“Songwriters” is how I start the tweets. The next steps tend to vary. But, my desire to fist bump someone through my screen for being a like mind usually happens in the process. Laptop Philharmonic responded to my call for original music with a new release, “My Other Face.” Stick with this track and enjoy the tension and chill vibe and enjoy what this Warwick UK artist does with sound. You’ll hear lots of influence here that will keep you wanting to hear what is next. Click play and read the story below.
Story Behind “My Other Face”
“My Other Face” started as some chords that I liked. A lot of my work starts that way – a skeletal outline of a harmony, sketched out at the piano. Quite often with no tune or words in mind.
I’ll usually drape a melody over the scaffold of chords I’ve come up with, have some idea of what the song is about, and then spend ages trying to make the words fit. I cram as much meaning as I can into the syllables that the notes provide, and try to avoid cliché wherever possible.
My recording and production setup is… a little ramshakle. I have a laptop, an electric piano, a dented microphone and some decade-old production software. I stretch these things to their limits as much as I can, finding ways to work either with or around the constraints they impose.
It took me a long time to get to a version of this track I was happy with. There were two things that finally convinced me I had the arrangement just right. One is the pitch bending on the synth in the first half of the song – that really added to the uneasy atmosphere. The second was adding the FX to my voice at the end so that it cut through the dense arrangement instead of getting lost in there.
This particular track, while it kind of works on its own, was very much written to be part of a complete album. I have a background in classical piano, so I tend to think in terms of bigger structures. This song is written to fit in both musically and in terms of meaning with the ones that will surround it, and I hope that’ll be apparent when the album comes out in January.
Laptop Philharmonic Bio
Laptop Philharmonic is a singer, songwriter and producer from Warwick in the UK. His first album, Craniotomy, was released in 2016. It was a concept album about his experiences with a 10 hour operation to remove a large brain tumour. A second album is due out in January 2019.
