Influences
This page is dedicated to discussing the various musical and non-musical projects that form a basis and inspiration for the sounds/aesthetics of my music, specifically for figure62! Whilst the sound and visual aspects of the project are rooted in the folk and singer/songwriter music and culture, there's a nigh infinite amount of genres and forms of media which conglomerate to form the project's sonic imprint.
A Minor Forest - Bill's Mom Likes To F*ck
The primary structural and sonic influence on the music I create, regardless of genre or style, is the band A Minor Forest, a staple of the underground and angular Slint-offshoot scene of math rock. With sprawling musical landscapes that are occasionally decently lengthy, A Minor Forest embrace harmonic and melodic ideas that are rarely encountered outside of the context of improvisational jazz, blending these often harshly dissonant and tense passages with deeply emotive and consonant melodies, never settling on one section for too long. They've had a notable influence on the structure and sound of the songs I create, from inheriting the inherent length that these songs often carry along to stuffing several passages of varying dynamics into one piece of music.
Nick Drake - Things Behind The Sun
For this project specifically, I took deep inspiration from a musician that I was heavily interested in during my early to mid teens, that being Nick Drake. Being one of the guitarists who inspired me to pick up the instrument intitially, I hadn't revisited a lot of his music for a very long time and felt the solo acoustic project that I was doing currently was a perfect excuse to delve back in. I specifically listened to a lot of his album Pink Moon which, while not being my favourite Drake album, gave me a good insight into how he created music that was completely solo yet still sounded lush and full when he wanted it to be so. Alternate tunings, working with dynamics, all of these aspects of his playing on Pink Moon inspired the music that came out of figure62.
Michael Gira - Destroyer
Michael Gira is a musician who i've always had mixed opinions on, however there is one undeniable fact that i cannot deny - He is an excellent songwriter. He sees no need to overcomplicate chord progressions and this is seen best in Destroyer, a song which strips back the acoustic guitar and allows you to focus on the vocals and the instrument equally without having to try and catch every word or note. This song inspired me to write a couple instrumentals that are notably simpler than my usual writing, instead letting me form a more concise guitar part that actively accompanies the lyrics instead of simply sitting along with them.
Corea - Eterno en la garganta del tormento
Corea as a band are, perhaps, the only band or artist that as a whole inspires me more than A Minor Forest. Primarily utilising notes from diminished and harmonic minor scales, sometimes going into mixolydian modes, they create an incredibly tense and overbearing sound that, when paired with their production style, cannot be put into words. specifically the song Eterno en la garganta del tormento inspired me for figure62 not only due to it's length, but due to the incredible array of moods it is able to create, at one moment being threatening and quietly brooding while in the next it's bombastically triumphant. I tried reflecting this in my music for figure62 through key and time signature changes to make pieces feel more frantic or calm, allowing the length to sprawl to allow the music to breathe when it feels it must.
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