Track by track with Alfie GrangerHowell and Nick Harriman
Silence Never Heard
Alfie: “I started this one with the orchestral stuff; all the pads and strings and stuff. It was a totally instrumental thing – beatless. Then I remember passing it to Nick, who chopped up some of the samples and added beats. It was kind of like a remix. It was cool.
“It was always called Silence Never Heard, too. A lot of the time we have dummy tracks names and change it up when it goes to mastering, but this was always called that. It was taken from a Bukowski poem [ Dinosauria, We].
“We also sampled some bleeps and ambient noise stuff out of some sci-fi films in here, too.”
Lost In You Feat. Janai
Nick: “This is one thing that had been knocking about for quite a long time before we put the vocals on. It kinda worked on its own, without the vocals.
“We were sitting on this for ages, unsure whether it would work on a dancefloor. Then we had the idea of getting a singer on it. We knew Janai from school. We both met at sixth-form college in Camden and we met her there as well. She was an old friend.
“We got the demo back from her and it was really good. It was bang-on; we didn’t change anything, I think. Not a lot of going back and forth.”
Stick By This
Alfie: “Nick started this, then I came in. It didn’t have any of the strings at the start and in the middle. I added those, but it was Nick’s idea to extend them and have a string solo and then mess around with some cello.
“We managed to get a good sound, and thought, ‘Fuck it! A cello.’ It’s a high sound, and we were struggling to get that. We’d started it with samples and weren’t thinking about how a real musician would attempt to play over the top of it. We got in a really good player and managed to get it in the end, but it did take a while.”
Plastique
Nick:
“This a hybrid type of track. We didn’t have a strict vision of what we wanted it to be, so it morphed into this sort of mix between garage and something more expansive, in that Orbital style.
“It was influenced by Moderat, too, and the stuff they did on his first album – those kind of choppy, garage, post-dubstep beats.
“We had a little dubstep influence. We never fully embraced it as DJs, but we were surrounded by it, and a lot of our mates who were DJs were playing it out at the time, so we could dip our toes in it every now and again.”
I’m Running Feat. Soloman
Alfie:
“This features Soloman. We had this dub-influenced track and we were looking for someone who sung in that style and would work on that track. So we were trawling through MySpace. We didn’t have enough profile to attract any big singers. We wanted someone like Horace Andy, but we were totally
“Tracks like Resin were a precursor to how the Dusky sound would develop – more of that club sound, with the garagey drums and stuff. At the time it was quite new. Not many people were doing that with the post-dubstep stuff, and house/garage sound influence. It was a little bit of a new thing at the time, or something that was coming back into fashion. We were just exploring that” – Alfie Granger-Howell
unknown. We found Solomon and he was up for it, so we met up.
“There was a lot of back and forth with that one. He sent over a demo, improvising a bit over the whole track on the theme of running. Then we picked out bits we liked and elaborated on it.”
Falling
Nick:
“This was influenced by the nu-disco sound, which was a term that was coined at the time [laughs], with some dub bits in there.
“It was built around a vocal sample. It was one of those ones that felt like it wrote itself a bit. Once we’d come up with the bassline and vocal sample it was just a case of just improvising the pads over the top.
“I remember really enjoying doing the ending. It goes off into ambient at the end, with the strings playing. That was another bit we recorded real cello for. It was quite cool, as it was the first time we’d done an album, and had a chance to do more chilled-out moments like that.”
Grain
Alfie:
“We had some kind of African thumb piano thing called a sansa that we played in. And the double bass sound was also a sample. We would have gone through our sample library, getting inspired.
“Once we had all the tracks for the album on a shortlist we could think about where they would fit on an album, and this felt right at about this halfway point. It wasn’t in our minds when we were writing it. That was figured out afterwards.
“It came together quite quickly. Looking at the project right now it looks quite simple. It’s quite chilled and groove-based.”
Lost Highway
Nick:
“That’s one of the more straight up clubby tracks. It’s also quite atmospheric, as well.
“There was a track by a producer who was doing similar stuff at the time called The Timewriter. He’s been a bit quiet recently, but around that time he was doing quite a few tracks.
That pitched-down vocal thing became quite a feature for us on stuff later on
I can’t remember the one particular track, but it inspired the original idea of Lost Highway with the bassline just looping over a coupla notes, in that swung rhythm. I think this was one where we came up with the groove first, then later on the strings and vocals were added.”
Mr Miyagi
Alfie: “It was quite influenced by going to festivals like Glade. This track is a distillation of the different sounds you’d get there. You’d hear the straight house and techno stuff, then some drum & bass stuff, some dubstep… and before that it was breakbeat… and these festivals would have the chillout areas as well.
“It was also influenced by acts like Leftfield who would have ambient moments on their albums. Tracks like
Melt, which we slipped into our Essential Mix, from Leftism. Having a quite chilled out track as an interlude – we got that from them.”
Thoughts & Motions
Nick: “There’s a lot of classic late ’80s, early ’90s acid house in here. The vocals came quite early on, actually. It’s Alfie singing, but pitched down. That pitched-down vocal thing became quite a feature for us on stuff later on. I’m not sure if it’s stood the test of time – it’s one of those things that sounds very much of its era.
“It became such a big thing. It wasn’t just us doing it. A few people had the same idea around the time. It became overused, those pitched vocals, but it was the first time we’d experimented with that.”
It’s Not Enough Feat. Janai
Alfie: “We’d taken some of the elements of this track for a remix we were doing for Above & Beyond. The little ride cymbal in there is a defining factor. That was heavily influenced by a track called Baccara by Guido Schneider. It has a totally different vibe, but it has that focus on a couple of ride cymbal hits. It gave it that almost 1920s jazz vibe. That came first, then we added the double bass, just messing with samples.”
Resin
Nick: “This was another clubbier one. It was written with a DJ intro/outro. The stabs came first and we filtered them up and down and messed with the decay and release.
“They were made in Circle. You forget about that synth. We haven’t used that in while, but we used it all the time back then. It’s by Future Audio Workshop. The other synth was Albino 3, which was a Rob Papen one.
“At this point in the album, we started to have these bigger moments. This track and Need You Back had the big crescendos – quite different to the earlier stuff on the album.”
Need You Back
Alfie: “This track definitely has more of the original Solarity influence on it. We went back to that style a bit on the second album, with the big moments and build-ups and things.
“The Solarity sound was much brighter and in-your-face – lots of white noise and stuff like that. It all became a bit more toned down for the Dusky stuff. Need You Back was one of the earliest tracks we made for the album.”
If Only
Nick: “This started as an idea, just messing around with the piano and a vocal thing. We started it without any preconceptions of what it would become. We didn’t even necessarily make it with the album in mind, but when we started developing it and leaving the drums at the end, we knew it would be the closing track on the album. It has a perfect outro, with the strings building back up again.”
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