OdNu - Awake

Awake is taken from the album “My Own Island” - the result of my latest explorations within the immersive music realm and is my first Dolby Atmos album. My last album “Expansive Nothingness” was mixed binaurally and I really appreciated the spaciousness that the technology lent to my compositions. After that album was released in 2021, I became curious about Dolby Atmos and so alongside the creative process of composing this latest release, I was also figuring out the technical aspects of designing and setting up my own Dolby Atmos studio. I was interested in creating a studio environment that is immersive so that my composing, editing, mixing and mastering experience was also immersive. And in the process, I felt like I was creating my own island. “My Own Island” is about that personal creative space and individual internal reality that each of us has. Each track on the album are poems within poems where I encoded my ideas and feelings into the sounds, loops and melodies. Even the album titles can be read like a poem. The guitar is the main instrument (even synth sounds are played with a midi guitar) with the addition of supporting instruments like voice, charango, clarinet, prepared vst piano, various synths and field recordings. All sounds pass through hardware effects back and forth before being recorded in my DAW. The mix is also a big part of the composition where I work with fader and knob gestures as an expressive tool in order to add a more human feeling. The result is a weaving in and out of leitmotifs that travel through ambient landscapes, dub infused passages or even sometimes song-like structures. A humanistic, expressionist, unclassified album guided by intuition and mixed in Dolby Atmos and made entirely on my own island.