I’ve recently been working on the Elysian installation quite a bit. It’s being presented next Friday the 26th of September, 2025.

I’ve primarily used the material of Time Vials (all parts) as a starting point. I used it to map out a base structure for the work, which ran for approximately 45 mins. This foundation gave me a good overview of the intensity trajectory the piece would travel through.

With this, I created a bunch of new material by heavily processing the existing sounds and pieces, and creating new parts. This process presented me with an important lesson: be rough with your material. What I mean by this is that it’s important to get out of the mindset of the engineer, who is focused more on the subtleties and fine-tuning of existing material, and into the mindset of the creative and experimental artist. There’s so much information out there about the ‘correct’ ways to treat audio, but I’ve found that this mostly comes from an engineer’s perspective of working with sound. There is a massive focus on tidying out audio, or changing it subtly to meet an artist’s vision. Of course, there are examples of discussions of tones and overdriven sounds, but I feel like there is very little being discussed about the longer processes that can be undertaken by experimental artists working with material with more of a generative approach: aiming to create new materials, rather than clean up existing materials. To future me, I say: when doing work similar to this installation, go ahead and carry out very drastic levels of processing on your existing material, whether that is parts of, or entire, tracks. Transpose and stretch whole pieces; granulate them; run them through some spectral processors like SpecOps; do all of these things in a chain. Use ‘finished’ pieces or parts as the raw material in processes that result in new pieces. This isn’t some groundbreaking idea or anything – it’s a very common technique for more experimental or technical electronic music. But it’s one that I’ve really employed to create the installation piece, and want to adopt more in the future.

I remember hearing Blawan talk about his studio processes, centring around similar drastic approaches to resampling material. It involved starting out with a drum groove or percussive synth line (created on a drum machine or modular synth), which is then processed and recorded it into a DAW. Then, the recording is sent through more processing equipment, driving or altering it in a range of ways, and recorded back into the DAW. This process is repeated over and over. At some point, you can stop and listen to what you’ve made, and it’ll most likely be pretty experimental and ‘weird’.

What’s important here is the mindset: don’t think your material has to be treated like it is so fragile. Be rough with it.