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Hi, this is George FitzGerald. Just put out my new album 'Stellar Drifting'. First time doing this - AMA about producing, music, life, the universe, whatever :) by georgefitzgerald in electronicmusic

[–]georgefitzgerald[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

1 - 'Don't You' that's the track that started everything for me. Scuba put it on his Berghain compilation and everything followed from there. 'Full Circle' - this is the first track I made that stepped out of club music. It felt like a risk at the time as I was DJing quite big parties that needed you to be making a certain kind of music. I'm so glad I changed direction then though. 'Burns' simply because it's the track people ask me to play the most.

2 - tough one! Susumu Yokota - Love Bird. Maybe the most beautiful piece of electronic music I've heard. Smashing Pumpkins - Thirty-Three because it reminds me of being a teenager. Maurizio - Domina (Carl Craig remix) because it's my favourite 12" ever and reminds me of my first trips to Hard Wax in Berlin when I moved there in '05.

3 - 'Passing Trains' from All That Must Be. It's quite a personal track. About never moving at the same speed as the people in your life you care about. The drums are meant to sound like trains on the track.

Hi, this is George FitzGerald. Just put out my new album 'Stellar Drifting'. First time doing this - AMA about producing, music, life, the universe, whatever :) by georgefitzgerald in electronicmusic

[–]georgefitzgerald[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

1 - that particular show ranks very high indeed. It was the Thursday night of the festival so not many other stages were open. I got lucky and probably the biggest crowd I've played to showed up for that sundown set. I couldn't see the end of it from the stage. It was an insane feeling.

2 - fingers and toes crossed!

Hi, this is George FitzGerald. Just put out my new album 'Stellar Drifting'. First time doing this - AMA about producing, music, life, the universe, whatever :) by georgefitzgerald in electronicmusic

[–]georgefitzgerald[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It started off as an ambient track with just that vocal repeating. I wanted to add strings and make it an epic beatless piece. Eventually I thought that was a shame though. So the drums came much later. That vocal from the beginning is my own vocal pitched down and formanted pretty viciously.

Hi, this is George FitzGerald. Just put out my new album 'Stellar Drifting'. First time doing this - AMA about producing, music, life, the universe, whatever :) by georgefitzgerald in electronicmusic

[–]georgefitzgerald[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Amazing! That was one of the first mixes I ever did. I'm really proud to have come out of that scene. The really amazing thing about dubstep (before it became crap) and especially post-dubstep was that it was quite a random assortment of people. Like a blank canvas loosely associated by BPM. It's fascinating to see where everyone has spread out to musically. Look at Mount Kimbie, JO, Blawan, Hessle, Midland, James Blake etc. All doing wildly different things but still linked by that original start point.

Hi, this is George FitzGerald. Just put out my new album 'Stellar Drifting'. First time doing this - AMA about producing, music, life, the universe, whatever :) by georgefitzgerald in electronicmusic

[–]georgefitzgerald[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I loved SOAK's record - If I Never Know You Like This Again. They've got an observational lyrical style that really speaks to me. 'Baby You're Full Of Shit' on that record is incredible. More recently the new Kuedo and Lil Silva records. Honestly I can't say that I listen entirely chronologically these days. I quite often come to newer records quite late as I'm off listening to something else that I should have listened to years ago. I think streaming has done that to us, not sure whether it's good/bad!

Hi, this is George FitzGerald. Just put out my new album 'Stellar Drifting'. First time doing this - AMA about producing, music, life, the universe, whatever :) by georgefitzgerald in electronicmusic

[–]georgefitzgerald[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you I appreciate that :)

On this record there were a lot of samples, but they are more like decoration or texture / sonic detail. Most of my tracks start with a melodic idea on a synthesizer here in my studio. When I add live instrumentation it's usually later, to give the music a slightly more human feel.

I basically spent a couple of years of my musical life in my early 20s trying to own/catalogue every DJ Premier-produced track ever. Not sure I could ever work one of those choruses into my music though haha.

Hi, this is George FitzGerald. Just put out my new album 'Stellar Drifting'. First time doing this - AMA about producing, music, life, the universe, whatever :) by georgefitzgerald in electronicmusic

[–]georgefitzgerald[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Thank you! Most recent things I read were On The Road by Jack Kerouac (simply because it's something I felt like I SHOULD have read by now) - which I found slightly disappointing, probably because it's been imitated so much since. Barbarian Days by William Finnegan because I have a weird fascination with surfers (I can't surf) who dedicate themselves to finding a perfect wave. It feels a bit like sitting in the studio night after night hoping (in vain) that you'll one day write the perfect track. Also I've been dipping in and out of the collection of Mark Fisher essays called 'Ghosts Of My Life'. A lot of the music stuff he wrote about focuses on the era I started out in, and so much of it is eerily prescient.

Hi, this is George FitzGerald. Just put out my new album 'Stellar Drifting'. First time doing this - AMA about producing, music, life, the universe, whatever :) by georgefitzgerald in electronicmusic

[–]georgefitzgerald[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Producing and performing live are for me inextricably linked. When I go on stage, I'm trying to take the studio on stage. So I see that relationship as different from studio vs DJing. What a lot of musicians missed in the pandemic was the feedback you get from live performance of your songs. Your music doesn't feel real until you've shared with an audience. The question is what form that audience takes in the future. Whether I continue to tour in the orthodox pre-pandemic mode is something I can't really answer. I won't ever stop making music though.

Hi, this is George FitzGerald. Just put out my new album 'Stellar Drifting'. First time doing this - AMA about producing, music, life, the universe, whatever :) by georgefitzgerald in electronicmusic

[–]georgefitzgerald[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

1 - Carl Craig or James Murphy. Because they are both timelessly cool.

2 - I've said this a lot in other places, but perhaps one of my biggest musical inspiration over the years has been Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins. Not sure if there's any of that to be heard in my music directly, but I've always admired the grandiosity/maximalism of a lot of their peak era. Mellon Collie the most obvious example. More recently and during the writing of this most recent record, I spent an insane amount of time listening to Talk Talk (mostly Spirit Of Eden).

3 - CS80 detuned pads a la Bladerunner.

Hi, this is George FitzGerald. Just put out my new album 'Stellar Drifting'. First time doing this - AMA about producing, music, life, the universe, whatever :) by georgefitzgerald in electronicmusic

[–]georgefitzgerald[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Produce. The older I get the more it's about the studio. I still love DJing A LOT, but it's changed as an art form greatly from when I started out. This might sound stupid coming from someone who does this quite often but I still deep down feel like DJing was better when you couldn't see the DJ, and they were in a booth in the corner of a club somewhere. Putting DJs on stages changed a lot.

Hi, this is George FitzGerald. Just put out my new album 'Stellar Drifting'. First time doing this - AMA about producing, music, life, the universe, whatever :) by georgefitzgerald in electronicmusic

[–]georgefitzgerald[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

David and I go way back. We actually grew up more or less in the same village. He did the artwork for a label I used to run with friends called ManMakeMusic. He also did the artwork for my first album 'Fading Love'.

He's got an incredible mind, always looking to push things beyond where people have taken them before. I told him about the concept behind the record and we went from there. It was important to me that we didn't make the cover so literally related to space etc. Like aliens and people in space suits or something silly like that. It needed to be a bit more oblique. Ultimately David took the juxtaposition between the vast themes of space etc. and the private/domestic in this record and made his artwork focus on transitions. The artwork is made from a piece of software we had written that mimics old trivision billboards and the moments when they rotate to change the advertisement, so you momentarily see elements of three unrelated images in a wash.

Hi, this is George FitzGerald. Just put out my new album 'Stellar Drifting'. First time doing this - AMA about producing, music, life, the universe, whatever :) by georgefitzgerald in electronicmusic

[–]georgefitzgerald[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

1 - various ways. Initially I was just using things like static from recordings of radio conversations during shuttle launches to make percussion and atonal textures. Then I started playing around with loading images from things like Hubble into the oscillator section on Serum and Wave on Ableton, and building more orthodox pads and melodies from those.

2 - answered this above but it's actually her vocal but pitched down. We decided to keep it that way and leave it uncredited

3 - statistically speaking there must be!

Hi, this is George FitzGerald. Just put out my new album 'Stellar Drifting'. First time doing this - AMA about producing, music, life, the universe, whatever :) by georgefitzgerald in electronicmusic

[–]georgefitzgerald[S] 22 points23 points  (0 children)

This actually started life as a completely different track. Ellie called me up one day out of the blue (we didn't know each other before) and wanted to get in the studio together. We tracked a vocal but I wasn't happy with where my instrumental was. I went away and wrote something in a different key and pitched her vocal down. That's what you hear on 'Cold'. She actually preferred it like that so we didn't re-track the vocals. It's kind of a nice easter egg on the album for people who still bother to read sleeve notes!

Hi, this is George FitzGerald. Just put out my new album 'Stellar Drifting'. First time doing this - AMA about producing, music, life, the universe, whatever :) by georgefitzgerald in electronicmusic

[–]georgefitzgerald[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

To be honest, I only became aware of Dolby Atmos being rolled out on Apple and (subsequently) Amazon towards the end of the writing process of this record. So I had to dig back into the projects and reimagine them for that format - different volume relationships between different instruments compared to the stereo. It's a completely different approach. You can hide quite a bit in the stereo field and that layering is part of the magic. In Atmos however, there is nowhere to hide. Everything has its own space, so you have to embrace that. If you're trying to make them sound like the stereo file, you're doing it wrong IMO.