Dublin by Brooklyn's Neil O'Connor has been operating under the body electric working title of Somadrone, and premieres his new track “Striding On Rhyme” with us today. Known for his keyboard contributions to the Irish group Redneck Manifesto, O'Connor's work as Somadrone seeks to summon the human experience from within the droning worlds of the ambient and digital. His upcoming album The First Wave for Bodytonic Music brings the next wave from his previous audio dimensions on Depth of Field, where he continues to straddle rhythm and rhyme within the contemporary electronic music continuum.
“Striding on Rhyme” brings the gentle lapping waters of Mediterranean dance tides splashing onto the respective shores of UK and US rhythm movements. The beat moves down these oceanic bodies, channels and cross continental corridors. The synths shimmer and shiver like vibraphonic harmonic audio that is pitted against string scores that urge on smoke screens of drum aided percussion tricks. Neil asks you to “take from this feeling things you can't explain”, delivering vocals in ways like the colloqial manners of speech employed upon waking and mobilizing one's synchronicity with the surrounding world. And as the beat stays rock solid and steady, the keys and samples spin like flower pedal pinwheel loops that could turn inifinitely in a centrifugal clockwise motion.
Somadrone's Daniel O'Connor took the tie to describe the expanses of his sound, histories, and the feeling of that 3,500 mile gap between SF and NYC.
From Dublin to Brooklyn and from Redneck Manifesto to Somadrone; describe how these rearrangements, migrations, displacements (if any), and how your solo sound has come to be.
A lot of the tracks actually started on the other side of the coast, in an apartment in San Francisco. I moved there in 2010. My last album, Depth of Field, was recorded mostly in Dublin, in a dark winter, through a major snow storm. Environments and surroundings had a major impact on the sound and feel of the album. You can hear the Californian sun and the Brooklyn nightclubs on this album. As an immigrant, you always try and find connection to your home through some channel. I felt quite the opposite. I had just finished up a PhD in Music, so I felt quiet free after being stuck in staves and acoustic instrument limitations. That's what I love the most about electronic music, its limitless and endless.
I trained as a filmmaker and got into writing soundtracks and instrumental music, back in 1999. So from there it was an expansion of where I was at the time in terms of a sound and direction. Each album sounds very different, schizophrenic even.
“Striding on Rhyme” feels like it strides on much of the UK's dance histories, as much as it reaches outward toward the Mediterranean dance-discotheques to the dance realms embedded within Canada and the Americas. What was the track striding on for you in it's compositional, and formidable, influential and malleable stages?
It all started with the rhythm. For me, if I have a strong rhythmical base, them the rest comes easy. And this track in particular was written just after I arrived in Brooklyn. Perhaps the pace of the city lent its influence. I remember doing mixes and listening to them on the B train on the way into work.
I was listening to a lot of New Order at the time. Then a lot of early NY dance music – Konk, Liquid Liquid, ESG. America felt open, responsive, ambitious. I could still feel that 3500 mile gap between SF and NY. I had two very contrasting worlds in my subconscious… Probably rubbed of on this shy paddy…
Going even further out into the warm worlds of synth experimentation, describe the undertaking that was creating and mastering the ambitious full-length, First Wave.
In SF and NY I was very lucky to have shared apartments with other folks who had a great collection of synths.
Major thanks and love to James Severance in SF and Conor Creaney in NY. Again, it began so long ago that I have some trouble recalling the process. I played everything live, not much MIDI on this album…usually first take, not into editing much.. I used an EMS Synthi, Fender Rhodes Chroma, Moog Voyager/Source/Opus 3, Roland Jupiter 4 and Arp 2600 on the album. The album was mastered in June by Josh Bonati. He has a great mastering suite in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
Loops and editing, taking from Eno's books 'Using the Studio as a Compositional Tool'. If a sound struck me, it was used. It could be a drone or an arpeggio. There is so much use of synthesized arpeggios in modern music. I could listen to an arpeggio all day, the fact that it moves and stays the same means that you can have other instruments revolve around it. Or use it as a rhythmic element along. Its funny how something so simple can be so damn effective…
Somadrone's The First Wave will be available November 4 from Bodytonic Music.
