Track By Track: Portable Sunsets - Bless

Music

Portable Sunsets (aka Brooklyn music-maker Peter Segerstrom) has just released his second album entitled Bless. The record is being furnished on our ears by the excellent Atomnation and follows 2012's outing Mercy. With a combination of harsh techno and old school love songs, it's "as if he's making ambient music with a club beat."

Have a read as Mr Sunsets himself talks us through the album one track at a time;

Bless

Writing this song was sort of like dragging a long piece of tape along the street… It just kept picking up dirt and random bits of things here and there and then it was suddenly a song. I think this happens more often than I notice in songwriting…

Crosby

That feeling when you are walking around a city on spring day that's just nice. That day when you don't have to do anything and you get to sit somewhere and look at things.

Ledges

Alvin Aronson was responsible for a lot of the drums on this track. We were in the studio late one night and were just noodling around with my DX7 and this drum patch and this track just showed up. I am happy with how far away it feels at times.

rm -R

This track was written in an afternoon in California after thinking about Europe for a while.

Straylight

I feel like the intention of this track was the clearest and simplest. It's a basic torchy house track. This was around the time that I really became aware that I love super wide stereo toms.

Pearl

Another one with a pretty simple clear intention. I think three or four notes of the melody of this track where written with some difficulty and then the rest of it kind of materialized in place.

Islander (Version)

After getting addicted to eurorack modular gear I wrote this song by just messing with the pitch knob on a Synthesis Technology Morphing Terrarium. It's just a tiny silver box that has such an insane number of alien and distant sounds inside. Totally bonkers.

Conversion

One of my friends just called this track the "digital sprinkler" track.

Sisters

This track is actually really old. I think I wrote it in 2011. Its gone through many many permutations but the vibe has always been the same. I am trying to dig up an older version that is way more clubby and noisy.

Cloakmode

This was another one that basically just started with tom drums and then a lot of other stuff happened. Similar to Bless, I would play the parts of the track and things just kept getting stuck to it and it ended up sort of gooey and noisy.

Screen Presence

I had actually written this beat for a weird cover of a Childish Gambino track that I thought had the most amazing melody. I played it live at the Wassaic Festival last summer and then I added this weird piano line and it seemed to make sense to just pull the beat almost all the way out of it. It seems like a lot of my tracks end up backwards or inside out from where they start…