Story In Sound: Cynkill
photo in our backyard, Glendale, CA 2019
Broadcast live on the Youngbloods Morning Show on Eaton Radio, my pal John Moses invited me to walk through the making of my new single, Cynkill, for a Story In Sound. Listen to the segment below, or scroll past its transcript to hear the full episode of the show.
TRANSCRIPT:
You are listening to the Youngbloods morning show on Eaton Radio
I’m Caural, and this is Story In Sound
About twenty years ago now, that little snippet was broadcast as part of a mix from where I was living in Brooklyn to a then brand new restaurant and bar called Rodan in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood. It was winter of 2003. Rewinding a bit more, my friend Nate Harrison - the label head of Toshoklabs, who put out my very first album - introduced me to software called Metasynth.
It was my senior year at NYU, and Aphex Twin had just released Windowlicker. The second song sounded like it dropped out of the fucking sky, but Nate was like, oh, he’s probably putting a jpeg of his face in Metasynth and programming drums on top of it.
But besides crazy filters, analyzing images as sound or even drawing your own, Metasynth did granular synthesis too, and I was soon using it maybe a little too much. Here it is again on a remix I did for The Timeout Drawer. I think the quote from my friend Chris was something like, "what the hell was that?"
So basically, since I was using a hardware sampler at the time, I would make myself little sample CDs of filtered bits, bass sounds, and these mangled chance edits of music to later chop up. But this one was on its own CD repeating for like 30 minutes, and it just sat in a binder for almost twenty years.
When I started making electronic music again - this time in Los Angeles, and in Ableton - I started digitizing all those sample CDees from a lifetime ago to put on my hard drive. When I came across this one, I was like, this could be something.
Except, it sounded square as hell to me now. Just too fast.
So, the first thing I did was slow it down, which obviously helped, except it was in 17/8, which only made sense to the software that made it! So, I added in an extra count to take it to 9, and finally stretched the phrase out across five bars of 4.
At this point though, the song was just this weird skeleton of that lonely sample, but a first pass on Rhodes just completely transformed it.
Since those first keys were mostly in a higher octave, I fattened them up with a second part in a lower register.
The song had now evolved on its own to become something completely different.
It was 2019. Two years prior, my wife found a rental house on Craigslist which she thought could work for a short film she just finished writing, but it was secretly an escape from our Studio City apartment. It came complete with fruit trees and was legitimately an urban farm - it seemed like a scam. Thankfully, it wasn't, and we shot Word Is Bond in it the same weekend we moved in. I’d see our vegetable beds and this huge, pink bougainvillea from my little makeshift studio in our bedroom. It was always hot, but it was just this truly ideal situation. I think just getting outside to pick fruit, trim trees, or dig in the soil made everything I worked on at this time super lush.
But back to Cynkill: For the longest time, I was just stuck. I had basically shelved it while I worked on other stuff, like turning off our AC and making Meagan Simone stand in the bathroom singing dozens of takes on Kings, originally intended for the credits on Word Is Bond. But every once in a while, I’d walk outside with those Rhodes parts looping in my headphones, and it started to feel like our plants wanted to sing along.
I started hearing a chorus, and imagined myself in a huge theater.
I auditioned a pulsing drum that sounded totally stupid, but I wound up keeping the percussive ambience I had used as a layer on top. To keep with the concert theme, I added a crowd clapping, and then a hyper-reverbed count off to help subdivide everything. There’s that drum stick sample.
In playing around on the Rhodes, a chorus, verse, and different bridges started to emerge. Maybe subconsciously I was trying to contrast the choppiness of that original sample, but a lot of the sounds that felt right were just really drone-y.
I designed these shimmery synth pulses by pitching, editing, and layering a few samples together, and really dug the idea of an overdriven guitar beneath, which I programmed to do this chromatic climb.
But I didn’t want things to get too spaced out or dissonant, and I think the vocals kept things in line. So I added some more in the outro, which felt like someone walking alongside me in our garden, improvising as she heard what I did.
It was early summer now, and whenever we’d go outside of our place, these songbirds were just on it - especially at night. I remember standing in our front yard and singing back at one of them this one time. It was like two in the morning and I was completely drunk, and loud, and I woke our housemate up.
But our last day in Los Angeles - June 12th of 2019 - was really tough. We were saying our goodbyes to friends that day and, late that night, I was walking around our property just crying. All of a sudden, this one bird started singing, and I pulled out my phone to record it.
The next day, we began our drive across the country to move to upstate New York, and this song sat on my hard drive while we worked on movies until the winter.
Though I only had a few tunes in progress, I had high hopes to do an album. While I was still in LA, that album's working title was “Cyn” (C-Y-N) - you’d see it abbreviated everywhere on street signs, and on hikes you’d just literally be in them. Anyway, the geography was totally different all around me now. All of these quaint towns along the Hudson River had names like Fishkill, Cottekill, Wallkill and - just across the river from us - was Catskill. If you don’t know (and I didn’t), “Kill” is a Dutch word meaning ‘riverbed’ or ‘water channel’.
I missed warm weather, and I definitely missed California. It was our first actual winter in like 6 years, and I think the only thing cheering me up was making music. Finally, I had found the drums for this song.
One of the last sounds I found was quite funny. We’d always go on hikes - even in the dead of winter - and explore little spots along the way. Thanks to a stranger leaving a box of CDs on their curb, I got this wild vocal sample. The only hint you’ll get - without giving it away - is that it’s a terrible album with timbales on it from the early 90s.
The name of my future album went out the window, but Cyn - and now Kill - stuck. I combined them as a title for this song begun in one landscape, and finished in another. The first rough mix I finished was premiered on a little weekly Zoom group we had with friends during quarantine. That was so fucking weird.
But now, here’s Cynkill on the other side.