I heard “Geographically Opposed” by Pick A Piper and I was hooked right away. A gorgeous, haunting track with a video to match:
Pick A Piper was kind enough to answer a few questions about the latest album, “Distance.”
How would you describe your sound to someone who’s never heard you before?
Music is always hard to describe, especially when it’s your own. I would say that we make electronic music with a lot of natural sounds. Sometimes these are acoustic sounds processed to sound more electronic, or vice versa. Often we simply mix acoustic and electronic sounds together with the hope of creating parts that don’t distinctly sound like a synth or an instrument. There is an emphasis on rhythm as well. When in the studio, this rhythmic edge comes from a lot of different drum and melodic sounds. Live we emphasize it by having 3 of us playing drums! Not at all times, but we use drums to help build tension and energy over the course of our live show.
What gear/software/techniques did you use in making this recording?
The album was made in Ableton live using a ton of soft synths, such as Monark, TAL U-NO-LX, TAL BassLine-101, many acoustic VST sampled instruments (either ones I made myself by sampling individual notes of things or ones that I found online) and hardware synths too, mainly the Prophet 6 and the Minimoog Voyager. Drum wise I don’t have any hardware drum machines. I have a ton of drum samples I’ve collected over the years that I used to make most of the beats on the record. Some of those I’d even snip from a track if I heard a snare or something I liked, etc (if there was an isolated moment to do so, like a drum intro of a song). There are a couple loops I performed on a drum kit that I used, but for the most part beats were put together sample by sample.
What mood or mental state do you hope to evoke in the listener with this music?
I hope to evoke a sense of reflectiveness for the listener. I make music from a positive standpoint and hope it comes across positivity to those who hear it. However I also recognize that people need music during dark times and I’m happy if my music can help someone through a dark time, even if it means staying in the darkness a while longer to sort things out. Mainly, I feel like our music is up to the interpretation of the listener and I’m happy to evoke any feelings that they personally want to gain from it.
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