Artists
Album Info
Release Date: 2022-03-18Label: Kicking Ink Recordings
It's been seven (seven!) years since I last made an album. So why are we here talking about a new Mr Fogg record in 2022?For years I didn’t write or record a single musical idea. And I really didn't know how I felt about the first three Mr Fogg albums.
But every now and then somebody would message me to tell me they been listening to my songs and to tell me how much they enjoyed them. And eventually I plucked up the courage to listen to the music and realised that some of it was, actually, you know, pretty good.
So I started recording snippets of ideas on my phone, with the half idea that I would get around to making something of them one day. Rhythms tapped on tables, or melodies that came into my head as I walked down the street. And after three or four years of doing that, I realised I had a database of fifty or sixty song ideas, all recorded this way on the phone.
Then the pandemic hit, and, like so many artists, I found myself using music to make sense of how I was feeling. That made me finally finish a song for the first time in six or seven years. And then once I had started, I didn’t stop until I had a record.
Sonically, In Paradise is almost the opposite of the last album. With Youth, I was bored of drums. I felt like every beat I heard on the radio or made myself was a copy of something else, and I couldn’t find a way to break out of that. With this record, I wanted to find a way to represent the influence that dance music had on me in the early days – in techno clubs in Ibiza, underground drum’n’bass nights in Leeds, or learning to DJ.
It's also the first music in fifteen years that I have made completely at home. At first the lockdown prevented me going to my studio, but then it became part of the character of the album. You can hear real life bleeding into the songs from the original phone recordings and my family inserting themselves into the process.
It's a good feeling to be excited about making music again. I hope you enjoy the results.
credits
released March 18, 2022
Written, performed and produced by Mr Fogg
Mastered by John Davis
℗ & © 2020 Kicking Ink Recordings
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