the sound heard in the opening. If I remember correctly, I was sending pitch CV from the 4MS Spectral Multiband Resonator to create the arpeggio. While this song is the first on the album, it was actually one of the later stops in our trip before we returned to Reykjavik.
Track two on the other hand, was also the second place we camped on our trip. Dynjandi is a huge waterfall nestled at the end of a long fjord. With a name that translates as “Thunderous”, Dynjandi’s volume made it easy to get a few good recordings. The steady roar of a waterfall works quite well as a natural noise source for processing with my synthesizer. For this song I mostly used it to create percussive rhythms and swishy textures. I accomplished this by sequencing Quadrax with Steppy, then sending the envelopes to open Quad VCA channels and play with Morgasmatron’s filter cutoff.
Track three, Hraunfosser was the first waterfall we checked out on our trip. This one was interesting because it partially flows underground, then spills out along the side of a cliff seemingly coming from nowhere. Because it was more spread out and not as tall, the recording from this one is a bit more fizzy sounding. I used a similar technique as I did with Dynjandi to create rhythms and textures from the recording. This song actually almost got scrapped because I wasn’t happy with where it was going, but I really like how it turned out.
We witnessed one of the most spectacular sunsets I’ve ever seen in Höfn. Our campsite had an amazing view of a glacier, and the clouds lit up in vivid hues of orange and red above the white snow. The next morning while we had breakfast I could hear birds in the marshland below. They were some kind of wading shorebird, like plovers, and that’s what you hear at the start of this song. The recording was played back through a Qu-Bit Nebulae granular sampler with my usual Steppy, Quadrax, Quad VCA trio to shape rhythms. In this case I also used Tetrapad to play with the pitch of the recording.
Seyðisfjörður is the only place where I knew in advance that I wanted to record something. In fact, we partially went there because I wanted to record there, but it’s also a very cute picturesque fjord-side town. The thing that put it on my radar was a sound sculpture called Tvisongur, which is a cluster of round concrete domes. Each dome was made with a specific size in order to resonate and amplify the frequencies of the Icelandic musical tradition of five-tone harmony. I thought it would be cool to pick up a few impulse response recordings so I could try to recreate the response of those domes with convolution software. I still haven’t gotten around to trying this, but while we were in the domes my wife did some impromptu singing. It was the recordings of her voice that became this song. I sampled it into both my Octatrack and the Qu-Bit Nebulae; the Octatrack provided the rhythmic vocal portion and the Nebulae created the strange vocal atmospheres.
We quickly discovered that Iceland is a country that often looks like another planet, which makes it no surprise that it’s been featured in so many shows and movies. We visited locations used in Game of Thrones and Prometheus, but one of the most otherworldly spots in my opinion was Jökulsárlón. It’s a popular tourist attraction for a good reason as I’ve never seen anything else like it. Jökulsárlón is a glacier lagoon, where huge chunks of ice calve off and serenely float before drifting off to sea. The nearby beach is littered with translucent blue ice of varying size on a black stone beach, with some pieces around the size of a small car. While Jökulsárlón is a busy spot full of tour buses and zodiac tours, nearby Fjallsarlon was much more quiet. It was so quiet and still that we could hear the icebergs tinkling and squeaking as they rubbed against each other. We also heard the occasional distant avalanche as more chunks calved off the glacier. I wasn’t able to capture an avalanche with my recorder, but I did get a really cool recording of the lagoon. This is what you hear at the beginning of Fjallsarlon, but with my usual rhythmic processing and a heavy dose of feedback from Springray.
The last recording is a bit of an odd one because it has a somewhat tenuous connection to the location where it was recorded. Landmannalaugar is a beautiful remote inland area that features a natural hot spring river and a hardened lava flow. Before we entered the park we stopped under a large electrical tower. I think we were letting air out of the tires of the “super jeep” so they would be softer for climbing the sharp rocky roads. While I waited I thought it would be fun to try out my coil-pickup mic to see what kind of electro-magnetic interference I could pick up from the big tower. Because the mic was dangling from my recorder and it was so windy it made the buzzing tone warble in an interesting way. Sampling that recording into my Octatrack provided the main rhythmic foundation for this song.
There’s lots of great recordings that didn’t manage to make it into the album. There’s one of a geysir erupting, another of some bubbling geothermal mud pools, and yes, more waterfalls. It’s possible that these will eventually turn into songs, so there may be some “bonus tracks” or an EP down the road. Hopefully you enjoyed learning about my trip and the making of this album. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions about how I make my music.
You can check out the album here.
I also have t-shirts, tank tops, and mugs featuring the album art here.
SUBLIME SOUND 