On a recent Friday night in Manhattan, a waffle truck parked on the corner of 56th and 11th streets was in chaos. An enthusiastic young woman shoves an inflatable giraffe head decorated with red glowing sticks out of one of her truck windows to the music. A security guard tore it up.
Standing in the courtroom car was a grinning Fred Gibson. Fred again..We had an ad-hoc afterparty as a follow-up to the show at Hell’s Kitchen venue, Terminal 5.
“Chaos,” he later gleefully proclaimed an impromptu event, previewing tracks from his third album Actual Life 3 (January 1 – September 9, 2022), which was released on Friday. “Just great.”
‘Actual Life 3’ is the musical culmination that Gibson (Ed Sheeran, BTS, British grime star, Stormzy pop hitmaker) began releasing at the end of 2019. his own work. The result is rich electronica-rooted piano his ballads, wistful nu-his disco his anthems, and the occasional his UK garage his firestarters, all of which can be found on his YouTube, Instagram, his The iPhone camera consists of samples collected from his roll.
A few days after the concert, Gibson — smiling, exuberant, and sometimes docile — rolled up on a bar patio in the West Village and remembered how much Eno needed him when he was experiencing the peak of his commercial success. . He met Eno in one of the artist’s occasional star-studded shows. a cappella gathering As a teenager, he amazed him with his production prowess, which led to Eno (a “withered cliff-pusher”, as Gibson described him), who brought him in as a producer on several of his projects. I was.
“I know Fred calls me a mentor sometimes, but it actually works both ways,” Eno said over the phone. In fact, I’ve never heard anything like this before. He always seems to do it in relation to the community of people around him, the vocals and the ambient sounds.”
Eno was also referring to the basic structure of Fred.. songs. Many tracks begin with Gibson using his one of the thousands of ambient his drones that Eno once gave him. From there, I start working on a digital scrapbook of found footage. Some samples employ familiar voices, moan rap Atlanta superstar, future instagram live freestyle rapper Kodak Black, vocals from calls Most of them are relatively unknown, such as Chicago house DJ Blessed Madonna. They include the stadium worker Gibson joked to after Sheeran’s show, the nightclub audio he recorded on his iPhone, the spoken word poet, and the sudden glimpse while scrolling through various social media feeds. Growing bedroom pop singers include.
Gibson then cuts, distorts, pitch-shifts, stretches or compresses the samples into shimmering cinematic soundscapes, over which he sings in his soft, pleading voice. Some are cavernous, others dense, but they all retain the deep warmth of their handwoven fabric. It’s the ideal foundation for lyrics about too much feeling and not enough that map the thin fault lines that mark the boundaries between love and loss. The result is a track that will have listeners laughing and crying on the dance floor.
Gibson estimates that he has tried thousands of different methods to turn the conversations of strangers into musical pieces. “We always try to create as many empty seats as possible to prevent accidents from happening,” he said. “But to be honest, it was a lot of work at first,” he added. “I felt like I was twisting their minds.”
One track was created from footage of a young Toronto-based performance artist named Sabrina Benaim performing her work.explain depression to mother“It then expresses its deepest condolences.”Sabrina (I’m the Party)“
The source material is a full-fledged confessional that marks the vicissitudes of anxiety and depression, clearly not complemented by the beats of a successful pop producer. “I was insecure about everything I put on these people,” Gibson said. “I felt like I was being projected onto them.”
Speaking by phone from Toronto, Benaim recalled hearing the finished track for the first time after Gibson reached out on Instagram. “It was the wildest thing,” she said, laughing. I was very careful not to get it dirty.
Romy Croft — singer-songwriter for xx who used Gibson to release her debut solo single,lifetime– worked in much the same way as Gibson and Hi on the song “Lights Out” released earlier this year. Croft gave Gibson his xx demo, but it never materialized. A year later, Gibson said he did something with it.
As she explained in a recent call, she was consequently fed up with dance tracks that mixed laser squelches, piano chords, lilting beats and Croft’s wistful vocals. “He had just breathed new life into it,” Croft said. For her, the record reflects the thematic connections in his work.
Eno said he finds many of Gibson’s samples “tender and beautiful.” “I think it’s a beautiful combination to combine that with the energetic chaos of his music,” he added. “It’s kind of a romance in a vortex of emotions.”
new album It may be the apotheosis of this aesthetic. Gibson’s first two of his LPs, made during and shortly after the pandemic lockdown, concerned the sickness of his close friends and its aftermath, and were often pensive. Indulging. “Actual Life 3” is a sort of unfolding, a more cathartic, cloudy-eyed dance floor moment. Its unexpected collaborators include Kieran Hebden, aka electronic musician and producer Four Tet. He’s known for a kind of dense, protean electronica composition that rarely (if ever) adheres to anything close to the structure of a typical pop song.
“He pulls me in directions that I don’t normally work in,” Hebden said in a recent FaceTime call. Gibson described the song as “great melody and chord sequences elegantly worked out. The work done considerationIt doesn’t always sound ridiculously smooth — there’s nothing super ironic about it.Deeply refreshing, not hidden, not hidden Amazing mystery. “
“But,” Hebden paused. teeth: How come it looks so easy?” He laughed.
After playing the final in a series of then-unreleased songs to a growing crowd at the Waffle Track earlier this month, Gibson played Hebden (one of his pranksters that night). ) to choose the last song. Hebden deliberately looked at him and changed his course. Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA” blared from the speakers. The crowd exploded into verse, and Gibson danced and laughed along. The musicians exited the truck and returned to the packed venue. Another memory of him made on this night will be posted soon for posterity. It can also be the beginning of another song.