London-based digital musician Danny L Harle has at all times been pushed by a easy, defining mission assertion: to make music that sounds the best way he feels. Having cultivated his personal distinctive palette for effectively over a decade, spanning all the things from hardcore to rave, pop and all the things in between, his sound stays just about unimaginable to pigeonhole.
Harle’s career-long dedication to eclecticism has typically manifested itself in formidable visible world-building, too. Following a decade of digital maximalism via his affiliation with the confounding digital label PC Music, his 2021 album Harlecore developed from a one-off native pub night time into a world rave model. In response to lockdown, the mission was finally reimagined as a digital interactive membership atmosphere, developed alongside VR artists Workforce Rolfes. Now he’s getting ready to step out of the trimmings of digital environs and into the bodily world.
‘The helpful factor about Harlecore was the truth that it was a set in this sort of fantasy atmosphere,’ he muses. ‘I used to be supposedly displaying the place the music was being carried out in that… Right here, there’s perhaps barely extra of an emphasis on photos of an imagined strategy of the making of the music as effectively, however at all times with an emphasis on a crucial abstractness and atmospheric storytelling, moderately than world constructing.’
Half a decade later, Harle has unleashed Cerulean, the album he considers to be his true debut – a voyage into sprawling sonic landscapes the place speaker-blowing bass and euphoric trance collide with classical harmonies and tactile sound design. To that finish, it’s very a lot a Danny L Harle mission, not least due to its stark, putting visible parts – even when the music comes first.
‘Quite a lot of the methods by which I made this album have been a really concerted effort to not be high-concept,’ he explains. ‘I sat down and simply made the music I wished to listen to. The album in its completed state can be my manifesto for music, actually. Something visible would come after that.’
What did comply with, nonetheless, was a mission that embodies the physicality of that music – a dreamscape, of types, constructed from and impressed by sculpture, decaying sea forts and the unusual, lonely mechanics of video video games. It’s each bit as meticulous and regarded as what got here earlier than, with the identical eager sense of playfulness that underpins all the things he touches.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of XL Recordings)
On the centre of Cerulean is art work from Yuma Burgess, which sees the sculptor and designer remodeling Harle’s homey recording studio at The Premises in London into one thing extra harking back to a spaceship’s management room. Maybe most impressively, the quilt is not a digital render; it’s a bodily set constructed by hand inside a church in Dunfermline, Scotland the place Burgess lives and works. Having not too long ago relocated from London – a transfer he recommends to any sculptor in want of space for storing – the church turned the one place the place a bodily construct of this scale may conceivably occur.
‘I inform everybody to only go and purchase a church in Scotland, as a result of they’re simply insanely reasonably priced,’ Burgess jests. ‘I spent a 12 months visiting random church buildings in Scotland, which was a enjoyable factor to do in itself. Each time I did, I at all times requested who else was , simply out of curiosity and very often it will be different sculptors – particularly sculptors from London.’
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of Yuma)
‘It’s nearly like the image existed earlier than we took the image,’ Harle provides. ‘We would by no means actually collaborated earlier than, however he’d labored with Caroline Polachek, a frequent collaborator of mine. He came to visit and simply knew all my references… I had the concept for the quilt in a flash, and defined it to him.’
After a single cellphone name adopted by a couple of references, Burgess returned with a digital portray on his iPad that completely encapsulated Harle’s imaginative and prescient.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of Yuma)
‘I advised to Danny that he simply come up for a few days to do the shoot,’ Burgess explains. ‘I had a couple of month and a half to chip away on the set. It was only a bit extra relaxed than renting a studio for 2 days and panicking.’
The outcome was a three-by-three metre dice populated with an array of discovered ephemera, largely constructed from scratch or salvaged from the church itself. Burgess even repurposed a wood font that sits in entrance of Harle on the quilt.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of Yuma)
‘It was a humorous course of and I’ve actually by no means finished something prefer it,’ Burgess says. ‘I often simply make a one-off singular object and I do not actually do set design, so this was a bit totally different to what I am used to – simply happening eBay and public sale homes. We have been approaching vintage furnishings locations props for movie and stuff. As time drew on, I realised that there was fairly a little bit of stuff that suited the vibe on the church.’
Desperate to complement Burgess’ visuals, Harle and photographer Ronan Park sought out places to shoot that regarded like portals into one other world. Impressed by certainly one of Park’s pictures – a shot of the Matterhorn taken from a airplane window – the pair set off in the hunt for decaying sea forts off the UK coast – liminal areas which are actually collapsing into the ocean.
‘They’re extremely harmful and it is very exhausting to constitution boats to get to them,’ he states. ‘And that is the place principally the entire visible materials was created, aside from the quilt shoot, which was constructed within Yuma’s church. These places actually form of resonated with what I used to be fascinated with.’
Harle additionally cites the literary affect of writer Suzanna Clark’s Piranesi, a meditative journey into human nature, which shortly turned obligatory studying for all of his collaborators.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of XL Recordings)
‘I do assume it is the perfect guide I’ve ever learn,’ he enthuses. ‘It simply actually appeared to hit on one thing that was completely excellent in relation to the album. It entails this island within the sea that is full of those marble sculptures which are form of created by the human creativeness, nevertheless it’s additionally then a spot that you would be able to occupy and get stranded there. I discovered that to be a very attention-grabbing idea.’
In the meantime, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker served as a serious affect on the mission as an entire, each thematically and within the methods by which the director was pressured to reshoot the film on a shoestring funds, which finally cemented its popularity as a masterpiece.
‘Once you’re pressured to do one thing actually shortly or on a low funds, it typically produces a greater outcome,’ he posits. ‘It simply forces spontaneity and resourcefulness.’
Shirking typical notions for music movies, Cerulean arrives accompanied by a visible companion directed by Paris-based filmmaker and visible artist Lillian Hardoineau. Throughout its 30-minute runtime, Harle performs towards the backdrop of a fantastical, nautical rave base, surrounded by a curious solid of contemplative ravers, feline companions and masked antagonists.
‘Lillian’s method to mild, grading and his digital camera work was similar to an absolute no-brainer when it comes to selecting somebody,’ Harle states. ‘There’s such a way of emotion simply in the best way he movies a panorama, and that simply labored completely with what I used to be making an attempt to do.’
Cinematic and literary allusions apart, Harle initially pitched his concept for the live-action visuals with one very particular cultural reference in thoughts – Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke’s notoriously uneasy Boiler Room set.
‘The factor that I discovered fairly inspiring about it’s that everybody’s having their very own response to the music,’ Harle observes. ‘It is not this collective factor, however there’s nonetheless an total ambiance of positivity. I simply assume that is a very pretty factor, however I used to be thinking about a extra euphoric, melancholic model of that.’
Fittingly, in Harle’s imagined world, a rave is a spot the place one individual is likely to be dancing, whereas the individual subsequent to them is crying or misplaced in thought. It’s a collective of people, all having their very own non-public expertise in a shared house.
One in every of Cerulean’s most potent but curious influences is a gameplay mechanic within the Darkish Souls online game collection whereby gamers catch glimpses of different individuals struggling via the identical environments. Unable to speak, they’re nonetheless aware of one another’s presence.
‘This ‘alone collectively’ factor may be very evocative,’ Harle explains. ‘You see these phantoms of different individuals who have gone on the identical mission… everybody’s had this expertise of taking place the identical path, however in a different way, and on their very own.’
Harle’s fascination with gaming’s capability to encourage communal experiences extends past merely enjoying them too. Throughout a gathering with legendary sport director Hideo Kojima, with whom Harle collaborated on Caroline Polachek’s music ‘On The Seaside’ for the Demise Stranding 2 soundtrack, their dialog centered much less on know-how and extra on human connection. Harle was struck by Kojima’s real need to make use of his craft to assist individuals.
‘I wished to get fairly nerdy about online game mechanics, however he bypassed something technical,’ Harle states. ‘He spoke about how there must be a hope for humanity in these video games. We spoke about how in The Exorcist, for instance, he loves the message from the preacher: ‘I’m an grownup and I’ll defend you as a toddler.’ To him, that may be a very profound assertion to make in that movie… He isn’t a form of game-obsessive making video games – he is making an attempt to assist individuals in the one approach he is aware of how, seemingly, and that’s such a cool approach of doing it.’
Equally, a refusal to comply with any form of typical blueprint is finally what makes the world of Cerulean so compelling. Whether or not he’s chartering boats to rusting sea forts or constructing interstellar cockpits in a church, Harle’s work is all a couple of DIY obsession together with his personal particular model of unorthodox magnificence.
‘I’m simply so concerned in the best way I do issues and the best way my collaborators do issues,’ he admits. ‘I’m not conscious of what’s regular in any respect. I don’t assume there’s a ‘regular’ with it. Each time I write with a brand new individual, they’re like, “I’ve by no means written music like this earlier than.” I’ve simply obtained fairly a selected course of for all the things – principally studying tips on how to make what I wish to hear and see on this planet. And it is perhaps barely unorthodox at instances.’
In a panorama typically dominated by slick, digital perfection, Cerulean stands out as a monument to that sense of creativity. In spite of everything, essentially the most evocative worlds aren’t at all times inbuilt a pc. Generally, they’re hammered collectively in a Scottish church, or found within the ruins of a collapsing sea fort – one ‘alone collectively’ second at a time.
Cerulean by Danny L Harle is out now.
