The Deep

The ideas that led me to want to make The Deep came out of some of the same dark places we have all been to in the last few years. In the face of human death, destruction and violence spiralling, I noticed that I was becoming more and more obsessed with watching videos of two things: the deep ocean and deep space.

Both always feel like spaces of annihilation to me, beyond the reach of human damage.

I want to try to focus on those massive, alien, sublime spaces, and the relatively miniscule objects within them– one dot a whale in the ocean, cruising miles under; and the other dot the Voyager probe, flying out beyond the solar system.

I was fascinated by space and by whales (particularly blue whales) when I was a little kid, but 40 years later they have both suddenly come back and taken hold of me again.

The Deep, track by track

Old eyes

IMO, a good opening track needs to be a sign-post for the mood and tone of an album.

I am much more focused on tone and the slowly rising pace here than on melody, so whatever melody there is run through with lots of small samples of what I’ve been calling “driftwood”, meant to signal the massive space of the void of the deep ocean around it. I made them by breaking up old acoustic songs I had recorded about 20 years ago, and then bending and crushing them until they are illegible.

I also wanted to set up some of the kinds of opening questions on the lyrical side, mostly wondering about why I became obsessed with blue whales in the first place, having loved them as a kid, but then having forgotten them for decades.

There’s something incredibly enigmatic about them. And something wonderfully calm, particularly given their massive size, and deep oceans where they live, which terrify me.

Also (and I know this is not really true, sadly), in a worn-torn and pandemic attacked human world, I loved the conceit of blue whales as creatures that have escaped us.

OLD EYES

THE COLD, AND THE DARK, AND THE ENDLESS.
A BREATH, A BREATH, A BREATH, 15 MINUTES.
A BREATH, A BREATH, A BREATH, 15 MINUTES,
IS A MONOLITH.

I NEED TO KNOW HOW YOU ESCAPE, BUT YOU WON’T STAY
THERE’S MILES MORE UNDER MY FEET,
BETTER TO FEEL WEIGHT
ON MY SHOULDERS

WEIGHT PUSHING, SHOVING, PUNCHING, CUTTING
PUSHING, SHOVING, PUNCHING, CUTTING
I NEED TO KNOW HOW YOU ESCAPE,
BUT THERE’S JUST…

A 15 MINUTES EXHALE
AND HER SAYING OLD EYES CAN FADE
15 MINUTES, LIKE PANIC
IS A MONOLITH

SINK! KEEP YOU IN SIGHT! START THE DIM FLIGHT, DOWNWARDS.
GIVE UP MY EYES, ONLY THE LONG, LONG HOLD, FROM GASPING.
OVER THE MILES, WE ARE BOTH FORMLESS.
NO LIGHT IS NO TIME, NO LIGHT IS NO TIME, OVER ME

UNBLINKING,
AND SILENT.
OLD EYES.
INERTIA.

Breaching

Some of the many photos of whales I looked at as I made The Deep was of them breaking through the surface of the water. I’m sure researchers have their explanation for this, but for me it’s another example of the enigma of whales’ lives. Part of me doesn’t want a complex physiological explanation, so this song is about a much more simple possibility: that breaching is just play.

I love the idea of these creatures, not just wild in tooth and claw, but having fun, and this song tries to render that idea.

I built in a couple of pairs of instruments (two cellos, and two guitars) which I’ve tried to have dance around each other, “tagging” each other, and then I wanted the song to end with a euphoric burst up into bright light.

BREACHING

YOU RUN ROUND ME,
SKIP BACK AND TURN
UNTIL SPINNING YOU’RE GONE!

I’M CHASED DOWN,
THEN SLIP PAST OVER,
AND TWIST UP THROUGH A GLITTERING LINE.

STAY WHERE TIME IS CALM,
OVER THERE SOMEWHERE,
HOVERING SLOWLY.

AND EVEN IF YOU CATCH UP,
WE HARDLY KNOW WHAT TO DO.
BRUSH CONTACT, THEN OVER AGAIN.

A BREACHING DANCE, AIMLESS.
BRIGHT BREACHING THROUGH LIGHTNESS.
A BREACHING DANCE, AIMLESS.
BRIGHT BREACHING THROUGH LIGHTNESS.

WE ARE NOT SPEAKING.
I GIVE YOU NOTHING
MORE THAN THE MOMENT WE’RE IN.

SCARED WILL GET HERE.
MURKY AT FIRST, GROWING FEAR.
BUT I FORGET IN THE FLURRY AND SPREE

STAY WHERE TIME IS CALM,
OVER THERE SOMEWHERE,
HOVERING SLOWLY.

HOVERING SLOWLY.
HOVERING SLOWLY.
HOVERING SLOWLY.

A BREACHING DANCE, AIMLESS.
BRIGHT BREACHING THROUGH LIGHTNESS.

Scar Ridges

Scar Ridges is probably the most energetic song on the album.

It’s always interesting to me to see how the music you come across as you write your own conditions what you end up with. Among lots of new albums I heard during this production, it was actually a live album by Soulwax (“Nite Versions”) that most impacted how this song came out.

“Nite Versions” is a sort of alternative, electronic, dance music album. Not very deep ocean like, in a sense, but it does match the energy I wanted, because the song is about fantastising the stories behind all those old cuts and scars you can see on a whale’s skin. I dreamt of the power and intensity of what caused these marks.

We can’t know those stories of course (a running theme across all the whale songs), but we can dream of them. So with that power, I dreamt of them as wild, daring adventures, and past pain now overcome.

This is the most complex production on the album (and therefore the most complex production I’ve ever done, I suppose!). My machine was really creaking under the pressure of it. It was two drum machines running in parallel for example, one pretty traditional, and the second set up with various hard cut/gated samples, to sound more industrial.

Lots of this album uses re-amping, but none-more than this song. Basically, re-amping is where a sound recording made into the computer (or a sound built entirely in the computer) is played back out, and then recorded back in again, in a loop.

There’s two main reasons for doing this: it means you can split the stage where you try to perform the musical part correctly, from the stage where you make that recording sound tonally as you want it. Without re-amping, recording is like musically patting your head while you also rub your stomach.

Even more importantly for me here, it also lets you add the tonal character of a room/space into a flat digital recording. In “Scar Ridges”, I reamped the drums, and the guitars and bass, in a stairwell in my basement. The sound of those musical parts being (virtually) played back out into that hard brittle-sounding space made everything sound much more harsh and (excuse the pun) cutting.

So the re-amping totally changes the sound of the song as a whole for me, making it much colder and harder, both like a lot of electronic music, and also like the stories I was making up for the song.

SCAR RIDGES

SCAR RIDGES, HARD, STILL CALM THOUGH,
STILL UNDER MY FINGERS, READ YEARS PAST.
LET’S FIGHT AGAIN OVER THE LOST THINGS.
THAT WATER CUTS COLD, THEN NUMB COVER.

SCAR RIDGES,
SCAR RIDGES SHOUT
WE FOUGHT,
BITTER CUT THROUGH THE COLD,
BITTER CUT’S NUMB NOW,
EVEN SO

SCAR RIDGES.
SCAR RIDGES.

SCAR RIDGES HARD, STILL CALM THOUGH,
STILL UNDER MY FINGERS, READ YEARS PAST.
LET’S FIGHT AGAIN OVER THE LOST THINGS.
THAT WATER CUTS COLD THEN NUMB COVER.

SCAR RIDGES.

She is Silent

This is the end of the whale-song section of the album, and I wanted it to bring together some of the things I’d been reflecting on up to this point.

Acoustically, it needed to be the “deepest” song, as my whale drifts out of sight, down into the dark. More than that even, I actually wanted the whale to blend into the darkness. That meant no hard edges of the strikes of notes being played. To overcome that, I recorded a melody on bass, then split the notes up, made duplicates, and then flipped them. This meant each note could rise up from nothing steadily, and then drift back down again in the same way. The whole song then sits on my whale’s sound, drifting in and out of the mix.

For the void, I also used lots of the driftwood samples I had added from the first track onwards. These tiny, irregular noises are intended to make the song actually sound all the more empty.

At the end of the song, I lose contact with my whale in the deep water, and my vocals become progressively less clear as I do so. I circle the line “She is silent, but smiling” to myself so I can recognize that I can never know the whale, but it has given me something joyous all the same.

SHE IS SILENT

WHEN MY BLUE FINGERS TOUCHED HER SKIN
THEN I KNEW WHAT SHE’D BEEN THROUGH,
WHAT SHE’D SEEN OVER YEARS IN THE DARK
SO IT WAS LIKE WE’D ALWAYS BEEN.

YOU’LL BE SHAKING SCARED,
YOU’LL BE FROZEN HOLDING STILL
SHE’D BE UNAWARE IF SHE HIT YOU.

I’M THE ONE SHE CARES ENOUGH
TO LET ME HOLD ON TO
AS SHE TURNS TOWARDS THE DARK.

SHE IS SILENT BUT SMILING.
SHE IS SILENT BUT SMILING.

SHE SHOWED ME, SHE TOLD ME, THE DARK DEEP
NUMB SILENT THICK WEIGHT SO WE CAN’T FEEL
SHE TOLD ME, ALL SMILING, THE DARK DEEP
NUMB SILENT GREY PIECES.

SHE IS SILENT BUT SMILING.

(Dive)

This 60 second interlude is the bridge between the end of my blue whale’s deep ocean stories, and the start of my turn to deep space, and the being I’m fascinated by out there, beyond our solar system: the Voyager 1 space probe. All the sounds are lifted from the last minute, and then first minute, of the songs around it.

Fly into Winter

As the introduction to the other being I’ve obsessed over for the album, the Voyager 1 space probe, “Fly into Winter” has tension and then the (literally) explosive energy of a rocket launch. It’s a pretty big change of pace from the songs before it.

The album is obviously circling around the ideas of being immersed in two massive voids – the deep ocean and deep space – which feel like they have a lot in common. For one thing, the two beings I’m focused on are absolutely infinitesimal compared to their environments.

I put a lot of time into trying to show the ways in which they are more or less “lost” from us as an audience, but it felt like the way my blue whale is lost in the deep ocean, and Voyager is lost in deep space, should be sonically different, because of the teaming life of the ocean, versus the cold sterility of space.

I ended up degrading a lot of the sounds on the water songs in a blurring, muddied way, but from this song onwards, as Voyager’s story begins, the lost sound is more about harsher, granular distortion-like tones, breaking down the voices and instruments as they try to send their signals out.

FLY INTO WINTER

WE FLY INTO WINTER ALONE,
SMASHED OUR BODIES GRIM,
WALKED OUT, THROWN OUT COLD,
OVER THE NIGHT WE WANT TO RUN TO.

YOU’RE STORMING, ROARING DOWN THE ROAD,
THE LIGHT OF A FIRE OVER YOUR SHOULDER.
USE THAT ENERGY TO FLY AND TO FLOAT
ANYWHERE YOU’RE FREE OF ME.

WE FLY INTO WINTER ALONE,
SMASHED OUR BODIES GRIM,
WALKED OUT, THROWN OUT COLD,

OVER THE NIGHT WE WANT TO RUN TO.

Golden

When NASA sent Voyager 1 into space, they attached a gold disk to its side. On one side of the disk is a vinyl recording of music, and messages of peace in many different languages. On the other side are diagrams and equations on how to find Earth, and instructions on how to build a record player, so they could play the recordings.

The “they” refers to alien life forms.

For me, the gold disk sums up so much about the Voyager mission. It’s certainly a scientific project, and what it discovered is truly incredible. It was also sent with a lot of hope and potential. The gold disk shows that they wanted Voyager to be an emissary for us all.

But there’s also another side of that, for me: the gold disk is insanely unlikely to ever be seen, not just because of the likelihood of aliens, but because of the absurd size of the void. I love the idea of it, but I also think it shows how laughably deluded humans are, about their own importance on this scale.

And to be honest I’m no better. The Impulse Powers’ music I make acts like that gold disk: sent out into a void, and waiting for a silence to be broken.

So I built this song as a layer of reflection about this, on top of a song I recorded over 20 years ago. My own gold disk. I wanted it to be like the audio equivalent of the movie trick where you are watching something, and then the camera pulls back, breaking your immersion, and revealing that you’re actually watching someone, themselves watching it on a screen.

Another way I try to challenge the old song’s attempt to “make contact” is by breaking down the audio itself, so its message is more and more degraded as the song goes on, over those massive distances in space.

All that said, I didn’t want to be totally dismissive of the original gold disk’s hope and potential, so sometimes the older me sings along with the younger version – like he and I can connect, over decades.

GOLDEN

THERE’S A TIME FOR FALLING,
BUT YOU’RE ALWAYS STALLING IT.
LET’S SEE YOU FLOORED.
LET’S SEE YOU FLOORED.

SO WE WAIT BUT IT’S MEANT TO BE,
IT’S A SLOW DECLINE TO ENVY,
BY FINGERTIPS,
WE KNOW THEY’LL SLIP

AWAY,
FROM DESPERATE TO REACH YOU,
TO BREAK THROUGH,
SILENCE, ABSENCE, COLD,
HEAR SOMETHING GOLDEN,
UNTIL…

UNDER WEIGHT OF NO WORDS YOU FREEZE.
I’VE NO HANDS BUT A GUSH OF REASONS.
SO WE WAIT, SO WE WAIT, WE WAIT.
SO WE WAIT TIL WE SEE THE FAILINGS.

FROM DESPERATE TO REACH YOU,
SILENCE, ABSENCE, COLD,
SILENCE, ABSENCE, COLD,
HERE’S SOMETHING GOLDEN
HERE’S SOMETHING GOLDEN
UNTIL…

DON’T APOLOGIZE
FOR YOUR SADNESS,
DON’T CLOSE YOUR EYES.
TIME IS PASSING.

Giant

I think Giant is the strangest song structure on The Deep.

It’s meant to sound like the feeling of Voyager having the sublime experience of approaching Jupiter. To be clear about the scale here, Voyager is about the size of a van, and Jupiter is about 1300 times the size of Earth.

This must obviously be a truly terrifying experience, but Voyager did survive it, and moved out into deeper space. So I wanted to try to create two sounds (one for voyager, and one for the planet), and see if I could have one face the annihilating power of the other, but somehow still come out the other side.

The challenge I found making the gas giant’s sound was to make it absolutely MASSIVE, but also keep some moments where it can be less threateningly awe-inspiring, and even beautiful. I ended up using about 8 different string instrument samples, with different slow-moving melodies, and then adding in those same sounds again after having been re-amped (more about what re-amping is in my comments about the “Scar Ridges” track). So I ended up with around 15 instruments overlaid, and then I moved them steadily in and out of the mix, in swells and drifts.

Making the Voyager sound actually ended up being more difficult than Jupiter. How can you give Voyager a musical “voice” that isn’t completely destroyed by the wall of 15 instruments it’s meeting? If I made voyager sound bigger, to complete, I’d lose the point of the difference in scale that the song is all about.

I tried lots of thin, sometimes piercing tones to lay over the Jupiter sound, but nothing could cut through. The solution I settled on was to have Voyager’s voice be a repeated melodic loop. It is thin and high-pitched versus Jupiter, like a whistle. More importantly though, the looping melody is a repeated call out of the storm of Jupiter, like a lighthouse cycling, cutting through darkness.

The song is also very important to me in terms of what I think it says about the tiny, inconsequential Voyager, approaching something like Jupiter, being able to see it, and still endure as it moves on.

GIANT

KEEP STARING, DON’T ARGUE, THE LINES I’M FED.
IN STATIC I’M STILL HERE, TO NOD MY HEAD.
PASSED AWAY.
PASSED AWAY.

THE GIANT IS SILENT, BUT STILL AHEAD.
THERE’S PANIC, MORE ANXIOUS TO RETCH OUT DREAD.
SO I TURN, I TURN, WHERE I’M LED.
PASSED AWAY.
PASSED AWAY.

Beacon

On this final song on The Deep, I am trying to balance two ideas. Voyager, now far, far beyond our solar system’s planets, is facing a level of absolute isolation that we could never know. The battery that it runs on has also lasted many years longer than was thought possible. At any moment, we could lose it.

On the other hand though, I wanted it to be a song about lots of inspiring ideals that Voyager evokes for me: endurance, resilience, and even a kind of freedom.

This tiny “being” has faced the terror of Jupiter, and come out the other side. It’s flying away from us at breakneck speed (roughly 11 miles every second), and in some ways that feels like an adventure.

So the song is mournful, but it’s also looking forward with some potential.

Musically, there are two tracks I tried to mix in to reflect this: a piano ballad, lamenting loss, and beneath it, the unending steady rumble of its energy cell, as a companion.

BEACON

WE HELD ONTO EACH OTHER’S FACES,
FOR A WHILE. FOR A BLINK,
TO REMEMBER THE CONTACT.

NO HOLD ON EACH OTHER’S FACES,
DISAPPEARED, IN A BLINK,
BUT WE PRETEND THERE IS A LINK.

MACHINE HUM IS NEVER GONE.
MACHINE HUM IS NEVER ISOLATION.

I’M COLD, IT’S COLDER AS WE LOSE THE TRACES
EMPTY HOUSE, DON’T BE SCARED
OF WHAT IS NOT THERE.

WE STOLE. WE STOLE WHAT WE WERE AWARE
WHEN WE FLOATED
BETWEEN CARE AND CARE.