Falemos de atmosferas sonhadoras. Cop Lights, de Orchid Mantis, surge precisamente de imagens saídas de um sonho e um artista que usou o experimentalismo para explorar o seu surrealismo. Aqui fica, na primeira pessoa, a origem da música e todo o seu processo criativo e de composição.
Cop Lights was one of the first songs I wrote for the EP, at the time I think I was listening to a lot of drum/bass/guitar-centric music and just wanted to write something more straightforward like that. I also sort of wrote it with live performance in mind, which is totally new for me. The lyrics were written around that scene I describe in the chorus, which was one of the few images I remembered from a really vague dream I had – I just thought it had this suggestive, surreal quality to it, while also being the sort of everyday thing you pass by & wonder about, make up stories about.
My process making songs is always experimentative at first, just looping guitar or synths over programmed drums and samples to find something that feels interesting or evocative. There’s also a lot of processing and repurposing sound involved: that repeating guitar line, for example, was recorded onto 4-track tape at a high tape speed and then slowed down before it was bounced back to Ableton to make it sound less sharp and more drawn out. The droning synth that introduces and sort of floats in the background of the track is a hardware synth sampled to an Casio SK-5 – it wasn’t recorded for this song, I was just looking for something to fill out the track and grabbed it from an abandoned project.
into the night
swear i’ll be out in half an hour
can’t waste my time
it’s all receding now
passing cop lights
and a parked car
with the doors open
and nobody there
sometimes
when your thoughts
hit you like a knife
sometimes
and i’m dreaming i’m sure
there’s no reason to carry on
with these thoughts and these words
what for
i’d wait for hours
until you came back to the house
to feel alright
there’s nowhere else i could survive
