Track By Track: Michael Diamond – Placid Wakefulness

5 Minute Read
unnamed-3
Music
 

Meditative electronica from a hotly tipped producer.

Michael Diamond is a musician who has been making waves for his diverse blend of electronica which fuses influences from Bass music, Ambient, House and beyond to create something rather unique.

Drawing upon his own background, Michael also sits at a unique juncture, honing a keen interest in medicine and medical practise. He is keen to explore the relationship between music, sound and it’s impact on those struggling with a wide array of disorders and illnesses including dementia, cancer and mental health disorders. The NHS itself has been adopting a similar approach and a number of studies are already demonstrating tangible evidence that music can be used to help and inform treatment.

 

His latest EP is called “Placid Wakefulness” and comes off the back of a critically acclaimed album which received support from the likes of Mixmag, DJ Mag, Electronic Sound, Juno, Gilles Peterson, Rinse FM, Phonica Records and earned Michael a ‘Rising Star’ nomination at the Youth Music Awards.

The record is described as “taking aim at the intersection between music and neuroscience, inspired by Michael’s medical research as a therapeutic doctor.”

We invited Michael to reflect on the nature of the project and explain what the music means to him.

A1. A Way of Listening ft. Alex Wilson & George Lloyd-Owen

“I’ll begin this track by track by making it clear that I don’t ever consciously utilise psychological theories or principles to make music – I just make what I feel and let the direct emotional feedback of the sounds guide me. Having said that, it’s inevitable that your life experiences feed into your art so undoubtedly the research projects had some influence on the record. Being exposed to some psychological theories of music perception (thanks to Prof. Eric Clarke) offered me new ways in which I could think about my music. Some aspects don’t need to be over-intellectualised, but at the same time thinking about music through the lens of different disciplines can reveal things we hadn’t considered before, and give us just a better ‘all-round’ understanding of our craft. So when I started to get into these academic projects (very much by accident) it offered exactly that – a different perspective. For me, the first track represents a certain way of engaging with music – I think it’s quite different to the experience of dancing in a rave or listening on your commute, basically there are different ‘ways of listening’ and I think some tracks invite you to listen in particular ways over others. The name is also a little tribute to Prof. Eric Clarke who wrote a seminal book of a similar name. This track was also the first time Alex Wilson got his flute in our 6 years of working together. We had recorded some sax parts for this piece, but the timbre and softness of the flute suited the overall energy of this track so beautifully that we stuck with that. And of course, George’s cameo cello flourishes were the perfect accompaniment.”

A2. Reverse Entropy ft. Alex Wilson

“Arguably the most dance-able track in the EP even though I’d say it still isn’t ‘dance music’. I remember the very first time I made this idea – I remember it particularly as I had such strong audio-visual synaesthesia. I imagined a scene in my mind’s eye – I could picture celestial mountains, coloured skies, fog, mist, and otherworldly entities. Almost as if the sounds and ambiences had their own visual counterparts. And I guess that got me thinking that sound in general is indicative of physical objects. It’s the movement of physical objects that pushes air particles in a certain way to create sound – so sound = movement. We as humans evolved the perception of sound to allow us to better understand and interpret our environments (sounds can indicate opportunity or threat – from an evolutionary point of view) – so the extension of this would be that musical sounds also indicate movement of some kind – eg. when listening to live band music you can imagine how the drummer’s sticks or guitarists’ fingers must be moving, you can sort-of insinuate what the auditory scene must’ve looked like to create the sounds you’re hearing. Extending this to electronic music – and maybe one way in which electronic music holds a special place – is that it doesn’t necessarily have an obvious and direct visual counterpart, the sounds can be completely unnatural and otherworldly so much so that the ‘objects’ that could’ve been creating these sounds are way more up for flexible and imaginative interpretation. With synthesised / artificial sounds – there’s just greater ambiguity and therefore possibilities as to what these sounds might be the sounds ‘of’. It can sometimes result in some really cool mental imagery. Maybe you’ll be able to see what I see when you hear this track, or maybe something different entirely…”

B1. Turning and Turning

“This track, compared to the others, is probably the most frenzied for me – It conjured images of whirlwinds, spirals and instability which reminded me of the first line in a W.B. Yeats poem I came across in my teens; ‘Turning and turning in the wydening gyre’.
In the poem he talks about the instability of the world and the chaos that might ensue if humans continue on their path of self-destruction (it was written just after WWI). I felt there were many moments in this track which incited similar feelings of chaos / instability and spiralling motion to me. But maybe in contrast to Yeats’ bleak outlook on the future of humanity, I guess mine is more hopeful – and the second half and outro reflects that slight positivity. Again, this wasn’t a piece consciously constructed in the image of Yeats’ world, it just happened to be quite a neat parallel and definitely helped me name the track!”

B2. Placid Wakefulness

“I actually made this initially for a certain someone, but they liked it so much I thought I’d share it with everyone else too – it’s definitely raw, and unpolished but I realised that is what gives it its charm to me. I went through thousands of frustrating hours trying to make it cleaner / get more separation between the elements but when sometimes I gained clarity I lost all of the interesting warmth and tonality that you only get when frequencies clash and sounds mask and interact with each other. It’s a simple track at it’s core and I noticed how it definitely has ‘lullaby-esque’ qualities – perhaps that’s why I find it quite soothing and mellow. It’s repetitive, its melody is simple, it’s relatively low-register (not many high frequencies at all in this tune) – all of these features are found in lullabies too, and it’s no coincidence that they reflect how a person might act when they are feeling calm and rested (eg. when we’re calm we also talk more slowly, talk in a lower pitch range, and so on). This track for me then represents the closest to sleep across the EP – but not quite fully there, there is something about it which still keeps me engaged – affording some wakefulness amongst the overall placid environment it creates.”