MONIQUE MAUREL
- Songwriting -
Rated 'S' for Spooky
Musical Works
Depths of Eden
- EP -
Cold Sun
Cold Sun was my aim to make a song that had a distressing heartbeat type sound for the drums. The thump is close to the club beats I normally do, but I feel like it is far enough removed to work. I wanted the vocals to be haunting, fitting in with some ancient, evil ritual from a dark cult. The synth sequence started slower and was separate, but as I raised the BPM it made far more sense within the song. The vocals were doubled with a pitched down effect, to emphasise the dark vibe and wonkiness of the overall sound. I pictured a black sun waiting to engulf the world for this one, as well as a personified version of time as a biblically accurate angel descending when this was happening, and that is how the lyrics came to be.
Quiet Nothing
Quiet Nothing was my first foray into manipulating samples in Ableton. This one I wanted to develop over time until a heavier climax, mixing the soft and the gritty together. This one I think captured some cool mellotron sounding synths and was definitely a challenge to figure out vocals as everything I did felt overly long. I made the decision to cut the vocals down to two key parts of the song, as scary as that was for me to do, as I thought the sparseness kept tension better and made the song a little more atmospheric after I put a tonne of reverb on it. I tried to make it a little more like a lullaby that just repeats, paired with a telephone / radio style EQ to crunch it up and make it sound further away on top of the reverb.
Thanatos
Thanatos I wanted to be big, epic, and heavy with my nu metal influences in mind. I made the guitar line in Ableton but was unsatisfied about the MIDI sound, so asked for my bandmate in GRAVELLE to play it on a real electric guitar for me. This definitely improved the sound. Additionally, I started with such a layered drum pattern there was no room for anything else, so I had to remove parts to make room, but I was very happy that I did as I think it benefitted from it. Another vocal challenge presented itself when I felt the verses needed to be quieter for dynamics sake, and I was happy with what I did for the chorus so did not want to change that outside of some processing when I came to mix it. So I tried something new - spoken word sections. This felt odd to do, but I enjoyed myself and I was happy with how creepy it made the song. It kind of made me want to get rid of the verses the more layers I did of them, but I just left the song after a while to be what it is.
