We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Air Drop

by Darryl Blood

supported by
EMD
EMD thumbnail
EMD Very Good Digital Release Review Haiku: Air Drop by Darryl Blood

Someone is tuning

a piano, but my heart

is the instrument.

comeawaywithemd.com/very-good-haiku-a-2021-music-writing-experiment/2/ Favorite track: Ardentia.
/
  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $8 USD  or more

     

1.
Abernathy 03:54
2.
3.
Ardentia 05:13
4.
5.
Novella 04:32
6.
7.
Voyeur 04:39
8.
9.
Stille 04:40

about

AIR DROP (Self-Release/BlueSanct)

Each download includes 5 bonus music videos

All songs written, recorded & produced by D. Blood except
“Novella” written by D.Blood / P.Bugden
Created between March-July '20
Mixed & mastered by D. Blood at the Amiable Dungeon, Los Angeles, CA

D.Blood - piano, keys, e-bow, drum programming, sounds
Patsy Bugden - Yamaha DX7 on "Novella"

INSTAGRAM:
@darrylblood_music

credits

released August 4, 2020

Most listeners of my generation formed their appreciation for music through a combination of radio singles and consecutive albums released by “favorite bands,” which is to say that what we “enjoy” is more often than not what is familiar to us—in other words, musical tropes. Mr. Blood has shown favoritism to personal tropes (unorthodox percussion, mysterious atmospheric samples, and his way around a piano) and his individual releases occasionally feel like best-of genre compilations, but his new album, Air Drop, comes as a particular surprise in its cohesion.

This is not to say that Air Drop is an any way monotonous or repetitive, but rather that its nine tracks sit together in a unified statement of purpose. It’s almost an aural commentary on both the inability of the human central nervous system to produce a stable condition of emotional disposition—determination, relaxation, exhilaration, curiosity, resignation—for any sustained length of time (as on its five “primary” songs), and its propensity for returning to states of anxiety (both heightened and subtle), highlighted in fine detail on the four numbers for which the album is named.

The anxious sounds of the “Air Drop” numbers is due in part to the free rhythms and percussive instrumentation employed. Mr. Blood’s bandcamp page generously includes videos of the making of these tracks with the album download, and the videos reveal a few of the factors that bring Air Drop (which was recorded through the emotional turbulence of the early days of quarantine of the coronavirus pandemic) its singular stress-and-release sensations—a prepared piano (featuring non-industry-standard use of painter’s tape) and screws, bolts, wire brushes, and pegs.

The shorter numbers are codified non-sequentially, which literalizes the feeling of dislocation, and act as interludes between Air Drop’s primary tracks. It is on these five songs that the aforementioned emotional dispositions are explored, and on which non-musical sounds and samples serve as atmospheric coloring and intangible totems. Additionally, it is here that Darryl Blood brings to bear his facility for combining score, ambience, and tones to create mood pieces: “Abernathy” is self-assured and confident, “Ardentia” is gentle and calming, “Novella” strides into darkwave territory with a majestically-reverbed beat and squiggling sounds at the perimeters, “Voyeur” literally tickles the ivories and lends a creepy air—but a socially-awkward mournfulness—to the act on which its name is based, while closer “Stille” portrays album-as-experience and brings resolution and a peaceful finality to the set.

Air Drop may be worlds away from much of Mr. Blood’s earliest work, and even some of his mid-era material, but is still bound by his inclination toward sound as feeling and his penchant for experimentation (tendencies evident as far back as those Turkish Delight recordings of the 90s). As a complete work, it stands as his most mature and engulfing presentation yet.

-Lattney Jones (Ball of Wax)

www.ballofwax.org/2020/08/album-review-darryl-blood-air-drop/#more-6834

"Air Drop has a strangely perfumed balance between brooding low-end acoustics and sidewinding experimentalism."

-TJ Norris (Toneshift)

toneshift.wordpress.com


ABERNATHY

This song came about around the beginning of June, when I was invited to submit music to a podcast called Toneshift. The podcast’s theme was centered around social injustice. It took about 4 days to complete the song from start to finish.

For the higher melodies on the verses, I used a method where I taped off parts of the piano strings, to give them a sharper attack. The title of the song comes from Ralph Abernathy, who was a leader in the civil rights movement and a close friend to Martin Luther King Jr.

I remember watching footage of civil rights protests and race riots on YouTube, past and present. It was really intense pouring over this sea of rage, seeing how history keeps repeating itself. At the time I was writing this song, the world was still reeling from the police brutality that lead to the death of George Floyd. I decided to include the chant, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” as another reminder of injustice, whose words referenced the shooting of Michael Brown back in 2014.


AIR DROP NO. 2

The cricket at the top of this song is also the same cricket you hear in that breakdown in “Abernathy”. It lives in my garage somewhere, and sometimes when I’m recording, it modestly starts chirping away.

All of these prepared piano pieces, titled “Air Drop” are numbered respectively, are improvised pieces that I first recorded on my iPhone as a video file. I later extracted the audio then edited and mixed them into the final songs. They are numbered in the order that they were recorded over a period of two days in April. I then re-shuffled them in the sequence to fit the flow of the album.

ARDENTIA

I was asked to compose a song for a film back in March and scrambled to write this over a weekend. This track was never used, so when the album started to come together, I decided to give it a home since it seemed to fit the purveying ambient mood.

AIR DROP NO. 4

I like the restlessness of this one. It creates a brief respite from the sleepy, ambient vibe. A wanted a friend to add some trumpet on it, but it never came together. In retrospect, I think that may have been a bit too busy.

NOVELLA

I started working on this song back in April. I had found this retro drum machine pattern I really liked in Logic, and just started integrating some Moog sounds around the rhythm hits. They instantly started sounding very vintage together, but it still needed something melodic to tie it all together.

I looked back through some old cassettes of mine, and came across a piece called “Intrique Electronique (Conversation Between the Elements)”. It was from a side-project I was in called HOUSES AND TREES, back in the early 90’s. At the end of this song there is a very ambient sounding Yamaha DX-7. Once I placed it into “Novella”, it fit the melodic mood I was looking for.


AIR DROP NO. 5

This was simply a rhythmic exercise, exploring different ways to play the prepared piano percussively. Like most of the Air Drop pieces, it came together pretty fast.

VOYEUR

This developed from a livestream Instagram performance I had taped in April at the Dungeon. I had recorded my upright piano through Logic so I was able to use a section of the performance for the finished piece. As people were commenting on the live feed, someone commented that they felt like a voyeur watching my performance, thus the name stuck. A few of the piano strings had been treated, which you can hear rattling at different moments, especially near the end.


AIR DROP NO. 1

This was my first recorded attempt of the prepared piano improv pieces. I simply treated the strings a whole octave from C# to C# on the upright and struck each key once or twice as a climbed up the scale, and then overlapped the takes in post. The funny things is that when I was recording the piano, after playing each note, I would hear a crow call in response outside my garage, way off in the distance. It’s buried low in the mix, but if you listen close, you can still hear the crow.

STILLE

I had a demo of this on my upright piano as far back as March ’20, about two weeks into the start of the Quarantine. In a way, this was the start of it all for the album, although at the time I didn’t know it. I was just sitting at the piano and I taped this quick improvised succession of chordal patterns on my iPhone.

I went back and relearned the piano line in Logic about a month later, using the demo as the guide for the chords and set it to a click. The finished piano on the track is actually a piano patch called Boesendorf Grand Piano.

The word “still” just popped into my head for the song. The title comes from the German word “Stille” which means silence or stillness. It felt like the obvious closing track.

license

all rights reserved

tags

Darryl Blood recommends:

If you like Darryl Blood, you may also like: