The Planet Of Sound

BLACK ANYTHING

Recorded Across Five Continents, Released in Five Parts on 10” Vinyl

AXIS MUNDI RECORDS

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‘Black Anything Pt.4‘ was recorded in Asia. “Having been to Asia a few times prior to recording ‘Black Anything‘, the one thing that strikes you is how vast and culturally expansive Asia is as a continent. It was never our intention to travel to these continents to make songs that would sound like local traditional music, but more a case of trying to let the surroundings seep into the recording process subliminally and enrich the music. To make only 2 tracks that ‘described’ or ‘felt’ like Asia was impossible, but one thing that had always stood out whilst travelling there was the sun.”

Quite aptly, the single taken off Pt.4 is ‘Follow the Sun‘, a homage to the importance of the Sun in Asian culture “The song was written from seeing this precious imagery everywhere and using it as a metaphor for trying to be a better person. We wanted a song that could take people out of that negative mind set and show something altogether more positive. We’ve always focused on escapism, often that would revolve around writing about physical places we wanted to be, but this time it was about escaping mentally to a much better place”.

About the second track ‘Now Stop‘, IS TROPICAL say: “We were messing around with this infectious groove in a soundcheck in China and just kept playing it over and over again and recording it on our iPhones. When we listened back, it sounded just like an ESG track, it had this scrappy, lazy groove that we loved. Simon had this sugary pop song he’d written for a fake J-Pop girl band. The lyrics were “You’ve got what you want, now stop. Put a little sugar on top”. It was written as a joke initially, but we dropped the end of the line and put it over the groove, so the lyrics took on a totally different and more serious tone. We set up one crappy little mic in a room and played it through live to get that raw lo-fi ESG production value.”

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