Hello from Montreal. I just released my new experimental dance album made entirely with royalty-free sample packs and voice memos from my iPhone. It’s called New Divine. Here’s some download codes.
https://divineforay.bandcamp.com/album/new-divine
New Divine started with the idea of making an album entirely in Ableton with samples instead of my usual go-to, the DSI Tempest. I wanted to get outside of my creative comfort zone. I was a little overwhelmed with the idea of sampling though since there’s so many options. So, I basically just googled “royalty-free sample packs”, downloaded some folders from the first site that seemed good, and limited myself to those.
But, to make it more personal, each song contains an audio snapshot of memory, a voice memo from my iphone taken sometime between 2012-2022. It’s like a non-linear journey through a very transformative decade for me.
In terms of genre, it's an eclectic mix of IDM and throwback dance music with some ambient and shoegaze elements woven throughout. Each song is pretty different from the next, but they all have two important things in common:
- They are all built by layering loops on top of loops on top of loops.
- They all follow the same core idea: Start with one simple element and build it into something epic.
The album started with these basic frameworks, but a sort of narrative started to form when I asked my friend to create the album art. He was originally going to make a painting, but then he sent me this photo of a stray dog he took in India after a Diwali parade. Someone had adorned the dog with a beautiful flower necklace. He said it made him think of the album title (at that time just a placeholder until I came up with something better) and how our ideas of what is divine can change with time. During a festival dedicated to multiple deities, this dog on the side of the road could just as easily be one of them.
When he said that, it got me thinking more deeply about this process of combining these very personal samples from my everyday life with a variety of sounds. Thinking about that, alongside the image of this newly deified dog, I see this album as a celebration of change. It’s a celebration of the long and complex paths we take to become better versions of ourselves.