I released an EDM album during lockdown
Eleven tracks made in a spare room in Woodbridge on a borrowed copy of Ableton and a MIDI keyboard with a dead F sharp.
The album is called Vestibule. The tracks are named after the B-roads around Woodbridge, because I could not think of anything and the B1438 goes past the end of my road.
It is not, if I am honest with myself, EDM. It is four-to-the-floor at 122 BPM with a lot of reverb on everything, which is what you produce when you have learned production entirely from YouTube and have never once heard the material on speakers, because it is a spare room in a terrace and there is a man called Derek through the wall.
The dead F# is audible on three tracks. I worked around it for the first eight and then stopped bothering.
The numbers
1,114 streams across all platforms, of which I would put roughly four hundred down to me checking it was still there.
One review, on a blog that covers about two hundred self-released records a month, which described it as “competent and quite long”. Both true.
And then, eleven months later and with no warning, an email: a chain of gyms in Latvia wanted to license P4 for in-club use. Thirty-eight euros. I signed it immediately and did not negotiate.
So somewhere in Riga there is a room where people are doing squats to a track I made about a B-road in Suffolk, and the F sharp still does not work.