Aker The Lion God - How It Was Made / Free Download

The making of Aker The Lion God, taken from the new Auntie Flo album In My Dreams (I'm A Bird And I'm Free). Free download of the 'Club Mix'. Album pre-sales and listening party invite

Last week, we announced the new Auntie Flo album - In My Dreams (I’m A Bird And I’m Free), which will be released on the 21st of November. Pre-orders are going fast - so please order now via Bandcamp if you’d like a copy of the limited edition purple vinyl.

Ahead of the release, we’re bringing you the second single from the album ‘Aker The Lion God’. You can listen to the album version here:

Similar to Green City, we’re releasing an extended club version which you can download for FREE - one for the balearic dancefloor DJs. It featured on my recent ICONS mix for BBC 6 Music.

Ransom Note have the premiere and described it as follows - whatever this means! I’ll take the Pachanga Boys reference though - ‘Time’ is one of my faves:

The following is a description of how the track was made:

THE FIELD RECORDING - WAIHEKE ISLAND

A lot of my production starts with a field recording, it helps me use the place it was recorded to inspire the track and give it meaning. A lot of my production process is all about finding a meaning, to create a story, even if it is just for myself. Without it, I find it hard to justify the tracks existence, especially given the vast number of songs that are released into the world every day. 

I found myself in the most remote location I’ve ever been: Waiheke Island in New Zealand. I’d travelled for a day and half to get there, by multiple planes, trains, taxis and finally a boat. It was like landing on the moon, but that might have been the jet lag. I was there to play at the Flamingo Pier festival and they put all the artists up in a super nice villa which was fairly remote itself! I did some solo wandering and found this random bench in the middle of nowhere. On the placard in tiny letters was the words ‘Aker The Lion God’. I’ve got no idea what that means but I was intrigued. I sat on the bench for a while and use my trusty Zoom H6 to record with. The sound is pretty intense, with constant cricket sounds dominating above the distant sound of water and birds.

THE CONCH SYNTH - RIO DE JANEIRO

This field recording recording formed the basis for the track. I then used a conch shell which I’d recorded in Brazil to play over the recording. I’ve developed a technique that allows nature to be the ‘time keeper’ rather than a metronome or clock. I played the conch shell using my MIDI keyboard but used the cues from the field recording to trigger my playing rather than sticking to a set time. The same was the case for the piano chords I played after. The experience might feel slightly ‘out of time’ by traditional standards but my hope is that it makes for a more natural listening experience where the human trumps the machine. 

I’m really interested in exploring time perception within music and find that the more I can break free from the set metronome on my DAW, the more I can play with the way track can be experienced. Without a standard timing pattern or distinct beat to latch onto, listeners can become more immersed within the ‘sound ecology’, which I think is fertile ground for exploring altered states of consciousness and ‘flow states’ that underpins a lot of my work. 

Similar to my approach with field recording, I use a lot of acoustic instruments and objects I find that produce unusual sounds and noises. For a long time I was inspired by Matthew Herbert’s sampling manifesto, so I avoid using any presets or sample libraries. Doing your own sampling helping bring a uniqueness to the track that again helps me justify its existence in the world. 

I pitched the conch shell down and it creates this really unusual undulating bass sound that can only be heard on decent speakers and headphones. I like the idea of working at different frequency ranges - infra or ultra sonic, or at the extremes of human hearing. You can then create different levels to a track that only become apparent by listening on different set ups. 

THE BASSLINE

I booked Charanjit Singh to play at my Highlife club night around 10 years ago. He made the seminal ‘Ten Raga’s To A Disco Beat’ album - which was a proto acid house record made in the early 80s. The album is centred around this really distinctive 303 bassline. During his performance in Glasgow, there was a lack of light which made it difficult for him to read his notebook with all the parameter settings written down for each track. As a result he played the exact same bassline on every track! It became really addictive and so the longer the set went on, the wilder the crowd went when the baseline came back for the umpteenth time!!

Anyway, I think it became firmly lodged in my head, for weeks away I found myself humming it… and so, almost ten years later, it became my inspiration for the bassline on Aker. 

Thanks for listening! If you are in London, please join us at our Album release party on release day - 21st Nov 730-930pm