Photo: Megan Cullen
Those familiar with Gregg Kowalsky’s past solo work might expect the former purveyor of meditative ambience to continue to explore the same minimalist ethos heard on 2017’s L’Orange, L’Orange, yet with his latest record Eso Es, Kowalsky embraced the unpredictable chaos of MIDI, returning to the software world of his formative years via a completely fresh creative process. The resulting record is a captivating listen – both tranquil and messy and somehow also sprawling yet minimal. We caught up with Gregg to discover more about the process of making the record, and learn more about his journey as a restless creative…
1
Firstly, we really enjoyed the new record,
Eso Es.
It’s a really captivating, lushly produced listen. What was the starting point?
Gregg Kowalsky: “I didn’t have one for a while and I was struggling. My last record was around five years ago. I always want to do something different so I just started playing around with an app on my iPad that was just a basic sequencer. I just started programming sequences just for fun. After a while I kind of liked the way that they were sounding. I ended up feeding them into Ableton Live’s audio-to-MIDI converter. That’s where everything sort of clicked. I’d never used MIDI aside from the odd track here and there. This was the first time that I really utilised MIDI data, the whole album became built around it. “Aside from converting the sequences to MIDI, I was also feeding stuff that you probably aren’t supposed to feed into the MIDI converter. That’s always been part of my technique – utilising software in ways that it wasn’t necessarily created to do. I would feed it a Juno 106 drone pad, whereas typically you’d feed in something more distinct like a bass line. It just spat out a confusion of MIDI data that I ended up working with.”
“I was programming sequences on my iPad. After a while I liked the way they were sounding…”
2
And how did you process that in the software domain?
GK: “I used Arturia’s DX7 V soft synth to play back the data and it actually sounded really cool. That’s basically where it started. Then the fun was figuring out which patch on the DX7 to use. The really fun part was feeding all kinds of weird stuff into the audio-to-MIDI converter and seeing what it came up with. This process organically happened and presented a new way to create. The whole album was based on the sequencer and then the DX7. I’d stack the MIDI data together, with a different DX7 sound playing it back on each track. My previous work was drone-based and quite minimalist. This became my most active and energetic music.”
3
So you were creatively reacting to the madness of this MIDI data being quite random and chaotic?