Handing over the mic to artists/musicians who break down their new albums track by track/share the thought process behind the creation. Today we’ll hear from Andy Schiaffino aka Body/Negative, non-binary multi-instrumentalist and producer based in LA. His debut album Fragments is out now on Track Number Records.
Figure 8 is a track that my co-producer (Dylan Gardner of Communicant) had showed me! He used to play it all the time on his piano, and I thought it was such a creepy sounding but delicate song, and I was so in love with the melody. I was always under the assumption that he had written it, but eventually I found out it was Schoolhouse Rock and that made it so much creepier; and of course I love Elliott Smith‘s version of it too. My intention for the cover was trying to see how it would sound if The Caretaker and William Basinski had written it.
Letterhead is a song in which I’m quite literally reciting a letter I had written to a friend, where I was confessing my love for them. This is the only song on the record that retained its working title; no other name felt right!
Catholic Guilt is dedicated to a few people I’ve lost in my life, and is also about just growing up being forced into religion while not really believing any of it from a really young age, as well as the existential crisis you experience after losing a parent when you’re a child. The poem i’m reciting was written when I was a teenager and was reworked for this record.
Between Spaces was a song that was created out of me experimenting with delayed piano loops I had recorded using this beautiful upright piano that was in a room I was renting in MacArthur Park at the time. I had a lot of fun producing this one!
With You is a very special song on the record. I actually wrote it as I was playing a livestream set on my Instagram. I thought it was really cool that the people who were tuned in got to see the process behind how I write a song – but basically it was just a vocal loop that was made in my little Boss loop station that I added guitar to, and it just turned into its own little world. With You is definitely another album favorite for me.
Safe As Houses is a little guitar riff that my friend Kyle Bray from the LA band Prized Pig (amongst many other projects) wrote while he was hanging out at my house right at the start of quarantine. I just kind of played around with the recording a bunch within my DAW and chopped it up and threw a bunch of different plug-ins on it and made it into what it is now. This one was inspired by some psychedelic records my co-producer Dylan had showed me while we were first working on Fragments.
The Big Sleep is actually a rework of Safe As Houses, that myself and my friend Nick Ventura from Froth and Numb.er worked on during a remote co write. The song is about suicide and the strange relationship I have with the idea of death.
Discover more from I Heart Noise
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.