My music project 🙂
When I was about 17 years old, I got my hands on FL Studio. I am sat in my room, at my desk under my loft bed, and I’ve got a PC and a pair of decently serving speakers (specifically, originally a pair of Meridian M30s). It should make sense for me to try and work out how people engineer things.
It seems funny to me now, but at that point, I had never confronted the technical side to sound, so it’s no surprise that my first attempts to lay any tracks down and construct an actual melody, beat, recording, whatever… it was a new frontier, those we so often find ourselves embarking upon.
I’ve been trawling through all my old MP3s (I luckily still have everything I ever made).. god, they’re so bad. It’s always important to reflect like this, because it reminds you that you can’t get good at things overnight.
That was almost a decade ago, since I started on whatever this quest is, and with whatever the goal was – which maybe I’m starting to lose track of a little bit. So, here’s a reminder of that, I suppose more to myself than to anybody else observing in on my little world.
Since I began all that time ago, I’ve been trying to work out the secrets, learning all I could about the process… how do people make songs that sound so tight and clean? How do they purposefully muddy it and add grit without ruining the overall landscape of the sound? It would take me a very long time to work it out, and in order to do that, you have to fail, and you have to be cringe.
I went with the name ‘Kapritsa’ as a moniker – it’s my mother’s maiden name, which I think is naturally quite sentimental to me (I’ll talk about my Mum some other time – love you Mum <3). I find it quite hard to now reflect on the songs that I made at the start, my gut tells me they’re terrible – and that’s okay, because ultimately, they serve a greater purpose. You wouldn’t rewrite the start of the story when you’re so far deep in, it just wouldn’t make sense.
Nonetheless, there are a couple of projects I put out that I’ve since deleted from the internet. Maybe it’s a bit of shame, most likely it’s because I outgrew the songs I made in some Toy Story-esque way. Idk.
I started with a song called ‘One Thing’. It was my first time actually recording anything properly, so it’s still quite of its time: muddy vocals, not much musical variation, less-than-preferrable singing. This continued with the two projects I followed up with, ‘KEP’ and ‘KLP’. Don’t get me wrong, the ideas were good – I was listening to a lot of 1975 at the time and taking in their slightly electronic-fused production approach, which I think helped me greatly. But ultimately, I was aiming quite high. I think I jumped the gun on them, and since then I’ve been focusing more on making every song just that slight bit better.
Of course, I have to mention my found love for extremely hazy, cloud-rap adjacent production. Big early inspirations were the likes of Clams Casino, Drain Gang, and so on. Originally, my background in music had consisted of a lot of classical, then EDM and hip-hop phases, but I think past all this, the greatest motivator was really finding a style that I liked to make, and hearing music that forced me to stop listening instantly and just entirely unload my brain from all the inspiration. I definitely have SoundCloud to thank for that mainly.
Either way, I know I’m having fun – that much is true when I look back at the old files, the goofy names, and all the photos I took when I was finding the sounds I wanted to hear in my head. Nowadays, I tend to be better at it, or at the very least quicker at it; I just love the prospect that all these people in the world, they’re all creating, and stamping their mark on something they crafted. What a pleasure it is to do that.
If you want to see the full range of the music I’m proud of (after having the Eureka moment of realising I was finally making art I actually liked) the main hub for this all is on my Bandcamp. And I will be updating that page in perpetuity – because I know I’ll always be making more music. That will never change. Like Labi Siffre said, “you don’t have to be near me to know that I’m singing” – and I think for all of us, that statement is even more true than it’s explicit interpretation. We’ll always be leaving our stamps on the world in some form.
So please feel free to browse all things Kapritsa! I love sharing the music, even if nobody listens, and I never want to make crazy money off my own thing here. Speaking of which, I’m going to sign this off with a bunch of promo codes for the most recent song I put on Bandcamp. Try them out while they’re still available and redeem a free copy at the link below if you fancy it.
~alex
> REDEEM BITTERSWEET CODES HERE <
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