Wake Up :)
New music emerging from my time in Stockerz
Hey friends and legendary supporters,
Hope you are all swell. Welcome to 2024 edition #1 of my newsletter :)
Today marks the beginning of an outwards shift for me. I feel like a bear that’s been in hibernation for a couple of years (although I haven’t just been sleeping, so maybe I’m more like a seed that’s been covered in soil but in truth working pretty hard to push my little plant stem through to the daylight…). Today is the release of my tune called ‘Wake Up’. There feels like no better titled track to come out of hibernation with.
This tune is the first offering from my upcoming EP ‘Stockerz’ - a collection of tunes that house my musical explorations from the year I spent living on an island in Stockholm in 2022-23. We lived in this kooky collective house on this funny (but very beautiful) island and I basically created a little world where all I did most days was eat my boiled egg in the morning, try (and often fail) to write some music, send some voice memos to some Aussie friends and go for a walk around the island. It was nice, but also alarmingly isolating in comparison to what my life had been in Melbourne. A temporary, bizarre, slow-paced reality…
At some point, I started playing with sampling my own voice and creating ‘new instruments’ that I could play on my keyboard. There was something really nice about hearing something really personal coming out of the keyboard, knowing that it had come from me rather than from some generic preset.
When I played with lovely saxophonist Flora Carbo for my Friends of the Future album I fell in love with her light textural ‘timbral trill’ sound with the clicking and clacking of the saxophone keys, and I wanted to create a sample with something similar. When I was in London for a visit I asked my dear friend Max Dowling to come and record some alto saxophone timbral trills for me to sample. This has become my ‘MaxSax TT’ instrument - a sample instrument that is now my go-to whenever I want something textural and atmospheric and beautiful. (We also recorded quite a horrible sounding saxophone which still to this day people think is a midi saxophone because it sounds so machine-like and squalky…I love it)
‘Wake Up’ is a study of these samples. Being a lover of layers, I wanted to challenge myself to try and produce a tune that only used my voice, my vocal samples and the saxophone samples - which I did. It still has many layers….but just not so many instruments lol.
So here it is - Wake Up :)
Stream ‘Wake Up’ on the platform of your choice here :))
Big thanks to Stikki aka Nick Roder for mixing, some fun production ideas, and being my go-to tech help person and moral support human. And to Max Dowling for the beautiful saxophone, mastering the track and more moral support. And to my dear mother Elizabeth Newman who created the artwork…
Here’s the funny cute artwork feat a pic Stikki took of me when I was quite likely in a doom scrolling insta hole so much so that my right hand felt sore (so I started scrolling with my left…). I dunno why, but this pic seems to sum up the feeling that I had a lot in that year after leaving Melbs. A little…unmoored.
I feel like this tune Wake Up (and the music I made this year in general) was kind of an antidote to that feeling - a pick-me-up pep talk to myself. I hope it can be a pick-YOU-up pep talk for you too.
Would love to hear how you feel about it.
Looking forward to continuing the outwards-facing trajectory with some more new tunes in the next few months (the mushroom tapping one is coming next… and then the full Stockerz EP).
Sending good vibes from Copenhagen, wherever on the planet you may be.
Love Lena x
Love Lena! Such thoughtful work ☺️