At the start of this year, a few days after the NYE celebration, after having done a lot of reflection on my activities in the previous year, I decided its due time to fire-up my favorite DAW and brush up on audio production skills.. I haven’t done any “serious” music production for several years (apart from producing a couple of DJ mixes every year), so I got really eager to produce something…
I spent almost the entire month of January upgrading my “digital toolbox” (as almost 5 years have passed since my last tinkering, almost every tool and plugin I used to use got upgraded or superseded by something new). That was fun for a couple of weeks, however, I soon found myself in need of a “project” – I needed something tangible to work on, to test all these upgraded/new tools and skills in action!
In the past, almost all of the music I produced, usually started with a piece of musical data: maybe a short melody, or a riff, sample, vocal line, etc.. This time I had no such piece. I had a carta blanca. I sat down and asked myself – what would I love to do, how much time & effort can I invest and what can be produced in such time?
The 1st answer was easy: I’d love to produce a new track and make a video for it.. so basically an A/V project. Considering the amount of work involved and budget limitations (there was none), I started considering the whole idea backward – I sketched out an abstract music video and started deriving its components according to the means (media) I had at my disposal.. I did a sort of reverse engineering of the final product. I spent a lot of time browsing through the web, YouTube, my own (quite extensive) video library watching countless videos and observing associations that arose. While observing some of the ongoing tragedy in the middle east I felt a strong empathy for the suffering of the people under western occupation and got especially dumbfounded by the infamous WikiLeaks video.
Observing this whole tragic scenario unfold from a videogame-style POV and witnessing total dehumanization enabled by this perverse real-world FPS made me sick to my stomach. I decided to pick this up and see where it leads me.. ideas and associations soon started to compound exponentially. I loved the general idea of writing a sort of “soundtrack” for this tragic event, however not in a classical sense. I wanted my track to portray/express it, but not necessarily be bound/limited by it. I started exploring sounds thinking about how to represent these ideas and conflicting parties musically. A basic expression of opposites was immediately positioned through the use of electronic vs. acoustic sound – the “invading west” will “speak” through electronics, the “invaded east” will do so through acoustics. The underlying main beat will be electronic, as the event portrayed/expressed was initiated and executed by the west.
Taking these basic concepts and expounding on them musically kept me busy for several weeks.. after the first interpretation was halfway thru, I brought my old trusted friend Dušan from Three of Many on board to collaborate with me. We talked about the project and concepts involved extensively and started to think about taking and developing this into a new EP by Three of Many. While planning and coordinating efforts between the 3 of us, I experimented a bit more and produced an offshoot of the demo, taking it into a different musical feel/style. While the initial sketch felt more up-tempo, brighter and sparser, this 2nd revision expressed the chosen theme much more effectively, using a darker overall mood and denser musical interaction in a much broader electro-acoustical soundscape.
During the final mixing and mastering of the part now entitled FreakyLeaks it became more and more evident, that at this time we won’t manage to pursue this as a Three of Many project, so I started developing the idea about releasing it under a brand new guise.. well, I’ll cut the (somewhat) long story short and just announce it – the Insurgent Orchestra is born!
What does it mean?
in·sur·gent
[in-sur-juhnt], adjective:
Rising in revolt against established authority, especially a government.
or·ches·tra
[awr-kuh-struh], noun:
A group of musicians whose members play a variety of different instruments.
ISN trailer 1
ISN trailer 2
ISN full release
