Posts in category: Poly Gecko News

Hey friends,

It’s been 3 months since I entered anything into this blog, and oh how things have changed dramatically, even in that relatively short period.

The most immediately thrilling and relevant news is that I’m now co-writing and co-producing my album with my friend Colin Darcy. Colin is a multi-faceted musician with a really solid ear for music production of all different genres. I’m immeasurably excited to be working with him. He’s brought me closer to songwriting and the philosophy surrounding it than ever before. This album had been moving at a snail’s pace since it’s inception, and he’s already got the ball rolling quite quickly on some tracks. I’m eagerly awaiting to see what we can accomplish together. I think we are the perfect team to assemble my first full-length forthcoming album.

Aside from aiding my musical ambitions, Colin has really opened my mind to lots of other steps to make music into a career – something that my mind doesn’t often visit because of how much of a pipedream I see it as. I feel so arrogant if I remotely suggest to myself that this could be a full-time job. There are so many other great musicians struggling to make a buck – why me? I guess my answer is – as he’s encouraged, why not?

With this album, I’m aiming to marry the electronic sounds of synthesizers, drum machines, talk boxes, etc with the organic sounds of drum kits, guitars, vocals. As an interesting twist, inspired by Deru, I’ve been hypothesizing ways to make the inorganic sounds feel more like organic instruments and the organic sounds feel more synthesized. I want to explain my thought process here, but during the recording process, I’ll document it all heavily so other producers can take a crack at it if they like the sounds I’ve obtained.

Finally, to get in the right mood for this album, I’ve curated a playlist listening diet in iTunes to keep myself entertained by albums that inspire me – for sound reasons or arrangement reasons. Some of these albums include:

• Currents, Tame Impala
• Tremors, SOHN
• Hesitation Marks, Nine Inch Nails
• Passive Me, Aggressive You, The Naked & Famous
• Junk, M83
• Phase, Jack Garratt
• Audio, Video, Disco, Justice
• Narrow Stairs, Death Cab for Cutie
• Born in the Echoes, The Chemical Brothers
• The Suburbs, Arcade Fire
• Walls, Apparat

While I won’t share the album before it’s finished, put these albums on shuffle with each other and you might start to get the feeling as to where mine will sit.

Thanks as always. I appreciate you all very much,

Ryan

Hey friends,

It’s been a while since I’ve written to you. This one will be short and sweet, but a post nonetheless. I recently had my hernia surgery (finally) and I’m on the recovery road now. I’ll have some sweet scars and no lifting or physical activity for 4 more weeks but I’ll survive. I hope you’ve all been well through 3 months into the new year, too. Let me get you up to date in all things Poly Gecko.

I’m toying with the idea of making my forthcoming EP, The Narrows into a full-length album instead. There are about 14 songs right now that could fit on it; a good chunk of them being ongoing collaborative projects with friends. If this were the case, it would obviously push it farther into the future, but I’ve got the material now – it’s just a matter of finishing it.

Aside from that, I’m actually the busiest I’ve ever been these last few weeks with collaboration. I’ve met with two separate friends a few times and we’ve worked on a few songs. Both projects are very different. One is headed in the electronic / RnB / lyrical  direction while the other is headed in a throwback house music direction. I’m really excited for both because although both electronic, they’re a slight departure from the Poly Gecko stuff. However, these collaborations share a few common threads: both will assume new names apart from Poly Gecko or their name, both will have an EP out as soon as the material shapes up and both will give me a better opportunity to play live. Poly Gecko will play live someday but it’s a hard transition. I have to finish up this next series of songs and then go to the drawing board and figure out how to take these songs to a stage.

I’ll leave you with a little teaser of something new I cooked up a few days ago. The working title is Neotics. I was listening to a lot of deadmau5 and Daft Punk and then this happened:

What have I been listening to? I thought you’d never ask.

1. The Inheritors by Holden
2. In Rolling Waves by The Naked and Famous
3. Where You Go I Go Too by Lindstorm
4. Believe In Your Dreams by TWRP
5. Wonder Where We Land by SBTRKT

Keep it chill. Talk soon.

Ryan

A few months ago, a great friend of mine left for Vancouver. His name is Cameron Hawes. I really do miss him everyday, and I know that sometime in the future we shall be reunited. Anyways, yadda yadda bromance yadda. Before Cameron left, he did a couple of features with a good friend of both of ours: Joel Freck. Joel is a fantastic producer and an even better gentleman. Joel laid down some fresh dance beats and Cameron did his vocal thing on top of them. Joel did a great job crafting these songs into masterpieces. After hearing some mixes from Joel, it occurred to me that I would love to remix one of them – specifically Take My Hand. So I got permission from both Joel and Cameron and went ahead. I’ve attempted some remixes before but I usually get about half way through and lose focus and work on something else, but I really wanted to see this one through and do it to the best of my ability.

Here’s the map from a few months ago

I spent a lot of time with this track, more time than I would’ve liked. I just knew it had so much potential to be a super great track and I wasn’t going to be satisfied until I hit that full potential. I’ve “finished” this song 3 times now, and now the version you’ll hear now is from October 2015. I made some updates since then but they didn’t stick. I always go back to the quote “art is never finished, only abandoned” by Leonardo da Vinci, and I think that applies heavily to this remix. I’m not totally satisfied with this mix, with this arrangement, but it is the absolute best I can do right now. And with so much time put into it, and with other songs I want to focus on, it’s time to release it and move on to the next thing. I still really like the tune, and I’m proud that I stuck with it as far as I did and tried so many different things with it.

Listen & Download to TAKE MY HAND [POLY GECKO REMIX] by JOEL FRECK feat. CAMERON HAWES:

Take care,

Ryan

Hey friends,

Winter is coming. But so is sweater season, an excuse to grow my beard and reasons to stay indoors and write music. Admittedly, I have been delinquent with updating this blog of late. I’ve been stupidly busy between work and school. But I only have one more month of school until I’m done… where did the time go?

Musically lately, I’ve been refining my process, thanks to the course I’m taking at Berklee Online. My instructor Loudon Sterns is showing me the way to enlightened electronic music crafting. I’m just a young padawan still, but soon I may become a Jedi Knight.  The last project I did for school was a Trance song I call COCO.

This week is just a light automation project before diving into House for three weeks and finishing on French House / Electro, which I’m really excited for.

My drummer Andrew and I went over some Poly Gecko songs both released and unreleased last week and it’s slowly coming together. It’ll still be a few months before we’re able to play live, but I’m beyond words for how excited I am to be moving in that direction finally. Andrew is such a talented dude and it’s gonna be super fun sharing a stage with him.

James and I are nearly done with Immigrant Song. It’s all recorded now, I just need to put on my mixing hat and make it sound pretty for you guys. You’ll hear it before the end of the year. Speaking of 2016, I decided to stop drinking until such time. Once and a while I need to prove to myself that I don’t need liquor to have a good time. I’m about three weeks without it now and I feel much more productive and energetic, but maybe that’s just placebo. Either way, I’ll revisit my friend Whiskey in the new year. Until then, not a drop shall enter me.

Things I’m hooked on right now:

1. Play With Me! Collection by Matador. I can’t even remember who told me about Matador, but I’m glad they did because he’s dope. Continuous mixes are growing on me – Andrew Bayer did it so well on their latest release – and Matador is no exception. All the songs off this album are great but the 53:00 continuous mix is where it’s at. The songs are even better when running into each other. My favourite cut off the album has to be Bsunday. It’s kinda repetitive, but #DatBass
2. Evergreen by Broods. I live and breathe Lorde and when I discovered this act, also from New Zealand and produced by Joel Little, I had to check them out. I listened to their EP, titled Broods EP for a long time before scoring this full-length album and it’s so good front-to-back. Right off the bat you’re hit with Mother & Father, and forever attached with Bridges and L.A.F. It’s a super fun album with really great textures and dynamics.
3. Good For You by Selena Gomez. I don’t even care what you say, this song is catchy.  As much as I might like to, I can’t stop jamming this tune. It kinda reminds me of Royals how it;s mostly that same groove the whole way and it doesn’t have some big explosive chorus, it’s just chill and sexy and I love it.

Stay friendly,

Ryan

Hey friends,

I hope you’ve been well. Let me brief you on what’s up with myself.

I’m now three weeks into my course at Berklee Online and I’m learning tons of great information. I had to design a kick drum from scratch using Native Instrument’s Massive and that was hard, but a really cool experiment. Then I went ahead and designed an organ sound for something to do. I’m familiarizing myself with all the control in Massive. It’s a super deep program so it’ll take a while before I fully harness it’s ability. If you’d like to download my kick drum I made, click here. You will require Massive to open that file.  Aside from designed kick drums, I’m also learning lots about sampling. I never really got into (external) sampling because I had such an extensive library of samples already but it’s pretty neat what you can do with recycled audio. It’s probably not a practice I’ll have a lot of use for in Poly Gecko but it’s a great lesson to learn nonetheless.

Aside from that, I’m working on a few new tunes. The Frost, Atoms, Arcade @ Midnight and Escapable. Atoms is going to be the coolest song I have so far I think. I’ve started to figure out exactly how to marry organic instruments and inorganic sounds. I want to share it so bad, but I want to make it presentable first and there’s much more work to be done. My friend and graphic designer James and nearly done our remodelling of Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song. And it is almost nothing like the original. We dropped the tempo, but most notably dropped that driving bass line. We’ll be done recording parts by this Monday and then the mixing process shall start. Expect to see it in November sometime.

Also expect to finally see my remix of Joel Freck’s Take My Hand finished. Finally. Finally. Finally. I keep going back on it and making minor adjustments, but at some point it’s going to be released and it should be now. When I asked a friend if it sounded done, he quoted Leonardo Di Vinci by saying, “art is never finished; only abandoned”. And that’s exactly what I needed to hear.

What am I listening to currently? Well…

1. Do Androids Dream by Andrew Bayer // This EP is just so deep, rich and well-produced. I must have listened to Tomorrow Boys roughly 100 times this last few weeks and I’m not remotely tired of it. I think this would be considered Trance music and if it is, it’s without doubt the very best Trance I’ve heard.
2. In Rolling Waves by The Naked and Famous // Much like their previous album, Passive Me Aggressive You, this album is so dynamic. It can go from single piano notes, to a tsunami of guitars and drums. Often times when a mix is intentionally overdriven I have a hard time liking it, but this group and Sleigh Bells are the only two groups I’ve heard pull it off. Kudos to the engineers.
3. Caracal by Disclosure // These two are rapidly becoming one of my favourite groups.  Their combination of pop and techno and fat basses is #winning. Also, any group that features Lorde on a track gets an automatic A+ in my books. Their new stage setup is so cool, too. They each have a giant oval of a desk with synths, drums, guitars, software, etc and they actually play electronic music live instead of pressing play and walking away like a lot of other acts. Check out their performance at iTunes Festival from September because it’s the greatest.

Come party with me at Purity Ring at HPX next Saturday,

Ryan