VESK – NEW FACES
Valérie Arend, Elias Philips, Stella Fittje & Karl Rogel„The song ,New Faces‘ is targeting the social interaction of people that are open minded, feeling the music and getting lost in it. As pumping and characteristic drums drive the song, spherical strings and dreamy samples carry you off into another experience of Lo-Fi music.“
CONCEPT
For the project we created the group VESK and started with a task and milestones overview in order to structure the project and assign every group member a main topic/task. The band name “VESK” included all our four names. Valérie, Elias, Stella and Karl. We took the first letter of each name – VESK.As the members of VESK are located at different locations with various creative backgrounds, we wanted to create the song with a creative, playful get together feeling. We worked mainly with Miro for the organisation and brainstormings in the project.
In the beginning of the project our group wanted to create an experimental Lo-Fi song which is targeting the social interaction of people that are open minded, feeling the music and getting lost in it. The idea was, to create a mood of dancing and clubbing. So the concept of the song “New Faces” is about meeting unknown, open-minded people - it is also describing the target group. It could be in a club but also during a walk home after clubbing - half sleepy, at the same time full of energy. As the brainstorming shows the song should reflect colourful darkness - dark dancing rooms and flashing, colourful lights.
SONG PRODUCTION
In order to find our way into the process, we first collected musical ideas. For inspiration we listened and exchanged lo-fi songs, played piano and recorded samples. Due to inspirational music and artists, such as BURIAL, ELOI and ROUTE8, we started to do own field recordings in order to create our own personal character. We did some field recordings - our main topic was, to create playful, unusual sounds. We recorded different sounds that were interesting for our song; bird noises, keys, piano chords, playground noises etc. For the final song we worked with the Software Ableton. As one of our group members was already very talented in music production, we were able to experiment with different drums, melody, high-hats, low-hats etc. When we had decided a rough direction of the song, we tried to arrange different parts of the samples.
Then, little by little, fewer samples and 808 drums were added. We came across a sound from a meme, the “Hello-Hi” vocals, which ultimately shaped the entire track and whole concept idea. Two bass tracks have been added for the low-end; a sub-bass that plays a legato and a rhythmic bass that comes from a VST synth. Another sample that was integrated in the track is the sound of birds, which is repetitive throughout the whole song. The mystical female vocals, which can be heard in the song, add another emotional level and are a contrast to the male “Hello-hi” vocals. In order to fill in the highs, a synth pad is integrated, which fully unfolds towards the end of the track.
FINAL DESCRIPTION
The debut single “New Faces” from VESK combines experimental Lo-Fi Music at its finest; personal field recordings with a breakbeat-style beat mixed with distorted vocals and samples. The recognizable “hello, hi” gives a disclosure of the main idea of the song of meeting people. As pumping and characteristic drums drive the song, spherical strings and dreamy samples carry you off into another experience of Lo-Fi music. The song is 4:55 minutes long and has 140 bpm breakbeats and dull drums.
VIDEO PRODUCTION
For the matching music video we worked with real time graphics - graphics that can be rendered and controlled through different aspects of the song - such as the volume, the bass, the MIDI etc. with the software vvvv. The content of the video should include old footage from different videos, broken images, ripped VHS recordings from different artists to incorporate the Lo-Fi style in the best way possible. Based on our concept idea of meeting new people, we worked with the three following characteristics; To create the clubbing-character and the depth of the song we started the used content was projected on a cube turning according to the music. The main idea of a get together should be transmitted different faces, as well as different hands of people. Through consequent development we improved the video within its colours, shapes and its audio-visual tuning. At the same time as creating the video, we worked continuously on the development of the concept idea and herewith the colour palettes. As the video was a little bit to stereotypical and not 100% matching to our song, which is as well not the usual, stereotypical Lo-Fi song, we changed the visual concept of the video throughout the project to a more chromatic, spherical, synth-wave like atmosphere.
OUTCOME
The outcome of the Project has been presented in the final extern and internal presentation on Friday the 13th and the 20th May 2022. The formulated press text contains all the necessary information and the group outcome, was uploaded with the final video result on Vimeo. We were very lucky to be a part of the project as some of us knew already a lot about music production, where other of us have just started. That’s why a big exchange of knowledge about music happened in between every of our group members. Even though the situation with being located in different cities was challenging, we managed to organise ourselves and worked together very well and efficiently.
ARTWORK
We started with minimalistic art covers where the typography was mainly in focus and moved on to a more visual cover, where we worked with the footage from the video itself. As the meeting situation with other people had to be in the focus of our art work, we mainly made compositions with footage of faces that were placed in our video.The following screenshots show the development of our covert art work matching to the process of our video.
FINAL COVER
PRESS
„The debut single ,New Faces‘ from VESK combines experimental Lo-Fi Music at it's finest; personal field recordings with a breakbeat-style beat mixed with distorted vocals and samples. The recognizable ,hello, hi‘ gives a disclosure of the main idea of meeting people, maybe unknown people, new faces, dancing, going home early in the morning while the birds are singing, half sleepy but at the same time full of energy. As the members of VESK are located at different locations with various creative backgrounds, so is the song – a creative, playful get together. The song ,New Faces‘ is targeting the social interaction of people that are open minded, feeling the music and getting lost in it. As pumping and characteristic drums drive the song, spherical strings and dreamy samples carry you off into another experience of Lo-Fi music.“