Verse Chorus Verse: Precipice - Indi

Indi, aka Indira Force, gives a track-by-track breakdown of her new album.

 

Verse Chorus Verse sees local artists break down the stories behind their music. For the latest in the series, we asked Indi, aka Indira Force, to give us a tour of her new album Precipice.

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'Demeter'
This one is about as close to a pop song as i get on this album. It's sort of a love song to nature and I named it after the Greek goddess of harvest and the Earth's fertility - I guess because I was doing a Greek mythology paper at the time. I also like personifying nature as a this all-surrounding female figure whether it be Gaia or Demeter or whatever.

All the sounds I made are intentionally like walking alongside trees when the wind is blowing through their leaves; it's all scattered and rustling and crackling. I recorded my vocals in a tunnel that had this super long reverb but also this drip, so you can hear the water dripping right before the second chorus. Also, I listened to a podcast once which compared children playing to scientists. They basically said that playing is the way that children test the difference between what is real and what is imaginary, and how they form an understanding about what works in the real world. that's why I wrote 'A Child's A Scientist'. 

'Cair paravel'
This is the last track to be recorded on the album. I wanted something that captured an ancient sort of time and I always imagined this song with someone telling an old folklore story over the top of it. This style of music comes very instinctively to me and I feel like melodies like this have existed for hundreds of years from a time when people still believed in fairies and giants. It might be overly whimsical, but it is also an homage to my ancestry. 

'Precipice'
Once I had written this, I knew I was going to write an album with the same feeling and instruments. It was the first thing I had ever written with live strings and it was such an "ah-ha" moment. the whole thing had all this dissonance and tension and it was scarier and bigger than anything I had previously created.

Anita Clark (Motte) had to play the same notes over and over and over on her violin in loads of layers; I think we did about eight layers of each note in the track and it was all done by her. She has this incredible technique and sound to her playing which is singular and eerie, and it fills up the track with strange emotion.

'Airportal'
This track sounds dark, but I actually wrote the beat in an overlit airport on my Korg Volca sampler when our flight was delayed. It explores this idea of an inner world and i like to think of the mind as being this expansive physical world. 

'Tablelands'
The original name for this was "cheesyballadsoundslikefuckinglanadelray".

I am resistant to piano ballads and they have been done before so much, I didn't even want to put this one on the album. My mind was changed by someone close to me saying that they loved it and even the original vocal take (which was just me have improvising into a handheld shur mic) was really special.

It took a long time for me to accept that this song would be on the album, that the album needed something like this as a relief from the clutter. It was the one song i was the most scared to give over to the listeners maybe because it is so stripped back and simple, but maybe also because it shows an aspect of my songwriting that I am ashamed of.

'Woman'

The beat for this track already existed. I live with Matt Gunn (who mixed this album) and we share the same studio. As musicians, are always writing random stuff and then just sort of chucking it under a weird name on the PC and forgetting about it.

I woke up from this strange dream one morning (which had involved meeting a child who was mine and she looked so much like me - it's hard to explain the full dream, it was more like the feeling) but I remembered Matt had this bizarre beat and I literally crawled out of bed over to the computer and sang the exact words/melody into the mic over the beat, and they are identical to how it is final track.

I don't know where that melody even came from. It was the first time since precipice that the idea was coming out faster than I record it. It's so crazy when that happens. this song originally had some full-on cinematic strings at the end but it was too busy with everything else going on and had been giving us headaches when we were mixing it. Once I took the strings out it was like magic, like "Yes! this is exactly how this song should be!"  

'Pith'
This one was so fun to record. i was in Titirangi when I wrote it, staying with my parents. I didn't have much gear up there so i took a single recording of Anita playing an ascending chromatic tremolo scale on her violin and chopped it up and layered it with itself. I was just singing anything that came to my head super up-close to the mic and with the intention of recorded aspects of my voice that I wouldn't usually dare. Then when I came back down to christchurch I was recording three incredible saxophone players for 'Airportal' and 'Woman', and had this thought that they could improvise some free-jazz styled stuff over the track (which was originally called 'composition no. IV'). When we hit record it was like they had been freed from musical constraints and it became a session of catharsis. the whole room was exhilarated.  
 
'Cannibals'
Back in 2013, when i first moved down to Christchurch, I wrote an EP. Before it could be finished, however, the computer i was working on completely died and iIlost all the files except for a couple from 'Cannibals'. It was half-formed and only had the first verse fleshed out - the rest was a mess.

I re-recorded everything three years later - even the synth that had been designed from my own voice - and then came up with the second half which turned out to be all strings. The juxtaposition of the two sections marks a dynamic shift in my composition between those years.

I don't usually like my lyrics, but these ones I like even though I wrote them years ago. I like writing from the perspective of the opposing or evil oppressor in a cynical way. I think the line "cast away your humanity, I'm encouraging apathy" is a good summary of how the current system thrives - then it sounds so pretty at the end.