We created a warped, melodic, chaotic, dystopian soundtrack.

This was a duet task and I was paired up with my classmate Daniel. At first, we had no idea how to execute Moor Mother’s style. But upon listening to a few of her tracks we discovered one thing.

This was because her music had a lot of symbolism behind it. There is depth to what she talks about and the social and political challenges of the world. When we listened to her music we concluded that it is usually a beautiful chaos. The sonority is there and it is clear, however, there is also a lot of dissonance within her tracks.

The first step we took was creating the melody. I opened up Logic and found a pad that I thought would sound euphoric because her music tends to contrast. Daniel worked on the drums on his own. I added pitch-bend modulation to the melody to essentially keep the listener on their toes.

I also used the resources that we were given for the melody and that was music mouse. This aided me as I was unsure of how to make the music sound more chaotic than it was and I added this on some strings.

The drums that Daniel originally gave me were good basic drums but we realised that they didn’t necessarily fit what we were trying to create. So together, we added some effects to the drums. We added delay, we flex-timed it on Logic to give it a very warped sound. I felt like this turned out well for what we were aiming for.

This way of working is most definitely the most experimental way of creating music. I felt like I had to apply myself as it didn’t come that naturally. For me personally, I could see how this way of working would help me expand and get out of my comfort zone, however, it isn’t my type of music.