On this day in 2020, my first album “A Forgotten Tape” was released on all music streaming platforms. Today is an important day to mark in my opinion, since the concept of the album was followed by two more albums and the last one, “The Blissful Dawn”, was released this year, marking the end of “the blissful trilogy”.
I have learned so much about music production since the release of “A Forgotten Tape”, but that album greatly defined the concepts I wanted to follow with Sunset Phase. I wanted nostalgic and melancholic themes to be prevalent throughout the tracks, and I wanted the record to give the feeling of discovering a lost tape with so many nostalgic, analog sounding tracks in it.
It was the beginning of the pandemic, around March of 2020, when I first started recording for the album. The first track I started working on was “Forgotten Sequencer”, which was heavily inspired by HOME, a pretty famous lo-fi synthwave composer who is also one of my biggest inspirations for Sunset Phase in general. His tracks, especially the ones such as “Intro” and “Sunshower”, with their analog arpeggios gave me a beautiful nostalgic feeling that I wanted to experiment with one day. And that day was when I started producing this track. This track has a simple arpeggio but that synthesized arpeggio was so satisfying that it inspired me a lot to incorporate similar elements pretty often in my tracks. This inspiration continued in other lo-fi synthwave tracks in the record, which are “Digital Dreams” and “Sleepwalking”.
The vast majority of the album was composed with emulations of analog synthesizers from the 1970s and 1980s such as Minimoog and also popular FM synthesizers such as Yamaha DX7. In addition, I used vintage sounding textures on pretty much all of the tracks such as vinyl crackles and VHS noises to give tracks that extra nostalgic feeling apart from the use of retro synth emulations. For example, I made the track “Paradise Keys” with the intention of creating an instrumental track similar to Crystal Castles’ music but composed in the late 1980s and lost in a tape, therefore I used vintage synthesizer emulations and VHS textures to create that desired effect while composing that track. I used similar effects to create these textures on my subsequent releases as well, particularly on “Retro Rave” and “Farewell Road”.
Some tracks from the album were not exactly aiming for this nostalgic effect with these composition and production techniques I mentioned above. “Emotional Dance” was one of these tracks, which was not composed with a vintage synthesizer sound but instead a processed piano, along with a subtle bass like a person humming it and sweeping foley textures in the background to give the track a more organic vibe. I composed that track when I was bored of making lo-fi synthwave for a while, but it allowed me to look at the Sunset Phase project with a different perspective. Making this track allowed me to realise that Sunset Phase does not have to rely on a specific type of music, and therefore it can experiment with many types and sounds while keeping similar aesthetics and themes. This realisation paved the way to experiment and create many “same vibe, different type” tracks that made their way into the album such as “Towards The End”, a lo-fi future garage track which was inspired mainly by future garage artists such as Burial and Vacant, but relied mainly on lo-fi hip hop elements and lo-fi synthwave chords.
I would like to mention my current relationship with this album as well. Looking back to it now, I realise the flaws that this album had such as its mixing and mastering problems since I have learned a lot more in these domains since then, which kind of leads me to not enjoy this album as much as my recent one in terms of being “listenable”, but that is because of me focusing a lot on these details as a producer. Nevertheless, I still enjoy going back to it from time to time because of how it motivates me to continue with Sunset Phase because of its satisfying thematic foundations. My personal favourites from this album are “In Low Spirits”, “Paradise Keys”, “Digital Dreams” and “Emotional Dance”. I still enjoy listening to these tracks a lot.
Before concluding this post, I would like to mention that I have published a video on my YouTube channel named “The Blissful Trilogy”, which is a continuous mix of my three albums, “A Forgotten Tape”, “Nostalgic Tides” and “The Blissful Dawn”, all in one to celebrate the 2nd anniversary of this album and also the start of this blissful trilogy.
You can listen to “A Forgotten Tape” on all music streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music using the Sunset Phase links at the right side of this website.
Thank you to everyone who supported this release and stay tuned for the upcoming music from Sunset Phase.
