How to Make Ambient Music Inspired by Loscil, Endless Falls

This video is all about using Loscil as a starting point to create music (check out my Biosphere one too    • How to Make Ambient Music Inspired by Bios...  ). I did a deep listen and researched his processes. I would have liked to have gone further with resampling the sounds if I had more time but hey, hazards of having time off.. It’s an album that makes you feel like an overcast rainy day, safe and warm and watching the rain from your window. A sound to get lost within. The arrangement is relatively minimal, ghostly in its seeming lack of complexity. The album is about the depth of the sonic, the ambient soundscape, a slow reveal of melancholy. • Rain plays a big part in the album, opens with rain, the cover is a rain-soaked window. • Some tracks with polymeter, loops left to run and overlap. • Uses some relatively minimal but very expressive instrumentation on tracks. • The sounds generally make you feel enveloped, probably due to the minimal arrangement letting big sounds breathe. • Possibly start with some musical phrases as the basis and build the other sounds around them. • Field samples used but generally lo-fi or processed to make them lo-fi. • Rain fades to drone in the first track, very likely that the drone uses rain feeding a resonator or something similar. • Usually starts by collecting and organising a library of sounds, field recordings and instruments, then takes them to the computer to transform them into usable musical sounds. Rhythmic manipulation into loops and phrases before editing them. • Scott finds inspiration from the coexistence of natural and industrial landscapes, the dichotomy and power of nature to stave off the development – inspired largely by his home in Vancouver. • ‘I find that with electronic music, in terms of sampling and re-sampling, there’s this kind of infinite number of ways you can treat material and turn it into new material. That’s the benefit of the studio as an instrument is that it’s its own recycling, you can turn things into other things. I find that process fascinating.’ • Endless Falls is his balance of the electronic realm with the acoustic, a middle ground of expression. • ‘I have pretty much always based my sound on samples and sound design. I rarely used synthesis in the traditional sense’. • Uses granular processing and convolution heavily to create textures and timbres. • Playing Gamelan for a few years influenced his sense of rhythm and polyrhythm, but also likes to work off the grid. 00:00 Sounds 17:33 Arrangement 18:12 Outro 19:52 Full Track