"Vista Point" was my first proper music "endeavor", and the first project I worked on under the name olazul.

The EP was created pretty much entirely as throwaway projects in an effort to understand Ableton and sampling. There are a couple of other songs that had the same ethos in mind, but these songs in particular stood out to me at the time as worthy enough to go into a released project.

This is why I use the term "garbage" when referring to it. It's not just that it's bad. It's that these were music files that were going to sit in my music projects folder forever, collecting dust, if I didn't go and release it. Might as well populate my Soundcloud and Bandcamp with something. That was my mindset going into the EP.

---

This album cover is a picture I took at a vista point (haha lol) along Highway 1 near Ragged Point. I liked the contrast of the mechanical, solar-powered equipment posted up on the site, and the beautiful rocky hillside punctuating the expansive Pacific Ocean. Then I dropped a duotone effect on it and called it a day.

---

So: Shimmering Juxtapose! One of my favorite songs from the scrap projects, and the whole inspiration behind releasing the EP in the first place.

This song's drum pattern was inspired by the latter half of Thru The Walls by Death Grips. The rest of the songs kind of follow a jungle-adjacent BPM, this one slows things down and places more emphasis on the chopped sample.

Which begs the question: what is that sample?

The answer, wholly and truthfully, is I can't remember! I never labeled my samples when I produced this EP.

My thesis for this EP, and my original idea for what I wanted to do as a producer, was make music that didn't sound like Electro Swing but which sampled 78 RPM records. Records that are already within public domain. Records that are often skipped when people go crate digging. Records that usually sell for a dollar a piece at the thrift store.

This started as a convenient way of using all of the 78 RPM records that I had been collecting up until that point. And for my future projects, I want to seep back into that method, because I think it has some legs if you're more proficient at producing than I was at this point.

...

Read the rest of the article here