Track By Track: Tom Hall

Los Angeles-based expat Tom Hall (AXXONN) examines the making of his absorbing new solo album, ‘Many Days End’.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

‘Taken’

There’s something about ‘Taken’ that makes me feel like something is leaving. The sequence of someone or something’s soul departing its physical body. This is not in a morbid fashion; a joyful journey to somewhere else.

‘Traveling 1000 Miles to Nowhere’

This track is made up of only four to six loops played repeatedly. If I remember correctly, these loops originally stemmed from my trusty Nord Lead 2. Slowly these are manipulated throughout the piece, building and destroying, overdriving and subtly tweaking using a number of personally-made effects involving granular processing.

‘Breaking Old’

I really like making these kind of crystalised type sounds that you’ll start to hear early on in this track, layering in huge overdriven bass and a nice accompanying melody somewhere in the middle. This track really has a beginning, middle and end, generally only distinguished through volume. These tracks hold a lot of emotion for me; a time where I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be in Los Angeles, Australia or somewhere else. ‘Breaking Old’ really is about letting go of old ideals and moving onto the new: burying them, killing them off, just forgetting them.

‘Sustained Relief’

Like a new life emerging. A time-lapse video of a seedling emerging over the space of weeks would really fit this. Well, that’s what I imagine. 2:17 is a spot where I really feel this piece exceeds; the bass line folds in nicely with the overdriven organ with the layered melody on top. I like how this piece winds down to a very subdued ending.

‘Not Existing Before’

There’s a number of field recordings layered in with this piece. The synthesised sounds themselves were generated using field recordings in granular-based digital synths, millions of micro sounds all being played back at the same time. A fascination of mine since childhood is controlled destruction. For example, setting fire to a certain part of bush land and trying to contain it within a certain area. I wasn’t very good at doing that and thankfully have now turned to doing this with sound. There’s a lot of fire in this track.

‘Fall into Dark’

For me this is one of the standout tracks from this album. I just love the melody and I remember almost to the day when and where I was when I came up with it. I wouldn’t change anything about it. It seems to make me feel joyful and sorrowful at the same time and really reminds me of the time my grandfather, Hilary Hall, passed away. He was humble and quiet yet with time revealed so many layers. His passing was terrible but at the same time so joyful; our family came together and many great stories were shared about him. I’ll never forget.

‘Mother’s Black Tears’

Like a lot of my work, this piece consists of overdriven sounds. It’s also the only track from the album that was played out live a number of times. The whole piece came together one night when I was just improvising in the studio on my Moog LP, which is how most of this starts, and I accidentally hit a switcher that engaged my Nord Lead 2 at the same time via a midi link, it completely blew out the speakers but sounded huge. I immediately jumped to the computer and just pressed record whilst playing over and over. The signal was purely being hard limited via the signal chain with nothing more than an engaged ProCo Rat pedal.

The first time I played it live was on a bill with a bunch of metal bands in Hollywood. It’s always funny to see the audience’s faces when rather than a three/four-piece band get up to play, there’s one guy and a few synths. I opened with ‘Mother’s Black Tears’ and for the rest of the show I had their attention.

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‘Many Days End’ is out now through Sonoptik.