The main thing I took from listening to Moor Mother is the very eerie ambient tone that the songs can have. I wanted to keep this ambience whilst also having punchy drums to drive home the message.
I began with making the drums, using a preset drum kit that I had made in the past and added heavy distortion to it. I then added the speech; I used the “I have a dream” speech by Martin Luther King Jr and began chopping the sample up, taking some powerful lines that still had some quality to them. I then processed them, using the outro of DANCING WITHOUT MOVING by Quadeca as a reference for the static, radio effect I wanted.
Once i had made this effect using heavy compression, EQ and effects such as Deelay (a unique delay plugin) and bitcrushers I wanted to use the cheers heard in the speech, so I put them through a shaper plugin to add a pumping rhythm at the end of the loop. I then made a reese bass by lowing the pitch of a saw wave and raising the unison. I cut off the top and added some white noise to fill it out with heavy distortion to heavily saturate it. I then added a very glitched out piano that is only almost following the beat to give a weird, uncanny valley-like sound. I made this by putting half-time and codec on the piano to crush the sound into a coherent yet glitchy mess. To finish it up, I added a quiet violin that is played in such a way where it mostly can’t be heard until a very resonant frequency is brought up, making it very noticeable.
This way of working really put emphasis on the drums creating not only the groove, but the vibe (which are normally left to the chords and sound design I do).
Leave a Reply