After the Unified Fields would reach the end of the concept that we've been developing for 3-4 years.
We've said all we want to say in this context that intense editing, manipulation, piecing it all together, kind of way.
We really felt that we needed something new, something that would challenge us, something that would excite us again.
I grew up in Senegal and always wanted to go back and work with musicians there.
I think the idea of coming to Senegal was a spark.
The spark has become an entry to a whole new musical culture which I've had no experience of at all and you're re-embracing in a completely new way.
We turned up with absolutely nothing pre-recorded.
We were very conscious that because we were going blind to a recording session,
we needed something, a backing track as it were, to give the inspiration to them.
The first thing we did was to record a radio, like Senegal's radio.
We just had a woman speaking in the wall-up and she just said,
And then we cut up some loops of that and played that to the zombie player, to Warabba.
We can put it somewhere on the back.
Do you want to play with a click or just breathe?
We were quite lucky to get Warabba first.
I think that helped create this recording process and that was us saying to them,
do a warm-up piece, whatever you're comfortable with, and then the big moment where we dropped some kind of processed loop
that we'd been working into their headphones and see how they responded to that.
We used that to play to the chorus.
It was like a snowball effect and there was more and more stuff to play to.
What I really enjoyed about yesterday is that I realised why I was there for that.
I really wanted that real immediate relationship to creativity
because since the opposite of what I do, I just do computers, so I'm thinking.
It started screaming as I was playing.
The energy was incredible.
We were essentially looking for loops in the beginning.
Sometimes I would find a clean loop from a bit of recording and give it to Franz and say,
do you want to try and treat this into something a bit more ambiguous?
Or equally, Franz might make some huge, long texture which I would try and interrogate the tempo from it.
That instrument is not made anymore.
We're going to do that one first.
We're going to do that one first.
We're going to do that one first.
Sometimes you're going to a groove and they'll be playing it for 6-7 minutes and you'll be recording that and knowing that you were looking for something maybe a bit more deconstructed or a bit more free.
That's it.
That's where the anxiety comes from.
We've got an hour or two with this person and I really want to try and push something out of them which is different to their warm-up track and hopefully something that has a connection to us.
There'd be cases with Warraba where you were away in 5 minutes and then there were other cases like one of the Kora players, Abdu.
We actually ended up with this beautiful bit of processing which ended up as a key aspect of the track named after him.
At the time it was definitely anxiety making because you'd say something to hopefully inspire a direction and they wouldn't necessarily get it at all.
We weren't dealing with conventional pen and paper musicians or writing out parts or anything like that.
The musical culture is very different there in the sense that they still have a very direct relationship with the music they play.
It's very folk by nature.
The music they play is about stories, things that happen to them, more traditional things that have been passed on and changed.
They're not aware of trends or styles of music, they just play their instrument and it was very refreshing to work with people like this because suddenly you play them something that's really awkward
or distorted or strange.
And yes, they'll be surprised but that would be only like 10 seconds and then they start to play something to that.
It just doesn't matter.
I suppose that was the greatest moments of joy as well because you'd play something to them and maybe tell them about a little bit.
You'd tell them about a little bit they'd played before that was a really good starting point.
You'd feel them respond.
It suddenly moved from a bit of traditional Senegalese music to a Senegalese sound within a piano interrupted frame.
It's very, very interesting.
The whole tradition is being passed down.
I really felt that strongly for the first time today. You could hear the digital world in here. You could hear our interconnected global world.
The whole world around the record, the way we did it, what happened to us in Senegal and how we worked after, which is about things that are hidden and coming out in the light and disappearing.
I don't know, there's something quite playful about it.
I think with Unified Feel we had loads of expectations, I think, from it. We were quite violently pushing things into, because we were trying to do something very unifying, all this stuff.
And I think it was really refreshing to say, you know what, it doesn't matter. We'll see what happens.
It has been a more pleasurable process making it. You listen to anything and subconsciously there is a memory attached to that sound.
With landscapes, we went away, it's associated to a human experience, to travel, we left our daily routine, we enabled ourselves to be completely submerged in creativity and to be receptive to all this energy and music and stuff.
And that's what we pulled back here.
Thank you.
