Unlike most electronic musicians, I tend to take a “rock” approach to writing songs, in that they’ll have a verse, bridge, chorus and middle 8, each with their own chord progression, vocal melody and lyrics. Conversely, a lot of dance music tends to work on simple chord progressions, or no chord progression, as chord changes often break the desired hypnotic effect. Of course, these are generalisations – The Beatles fabulous ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was on one chord and the Pet Shop Boys and Röyksopp have made some very chordy dance tracks.
So with each album I like to do a couple of less structured songs and Someone Something Sunshine (SSS) is one of these. It’s based on two chords and a circular bassline with different top-line melodies changing as the song progresses. It’s the first Space March song where I rap (although ‘Conspiracy’ is a kind of rap) – yes, it sounds like Neil Tennant with a slight Australian twang! Admittedly, I decided to do a rap because my girlfriend hates Aussie hiphop with a passion and I cheekily wanted to stir her by including some a rap in one of my songs – sorry Alex ;-)
SSS started out as quite a trippy affair sounding like Air circa ‘Moon Safari’ but as I added more layers, it developed into something else. Although it’s the trippy lead synths which give the song its intrigue – my favourite aspect of SSS. For this, I dusted off my old analogue synths – the Studio Electronics SE-1, Roland Jupiter 6 and Oberheim Matrix 1000 to beef-up the sound of the software synths – and it worked! I also recorded live finger clicks for this track and really like how that sounds layered with the synthetic drums.
I hope SSS brings someone some sunshine :)
UPDATE: Feb 2013 – replaced demo with album mix