Singled Out: Ways in Waves' Gliese

Ways in Waves just released the new single "Gliese", and to celebrate we asked the project's multi-instrumentalist and music producer leader Brian Raine to tell us about the track. Here is the story:

Gliese, like many of my songs, was completed several times before I was actually happy enough with it to finalize the mix. I know that a lot of artists resist this kind of process... and admittedly, I do as well. Oftentimes, if a song idea doesn't immediately captivate me and take on a life of its own, I move on. But with Gliese... I just always knew that the core of the song had the potential to move me, and I think that's probably the more accurate barometer for which ideas are worth pursuing and which aren't. So it's a unique song because I've lived with it for years, I've performed it in its many versions and have had the chance to reflect upon what it says and how it says it.

Anyway...

Before I even began writing the song, I was doing a group project in university where for one reason or another I was looking up potential habitable solar systems other than our own. One in particular caught my attention: the star Gliese 581. It has several planets around it in the habitable zone which are - oddly - tidally locked. With permanent day on one side and permanent night on the other, I imagined what kind of life would develop on such a planet, and what it would be like to develop human colonies there if life on earth became unbearable. The core of this fantasy is space travel, but more specifically: escapism - the myth that we can escape to the stars before our planet dies.

I iterated on this idea over the years, and musically I began playing around with Ableton live's session view (I was years out of uni at this point), which allows you to essentially use your own musical ideas as material to re-arrange in real time. This began as an attempt to re-produce minimalist composition techniques via pseudo-acoustic sounding mallet synths. Eventually I thought of how the future of the human race may be nostalgic for this particular period of time, as we are with the eras that preceded us.

Years later, when revisiting the lyrics of this song, I found that I no longer carried the same optimism (or naiveté) regarding space travel. It seems that the people who are pushing for it are - more often than not - some of the worst people imaginable, whose greed is directly contributing to the death of our planet. And so rather than scrapping all the lyrics and re-writing them, I adapted the ones I had to be from the perspective of a future society that's justifying its actions, twisting its own history to suit a particular narrative. And then I added the bridge, which is my favourite part of the song. It's from the perspective of the present, pleading with listeners to avoid the future I'm describing.

Finally, I re-did a lot of the synth layers with my modular synth. I found that the software synths lacked grit and presence, and so I programmed the sequences into my modular system and patched that into two different guitar amps - one tube, one solid state - with a variety of pedals in front of each one. I did dozens of takes of the exact same lines so that I could change the mic position around, the pedals, the modular patch itself... then I imported all of those takes into Ableton and made a collage of all of these vastly different sounds. Overall it sounds more aggressive and more alien, which is the point.

Hopefully on my next album I can find some more hope in space, right now I think I need to focus on what's happening around me, to the people I love, to the planet I love. I can't imagine making art about anything else at this moment."

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and learn more here

News > Ways in Waves