London-based digital musician Danny L Harle has all the time been pushed by a easy, defining mission assertion: to make music that sounds the best way he feels. Having cultivated his personal distinctive palette for nicely over a decade, spanning all the pieces from hardcore to rave, pop and all the pieces in between, his sound stays nearly not possible to pigeonhole.
Harle’s career-long dedication to eclecticism has usually manifested itself in formidable visible world-building, too. Following a decade of digital maximalism by means of his affiliation with the confounding digital label PC Music, his 2021 album Harlecore advanced from a one-off native pub evening into a world rave model. In response to lockdown, the mission was in the end reimagined as a digital interactive membership surroundings, developed alongside VR artists Group Rolfes. Now he’s getting ready to step out of the trimmings of digital environs and into the bodily world.
‘The helpful factor about Harlecore was the truth that it was a set in this sort of fantasy surroundings,’ he muses. ‘I used to be supposedly exhibiting the place the music was being carried out in that… Right here, there’s possibly barely extra of an emphasis on photographs of an imagined technique of the making of the music as nicely, however all the time with an emphasis on a mandatory abstractness and atmospheric storytelling, somewhat than world constructing.’
Half a decade later, Harle has unleashed Cerulean, the album he considers to be his true debut – a voyage into sprawling sonic landscapes the place speaker-blowing bass and euphoric trance collide with classical harmonies and tactile sound design. To that finish, it’s very a lot a Danny L Harle mission, not least due to its stark, hanging visible parts – even when the music comes first.
‘Numerous the methods wherein I made this album had been a really concerted effort to not be high-concept,’ he explains. ‘I sat down and simply made the music I needed to listen to. The album in its completed state can be my manifesto for music, actually. Something visible would come after that.’
What did observe, nonetheless, was a mission that embodies the physicality of that music – a dreamscape, of types, constructed from and impressed by sculpture, decaying sea forts and the unusual, lonely mechanics of video video games. It’s each bit as meticulous and thought of as what got here earlier than, with the identical eager sense of playfulness that underpins all the pieces he touches.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of XL Recordings)
On the centre of Cerulean is art work from Yuma Burgess, which sees the sculptor and designer remodeling Harle’s homey recording studio at The Premises in London into one thing extra harking back to a spaceship’s management room. Maybe most impressively, the duvet is not a digital render; it’s a bodily set constructed by hand inside a church in Dunfermline, Scotland the place Burgess lives and works. Having just lately relocated from London – a transfer he recommends to any sculptor in want of space for storing – the church grew to become the one place the place a bodily construct of this scale may conceivably occur.
‘I inform everybody to only go and purchase a church in Scotland, as a result of they’re simply insanely reasonably priced,’ Burgess jests. ‘I spent a 12 months visiting random church buildings in Scotland, which was a enjoyable factor to do in itself. Each time I did, I all the time requested who else was , simply out of curiosity and very often it could be different sculptors – particularly sculptors from London.’
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of Yuma)
‘It’s virtually like the image existed earlier than we took the image,’ Harle provides. ‘We would by no means actually collaborated earlier than, however he’d labored with Caroline Polachek, a frequent collaborator of mine. He came visiting and simply knew all my references… I had the concept for the duvet in a flash, and defined it to him.’
After a single cellphone name adopted by a number of references, Burgess returned with a digital portray on his iPad that completely encapsulated Harle’s imaginative and prescient.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of Yuma)
‘I recommended to Danny that he simply come up for a few days to do the shoot,’ Burgess explains. ‘I had a few month and a half to chip away on the set. It was only a bit extra relaxed than renting a studio for 2 days and panicking.’
The consequence was a three-by-three metre dice populated with an array of discovered ephemera, largely constructed from scratch or salvaged from the church itself. Burgess even repurposed a picket font that sits in entrance of Harle on the duvet.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of Yuma)
‘It was a humorous course of and I’ve truthfully by no means accomplished something prefer it,’ Burgess says. ‘I often simply make a one-off singular object and I do not actually do set design, so this was a bit completely different to what I am used to – simply happening eBay and public sale homes. We had been approaching vintage furnishings locations props for movie and stuff. As time drew on, I realised that there was fairly a little bit of stuff that suited the vibe on the church.’
Desirous to complement Burgess’ visuals, Harle and photographer Ronan Park sought out areas to shoot that regarded like portals into one other world. Impressed by one in all Park’s pictures – a shot of the Matterhorn taken from a airplane window – the pair set off looking for decaying sea forts off the UK coast – liminal areas which can be actually collapsing into the ocean.
‘They’re extremely harmful and it’s extremely exhausting to constitution boats to get to them,’ he states. ‘And that is the place mainly all the visible materials was created, aside from the duvet shoot, which was constructed within Yuma’s church. These areas actually sort of resonated with what I used to be fascinated about.’
Harle additionally cites the literary affect of writer Suzanna Clark’s Piranesi, a meditative journey into human nature, which shortly grew to become obligatory studying for all of his collaborators.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of XL Recordings)
‘I do suppose it is one of the best e-book I’ve ever learn,’ he enthuses. ‘It simply actually appeared to hit on one thing that was completely good in relation to the album. It includes this island within the sea that is full of those marble sculptures which can be form of created by the human creativeness, but it surely’s additionally then a spot that you may occupy and get stranded there. I discovered that to be a extremely attention-grabbing idea.’
In the meantime, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker served as a significant affect on the mission as an entire, each thematically and within the methods wherein the director was pressured to reshoot the film on a shoestring funds, which in the end cemented its status as a masterpiece.
‘If you’re pressured to do one thing actually shortly or on a low funds, it usually produces a greater consequence,’ he posits. ‘It simply forces spontaneity and resourcefulness.’
Shirking typical notions for music movies, Cerulean arrives accompanied by a visible companion directed by Paris-based filmmaker and visible artist Lillian Hardoineau. Throughout its 30-minute runtime, Harle performs towards the backdrop of a fantastical, nautical rave base, surrounded by a curious forged of contemplative ravers, feline companions and masked antagonists.
‘Lillian’s method to gentle, grading and his digicam work was similar to an absolute no-brainer when it comes to selecting somebody,’ Harle states. ‘There’s such a way of emotion simply in the best way he movies a panorama, and that simply labored completely with what I used to be making an attempt to do.’
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Cinematic and literary allusions apart, Harle initially pitched his thought for the live-action visuals with one very particular cultural reference in thoughts – Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke’s notoriously uneasy Boiler Room set.
‘The factor that I discovered fairly inspiring about it’s that everybody’s having their very own response to the music,’ Harle observes. ‘It is not this collective factor, however there’s nonetheless an general ambiance of positivity. I simply suppose that is a extremely beautiful factor, however I used to be concerned about a extra euphoric, melancholic model of that.’
Fittingly, in Harle’s imagined world, a rave is a spot the place one particular person may be dancing, whereas the particular person subsequent to them is crying or misplaced in thought. It’s a collective of people, all having their very own non-public expertise in a shared area.
One among Cerulean’s most potent but curious influences is a gameplay mechanic within the Darkish Souls online game sequence whereby gamers catch glimpses of different folks struggling by means of the identical environments. Unable to speak, they’re however conscious about one another’s presence.
‘This ‘alone collectively’ factor could be very evocative,’ Harle explains. ‘You see these phantoms of different individuals who have gone on the identical mission… everybody’s had this expertise of taking place the identical path, however otherwise, and on their very own.’
Harle’s fascination with gaming’s capability to encourage communal experiences extends past merely enjoying them too. Throughout a gathering with legendary sport director Hideo Kojima, with whom Harle collaborated on Caroline Polachek’s track ‘On The Seaside’ for the Dying Stranding 2 soundtrack, their dialog targeted much less on know-how and extra on human connection. Harle was struck by Kojima’s real need to make use of his craft to assist folks.
‘I needed to get fairly nerdy about online game mechanics, however he bypassed something technical,’ Harle states. ‘He spoke about how there must be a hope for humanity in these video games. We spoke about how in The Exorcist, for instance, he loves the message from the preacher: ‘I’m an grownup and I’ll defend you as a toddler.’ To him, that could be a very profound assertion to make in that movie… He isn’t a sort of game-obsessive making video games – he is making an attempt to assist folks in the one approach he is aware of how, seemingly, and that’s such a cool approach of doing it.’
Equally, a refusal to observe any sort of typical blueprint is in the end what makes the world of Cerulean so compelling. Whether or not he’s chartering boats to rusting sea forts or constructing interstellar cockpits in a church, Harle’s work is all a few DIY obsession along with his personal particular model of unorthodox magnificence.
‘I’m simply so concerned in the best way I do issues and the best way my collaborators do issues,’ he admits. ‘I’m not conscious of what’s regular in any respect. I don’t suppose there’s a ‘regular’ with it. Each time I write with a brand new particular person, they’re like, “I’ve by no means written music like this earlier than.” I’ve simply acquired fairly a particular course of for all the pieces – mainly studying methods to make what I need to hear and see on the earth. And it is possibly barely unorthodox at occasions.’
In a panorama usually dominated by slick, digital perfection, Cerulean stands out as a monument to that sense of creativity. In any case, probably the most evocative worlds aren’t all the time inbuilt a pc. Typically, they’re hammered collectively in a Scottish church, or found within the ruins of a collapsing sea fort – one ‘alone collectively’ second at a time.
Cerulean by Danny L Harle is out now.
Supply: Wallpaper
