By the end of this project, we should have a multi-faceted 16-piece interdisciplinary experience focused on addiction and pain, as well as elements that help get us through addiction and pain – love, belonging, and hope. Poems written by Laurentiu Zloteanu, music composed by me. An effort to raise awareness and empathy.
I can’t talk about the artists who inspired Mr. Zloteanu while he was doing his writing, but I find it adequate to end these posts with a list of artists (all of them Romanian, unintentionally) who have inspired me and are still inspiring me while working on this project:
– DJ Vasile; – Adrian Pleșca; – Brașov; – Specii; – Poetrip; – Șuie Paparude; – Electric Brother; – Adrian Enescu; – Haos; – Mirabela Dauer.
We decided that we’re going to self-release it as an album on Spotify through DistroKid, as well as on SoundCloud to provide access to a wider audience. We’re also considering vinyl after talking to a few of our DJ friends. As a well-established artist, Mr. Zloteanu will be using his full name on the cover while I’ll be using my stage name – Mirabela Power. The artwork for the record will, of course, be done by Mr. Zloteanu, as well as any subsequent promotional material.
The purpose of this project is trifold: 1. To raise awareness and empathy in Romania about the issues of drug use, hoping that one day drug users will get the help they need instead of being incarcerated. 2. To explore the artistic possibilities of weaving poetry and sound together, and to experiment with different genres, styles, and techniques; 2. To create a body of original work that showcases one’s talent and skill, and to share it with a wider audience, conveying one’s personal experiences through poetry and music, connecting with others who might relate to them.
I think the most relevant is the first point. Romanian authorities view addicts as criminals while drug addiction is viewed as a choice that should be punished with incarceration. Drug possession is punishable by up to three years in prison while possession with the intent of supply is punishable by a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 10 years in prison. Besides NA and a couple of NGOs there is no help for addicts. I’ve only been clean for a little over a year, but Mr. Zloteranu has been clean for over 13 years, so there are not a lot of people in Bucharest who know better than him what the process of getting clean in that environment is like and even fewer who possess the tools or the will to write about it, to start a conversation, to fan the flames of empathy.
The biggest obstacles I encountered pursuing this project were time and synchronization. Since Mr. Zloteanu is based in Bucharest, Romania, and me being in London, UK communication has proven difficult at times, especially since we both have daytime jobs, which interferes a great deal with our schedules. Another challenge stemming from having to collaborate from afar was the recording of the poems. As I couldn’t be there to help with the recording process, Mr. Zloteanu had to do three separate takes until we finally got it right. The first time there were problems with the equipment, and the second time there was an issue with his positioning and distance in relation to the microphone. Luckily we’ve known each other for many years so these setbacks were easy to overcome.
I’ll use one of the poems that I just finished working on called Strada si noaptea to give a detailed account of my production process.
I start by loading the vocal track in my sequencer and start time stamping events on it. I then open Kontakt and load Playbox into it, an amazing Kontakt library that offers to play a sequence of eight chords as opposed to individual notes. I know it has some very interesting bass presets that I want to experiment with. I settle on a preset and start playing around with velocity, chord arrangements, and built-in effects.
Once I’m happy with what I have, I clone it to start working on a bridge-type pattern of chord progressions within the same plugin. I prefer cloning the channel instead of just automating the parameters simply because it keeps the clutter in my automation track group to a minimum.
Then I open yet another instance of Playbox and look for some bells. I find what I’m looking for and copy the chord progression from bass to bells. I place the bell and bass patterns all along my vocal track.
For drums I open two instances of XO, one of my favorite plugins, hit play, and start hunting for patterns, once I find what I’m looking for I start looking for the kind of drum samples that I believe help the pattern breathe life into the track. XO contains an ocean of samples so it takes a while. I find my kick, hats, and snare, and I adjust a few things like swing, pan, and volume as well as compression and reverb. I give the whole track a listen and find myself satisfied with how the bells, bass, and drums complement each other and the vocals. At this point, I realize it’s starting to emerge as a hip-hop instrumental track so moving on I do my best to be mindful of where the song wants to go.
I identify a couple of spots on the track where I could cut the drums to underline Mr. Zloteanu’s message, as well as act as sonic paragraphs. After the second short break of snare and hats, when they start playing again I realize there’s something missing, like the drums should bring something with them upon their return. So I try to come up with something in the background, some sort of pad or choir. I spent hours experimenting with plugins like Serum, Abyss, and Pigments, I even give Omnisphere (which sounds great, but not a big fan of) a go, but I can’t seem to find what’s missing. Then an idea reveals itself: I record the bell track into a .wav file (to save CPU mainly), turn it down 12 octaves, then assign it to a separate mixer channel where I load Love by Dawsome, which with the help of a few faders can turn anything into a pad. I play around with the plugin for a bit until I’m happy with what I’m hearing. I play it with the whole track and it sounds great. Before moving on I also tried to load the recorded bells track into Edison and use the Blur function just to see how it sounds. It was pretty close but Love sounds way better for my purposes.
I then carefully started experimenting with the vocal track, subtly playing with time, pitch, cutting, and moving around pieces, trying to manipulate cadence to better serve the track while staying as close as possible to the original recording. I load Manipulator and Neoverb on its assigned mixer track and play around with Manipulator until Mr. Zloteanu’s vocals sound like a possessed robot. I turn the effect volume on the mixer channel all the way down for both Manipulator and Neoverb and create an automation track for both volumes which I use to turn them up whenever Mr. Zloteanu quotes the drug enforcement agents in his story. Now in order to create some space for the vocal tracks in the mix I send every mixer track to a bus channel, and then I sidechain the vocal track to the aforementioned bus channel. I load FabFilter Pro-Q3 on the bus channel, and while playing the song I use Pro-Q3’s analyzer to detect the vocal that I need to create room for. I set up a few dynamic points, have a listen, and being happy with the results I proceed to finally mastering the whole thing.
Now I’m very happy with the mix so I only have to load two plugins on my mastering chain. The first one is FabFilter Pro-MB which I use to dynamically separate the low ends of my track (unglue the kick’s low end from the bass). The second one is The God Particle which I mainly use as a limiter. I listened to the final track and satisfied with my results I sent it to Mr. Zloteanu for feedback. He was very happy with this particular track so I’m free to move on to the next track.
The process behind the collaboration is quite simple: Mr. Zloteanu records himself reading the poems, he then sends me the recordings and I proceed to carefully listen to them while I familiarize myself with elements such as theme, mood, cadence and rhythm, and I also clean them of any background noise or sibilance. I then choose a poem that I decide to work on and load it into my DAW. I identify key events in the narrative and place time stamps accordingly. I load a few plugins that I think might help underline the mood and theme of it and get to work on my composition. After I’m done I start carving room for the vocal track to make it part of the mix as opposed to just sitting on top of it so to speak. After mastering it the final track gets sent back for feedback to Mr. Zloteanu who has the final word on the matter. If he feels that anything’s missing or there’s too much of something, I get right on it and try to send him the adjusted version back the same day. I’m pleased to say he has yet to complain
As previously mentioned, Doamne, te rog, scoate-ma la montaj deals with themes of addiction, loss, and pain but also love, belonging, and spirituality. The poems are very personal and very vulnerable. They give the listener the opportunity to dive into some of Mr. Zloteanu’s darkest memories where drugs and isolation rob young minds of bright futures, and where the authorities confuse sickness with villainy. Years of chronic pain inflicted by lousy doctors, loss of friends and family, and many other instances of obstacles on the long road to balance and salvation are interlinked with hope, love, and tales of actual human connection. I guess the question that one could ask after listening to these poems is “Does salvation exist without suffering?“.
With such a wide range of themes, I get the freedom to experiment and deliver a broad variety of musical genres, a prospect that my collaborator is very happy with. Ambient electronica, R’n’B, hip-hop, psytrance, and techno are just a few of the genres I’m eager to tackle in my pursue to provide each poem with its appropriate soundtrack.
Before starting this project I did some research on poetry and sound, and to my suprise I didn’t come across any similar projects. Most songwriters are also poets, from Nick Cave and Jim Morrison to Lana del Ray and T-Boz. Many of them also find their inspiration in poetry, like Nick Cave for example, who stated “I have always read a lot of poetry. It’s part of my job as a songwriter. I try to read, at the very least, a half-hour of poetry a day, before I begin to do my own writing.” (Nick Cave – The Red Hand Files – Issue #25 – I know who the greats are, but who are your most loved poets? : The Red Hand Files).
There are also many musicians that find themselves so engaged with a certain poem to the point where they rewrite and integrate it into their music like Nickel Creek did with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Lighthouse on their track The Lighthouse’s Tale or Tiger Army and Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee.
I also found artists that would transform a poem into a song, by writing music for and singing the lyrics of the poem over it, like Romanian artist Nicu Alifantis did with many of Nichita Stanescu’s poems, or as a more recent example like Turkish musician Alper Tuzcu did with Pablo Neruda’s poem Con Ella, where he wrote a guitar track for the poem while Ecuadorian singer Micaella Cattani sings the poem’s lyrics over it. On this subject, Alper Tuzcu writes “Song lyrics tend to look for recurring sections, patterns, and rhymes, and they demand simplicity. Poems, however, do not always have to have this structure, or even reveal their structure at all. Both can be as freeform as the writer wishes them to be, yet it’s assumed that song lyrics will be paired with music, while poetry is often written independently of accompaniment, and may include its own musicality and flow.” (How to Compose Music Set to a Poem: A Case Study – Flypaper)
I also looked at Dr. Salomé Voegelin’s work and found myself somewhat inspired by some of her spoken word pieces, such as Moving Stones, where I found the use of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in the background very appealing. Yet I didn’t find any musicians, or sound artists that actually collaborated with poets not to compose a song together, but to weave music and poetry together as two distinct elments that complement each other.
Inspired by my research and findings I move on to understanding the themes I’ll be working with in this joint effort to transform readers into listeners.
This will be the first collection of poems written by my collaborator, Laurentiu Zloteanu. Here are a few words about him taken from http://artalibera.com, and also below you’ll find a few pictures of the visual work that he’s known for:
Laurentiu Zloteanu comes from Romania. He may not have come into this world, but simply out of it. Being an interdisciplinary visual artist, his whole existence is based on seeing the world through poetry, arts, music, movies and books. His final quest is to be at peace with all that is good and bad all together in this life. He studied psychology and the psychoanalysis of child and adolescent as a way of getting all aware of his own jump to maturity. Above his theoretical studies, he is really passionate about how the forms of addiction of drugs can lead people to spiritual transformations. His art is mostly inspired by the whole imagery specter of the unconscious mind. Both the use of detail & the power of the effects (of so many hours used at every painting) makes his art so vibrant, so electric (and almost kinetic) that the viewer can get really easy awakened, losing any kind of his or her sense of one’s self & implicit any sense of reality. One can discover in his art the influence of Alan Watts’s lectures, Jean-Michel Basquiat & Pieter Bruegel’s paintings visions combined with the expression of a single-minded psychedelic culture & of primitive-art in all of the abundance of Laurentiu Zloteanu’s own contemporary style of a self-taught Artist.
For my first project, I will be collaborating with a well-established Romanian interdisciplinary visual artist – Laurentiu Zloteanu. Titled “God, please cut me out in editing”, it is a 16-piece audio experience tackling themes such as addiction, pain, loss, love, and institutionalization – a beautiful mix of poetry and music. The idea of the process is simple: the poems are written and recorded by Laurentiu Zloteanu, each of them a story in itself. The recordings are then passed to me, and drawing from a wide range of musical genres, I compose tracks that complement the rhythm, mood, and theme of each poem, adding depth and dimension to them. I carefully mix the vocals in, manipulating pitch and cadence, and experimenting with various effect plugins where the situation allows or demands it. Upon its completion, we plan on digitally releasing it as a music album on Spotify.
