Sometimes inspiration peeks out of the ordinary, finding you at a point where you least expect it. It doesn’t always have to be the flash of the Eureka! moment, just the growing creep of realisation and a willingness to look beyond the standard wash of the everyday.
“Sometimes I take a particular street, leading away from the city, when I walk. It has these old wooden sheds all the way down along one side and I was immediately drawn to this mysterious feeling, as if somebody was trying to hide something on this empty street with all these poorly constructed sheds,” Asger explains.
It’s a feeling that underpins the eerie dissension and mystery of ‘Desert Plant’. Humming with a dark tension, Asger’s field recordings of a busy city contrast against the desolate, rail track-guided path on its outskirts.
“The street is close to the rail track and at some point it becomes a path, which lets you cross under a bridge,” he continues, “under that bridge, I recorded these great low-frequency sounds – a mix of the cars going over and the wind blowing beneath the bridge, with the sirens and city noises contributing to the soundscape.
“As I went along the road, literally, the ideas started building up inside my head. I remember feeling like slowly returning to reality when walking back that day.”
Those field recordings create an angry dissension, the agitated whip of the wind interrupting the mournful call of the vocals, gnashing over the dead space between stabbing, percussive beats.
A track wired by dark and low frequencies, it feels like you’ve stumbled across a place where horrible things happen and are hid, the ghosts of those actions lingering only until they’re discovered.
“It's called Desert Plant because of the place feeling like it was completely deserted, yet it offered me so much in the form of atmosphere and inspiration. There’s life but you have to find it, and acknowledge it.”
ASIP020 Odd Shapes - Desert Plant
