Vista Point
- Shimmering Juxtapose
- It's The Smell of Sun Rays
- I'm Sure You Can Handle It
- Isn't That Odd
- I Feel Like I Couldn't Do Anything About It
- There's Rain Coming in From the Corners of the Window
"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.
While Shimmering Juxtapose is the first song on the album, It's The Smell of Sun Rays was actually the first song I produced using this method of sampling.
This is the rare example of a song from this EP which I do remember the sample used! It was a recording of the song Liebestraum, Dream of Love, by Liszt, recorded by the Victor company pre-World War I. I remember this all because I accidentally broke the record at some point and was devastated.
One thing that this song makes obvious is the extremely barebones production, aside from the sample chop and drum pattern. Not only is this the case because it was the first of the songs I produced in this EP, but it was also because I intended on layering instruments on top of it. My original idea was to put a Cello sample over this song in particular, but I never got around to it. Hence why it comes out as the hollowest of the songs on this record.
But further, I really wanted to chase a nearly hypnogogic sound for this EP. I thought that music which straddled the line of cognisant and drifting suited a genre that could be halfway between performance, catchy, and artful.
Looking back, idk man, it just sounds washed out. I have better ways of making music sound dreamy than making it sound hollow.
For this song in particular, I wanted it to sound like the thought of anticipating doing something nice in the morning while you're trying to fall alseep. Something with family, friends, loved ones. Going out to the beach, or the mountains. The rose-tinted glasses of what could be based on what has already been. That was the intention of this song.
I'm Sure You Can Handle It sits alongside Isn't That Odd as the songs where there isn't a whole lot to say anymore. It's a continuation of the same practices and general principles of It's The Smell of Sun Rays. Cut a sample up in a way which leans on the fidelity texture of 78 RPM records, make it hypnogogic, all that jazz.
I will note, this song and Isn't That Odd never existed as a complete timeline in session view. The intent was to make a style of song that never existed as one singular thing, with half a dozen chopped versions and sample variations that I could switch between depending on the direction I wanted to take a live performance.
Ah yes, I Feel Like I Couldn't Do Anything About It. This song was my attempt to make dreambreak! Ahhhhh it's crap.
Well, it wasn't really intentionally trying to be dreambreak. There's a lot of things that go into dreambreak to make it what it is. This was, more or less, my attempt to get a handle on the effects system in Ableton, like with Grain Delay.
If I didn't put whatever effect is on the reverb on the reverb, I'd call it my favorite on the EP. I like the chop! It's just too prickly.
The original idea behind this song was to create a punctuality between the unnerved emotions of I'm Sure You Can Handle It and Isn't That Odd. Like remembering an embarrassing moment in your life, it flashes before you at first, commands your attention, gets you to self reflect, before fading back away into static, the nothingness that is your subconscious.
I did mention the EP was made to be very hypnogogic.
So this song in particular was created because I was following along with a launch tutorial in Ableton.
But this song I wanted to close the EP out with because it highlighted the appeal to me of this record as a whole.
This song was intended to sound the most like "staying home in the winter with a fever". The whole album is as abrasive as it is because I wanted it to feel like the barrier between falling asleep and being awake. Nostalgia tugs on that feeling to me, and this song feels the most like collapsing into sleep while reminiscing on your simpler childhood. The slow chaoticism of the drum break patterns going back and forth. The weird cheeriness of the record chop, like it's the misremembered theme song of a children's cartoon. The consistent mood of "slippingness" it carries all throughout. The very subtle reverb effect designed to sound like rain hitting a window. That was, to me, the perfect send off for this album.
So that's everything. What do I think about the album? I mean what can really be said about this album? It's exactly what I advertised it as: an experiment in music production. A way of seeing if I was cut out to create anything in Ableton.
But I think it was also the very first musical project I worked on where I realized music can tell a story without saying any words. And that a story doesn't need a character, or a plot, or a setting really. A story is just a way of conveying emotion. That is art at the end of the day.
What's more relatable than the thoughts that ripple throughout your mind when you're trying to fall asleep? In some way, I want to capture this idea in another project when I have the chance.
alexandre, February 18th, 2026