Berlin based multi-instrumentalist, producer and composer Calcou is back with a new track called “Below“. It is the third single from his upcoming EP, Places which will be released on the 20th of May via MFRD+C. The track is mastered by Brian Sanhaji (Charlotte De Witte and Pan Pot).
He explains: “This time I tried to explore space – musically, but also in a broader sense as a feeling of restriction. By leaving certain musical decisions to algorithms, I tried to overcome these restrictions with playfulness and randomness, acknowledging the fact that control seems like an illusion now more than ever. The drums in ‘Below’ circle around a field recording I took when I was walking along the stony beach of Fécamp in Northern France. The vocal elements are from my friend Julian Muller, a singer-songwriter based in the Bay Area in California. Most of the musical elements in ‘Below’ are samples of my own recordings. When things get wobbly and detuned, scattered by slicing or granular synthesis, I get this feeling of innovation and discovery, something nobody else will be able to recreate, even myself, except for that one little lucky moment in time and space.”
Watch the official video created by Mahir Duman who states: ”I have created the the video by using artificial intelligence. We discussed a lot in advance how the video could reflect Calcou’s approach to composing and sound selection, leaving room for the unexpected and random. So I chose to use pre-trained StyleGAN2, but left them purposefully undertrained to be as abstract as possible.