Alexander Panos discusses his debut album, Nascent.
Nascent is one of my favorite finds of 2022, an electronic sound collage that’s always in motion, contrasting precious moments of beauty against glitched vocal chops and bass swells. As I’ve lived with the album, it’s come to ground me in a way that I wouldn’t expect from an album that may initially come across as scattered. There is so much depth and emotion woven throughout, and beneath the pianos, synths, nylon string guitars, and harmonizer fueled vocals, there is a human heart making sense of the world. The songs can range from beautiful and fleeting, such as the vocal flooded cuts “Sutter” and “36523_red/blue,” to monumental and overwhelming, such as “Cycles” and “Dream Extinction.” If you enjoy the often glitchy yet grounded musings of Justin Vernon, this is a world you’ll want to venture into. I had the opportunity to discuss the creative process behind Nascent with its mastermind, Alexander Panos, and you can read our conversation below, as well as an additional artist profile here.
David Feigelson: How do you make a body of work, a song, that sounds like becoming? Because to me the album very much feels like that word. The songs are jittery and moving in a way where there’s all these beautiful, ethereal moments, but you can never quite grab them, because it’s always moving forward. It feels like there’s momentum becoming something. On top of that, a lot of the structure of both individual songs, like “Cycles” or “Dream Extinction,” and also the structure of the overall album, feels like it starts glitchier, maybe more abrasive and disparate, and grows more fleshed out and pillowy as songs or the album evolve. Could you talk about any of those things?
Alexander Panos: Yeah, sure. So as far as “becoming” is concerned, it’s kind of about when you’re in the process of creating something: you’re bringing something to life, and that whole process becomes your life, so you start writing about the process of creation. And while that’s happening, you’re growing and learning about yourself. How that’s reflected sonically, it’s hard for me to qualify exactly. I think the closest thing I could come up with is that it mimics a lot of movement you’d organically find in the world, like a leaf flowing down a river or a butterfly flapping its wings. It’s kind of erratic, right, it doesn’t seem any certain way, but there is musical gesture in those motions. When I was exploring the sonic spaces you know me for, I’d find myself writing in these ways. Like in “Sutter,” after the bit of dialogue where she says “I want a future,” there’s a little harmonizer chop, and that put a voice to the emotion that I was feeling when I heard that bit of dialogue. It was just like this thing trying to talk, but it’s stuttering and it can’t quite articulate what it’s trying to say. So there was a lot of playing with language and speech and things like that.
DF: And there’s the reversed vocals in “reasonsnotto,” can you talk about that?
AP: Yeah, “reasonsnotto” is hard to talk about technically because it was totally a feeling thing. I sat down with the harmonizer and started making these sounds and really resonating with them. I still remember that evening: hearing the text-to-speech voice, which was kind of this blank canvas, come to life as it was imbued with my emotions through the harmonizer. I felt like it was saying these things that I couldn’t put into words. But it was putting it into words, just in this totally novel way. So that’s kind of what happened. If I do try to talk about it from a technical perspective, it sounds something like this: The synthetic voice in “reasonsnotto” isn’t saying anything coherent. Its words are randomly generated. I have a friend who studied computer science; I brought him this text-to-speech concept and we worked together to write a Python script to put it into practice. Based on some phonetic rules I outlined in the script, it would randomly generate a block of spoken text. I can take that speech and, as I said earlier, imbue it with all these emotions via the harmonizer. What’s interesting — and “reasonsnotto” is the best example of this, but it happens throughout the album — is that I’m kind of able to create the raw experience of being communicated with, without the semantics of a language occluding the pure feeling of that experience. We’re all acutely tuned to the human voice, it’s why we have ears. Having emotions move through that same medium without words cluttering the experience lets them come through with so much depth and clarity. There are moments on that song where there is real language, like I’m singing or doing spoken word, but it gets blurred or morphed, and that just exemplifies this whole concept.
DF: You also have that kind of sky clearing moment at the end that’s very coherent.
AP: Yeah, that was sort of breaking through all of that and actually saying how I really felt across the past four or five songs.
DF: What does “I want more than a moment, I want a future” mean?
AP: I think it plays into the whole idea of “becoming” and actualizing your potential. Having spent the past however many years living a very sedentary lifestyle, writing this album, and feeling the pressure and shame that I did, I wanted to break out of that and actively live and be in the world. So “wanting more than a moment,” in my case, could be wanting more than the immediate gratification, the short-term thinking, the carnal desires, and the things that would impede you from reaching your potential. “Wanting a future” is desiring to actualize all my potential as a human being; I want to see that happen.
DF: That makes sense. I’m gonna throw a few more lyrics at you, get your thoughts.
AP: Sure.
DF: You talk about turning the right way or the wrong way on “Equinox” and then on “re:Turning.” Curious about that.
AP: Yeah, so “Equinox” started as a poem I wrote in the summer of 2019. I had the idea to do this spoken word/sound design interplay a few months later. When I first wrote the poem, it was like six in the morning. I had been up all night, I’d just made myself some food, and I was watching the dawn break. I had completely lost control of my sleep schedule. I just felt very helpless in a lot of different aspects of my life, and my sleep schedule falling apart was like a microcosm for this. I wrote that poem out of frustration. When I say, “Turn the right way,” there’s a literal reason because of the way things are laid out in my house and where I would go to finally sleep, shutting out the daylight with paper blinds. I was challenging myself to not give in to this tendency. But more importantly, it was just like, get a fucking grip. Assert your autonomy over your life, and make decisions with intent; really put in the work to become the person that you want to be. It’s said with a combination of hope and self-loathing; it was this really stirring intersection of those two feelings. So “turn[ing] the right way” is kind of about that. The title of “re:Turning,” was referencing that moment in “Equinox,” and I wanted “re:Turning” to feel like a first step: coming back to the real world, turning the right way, and starting to open myself up to actively living earnestly. I wanted it to feel very welcoming, very outdoors. One of my friends made a beautiful comment about the song. It was constructed out of the sound design from the previous nine tracks, all recontextualized under this light of hopefulness. He said that I’m “taking the most turbulent sounds on the album and finally making peace with them.” It was very astute. I was kind of shocked, because I did that subconsciously. So yeah, I would say “Equinox” is like the confession, the hardest conversation you have with yourself. “catch it” is sort of a reflection centered around acceptance: a memory collage of the past four or five years, looking back before I even started writing the album. “re:Turning” is like, okay, this first step is actually happening.
DF: That makes sense; and one more lyric. When you say “to be, my own self” on “Dream Extinction,” what does that mean to you?
AP: I feel like it’s relatively literal. I threw that vocal sample in the first draft of that song and it ended up making its way to the final version. I had plans to re-record it or change the lyric, but eventually I got really attached to it, and it just kind of stuck. The album is kind of in two different spaces. There are the parts of the album that are “in my head”—me interfacing with my own thoughts. The sound design tends to feel more synthetic, maybe softer around the edges. So that would be “Sutter,” “36523_red/blue,” “reasonsnotto,” and many parts of “Dream Extinction.” The other parts of the album are about me interfacing with the outside world, so the sound design is a lot more organic and tactile: it includes a lot of live instruments, foley, and field recordings. Songs like “Cycles,” “Equinox,” “catch it,” and “re:Turning” would fall into this space. “Dream Extinction,” which I titled well before I had this realization, ended up being the transition from the “in my head” space back to the outside world, hence the name. I didn’t intend for that to happen, It just emerged naturally. A lot of the meaning of the album was like that — realized after the fact.
DF: Yeah, that’s so satisfying, when that song transitions into the rushes of synth and bass and everything. Are those the transitions?
AP: Yeah, that’s sort of breaking out of the “dream”, the “in my head” space. It’s really visceral and intense; there’s all this ripping and crunching. But there’s heartache in there, and it uses sounds from the past few tracks. Then it concludes with the “to be, my own self” vocal, and it’s like, okay, now you have to be. And that turns into this little glistening sound at the end, looking back on that inner world. Then you get thrust into Equinox (Prelude), which starts with that piano sound, and you kind of wake up back in the real world with all these field recordings.
DF: Okay, this might be a good segue. Can you talk about the album cover? Does the split in the cover mirror what you were just talking about, and can you talk about your photography?
AP: Yeah, absolutely. The split in the album art does reference this. The left side refers to the parts of the album which take place in “the outside world” and then the more somber, blue-hour colors in the right half reference the songs which take place “in my head”. Having them side-by-side makes a lot of sense to me; there’s a lot of duality across Nascent, and the art was another way of realizing this. And then there’s the little embryo in the center. In a lot of my visual art I have those kinds of images, which are generated with neural networks. I found this particular area of the latent space that creates these embryonic creatures. To me, it looks like these embryos have entire universes inside of them. They have all this potential to give to the world, but they were just born, just barely alive, and are making these little cooing noises. I see myself in them. I think the fact that it’s neural net art contextualized by these real photographs also speaks to the cross between the electronic and organic elements on the album. But yeah, it was just an instant connection to the embryos, because their form literally describes how I feel: this thing curled in on itself, just entering the world.
DF: Okay, I have some more general questions about your creative process. You mentioned using different sounds from different songs on other songs in the album. What is your approach to that like, and how many sounds or motifs recur through this project?
AP: Yeah, so there are a lot. When I started writing the album, I was actually very concerned that I would have a hard time with continuity, but it ended up being very natural, working certain motifs in. A big one would be this short melody that plays in “Sutter,” (vocalizes), so that’s everywhere.
[Alexander proceeded to walk me through all the sounds that play through the album with the sessions on his computer.]
AP: It’s a lot of long sound design sessions: making a bunch of abstract textures, layering them together, listening for interesting moments that emerge, and writing around those happy accidents.
DF: So, I was going to ask about how you approach making a song. Is it usually very freeform, inspired by a sound or something, and seeing what happens and going with it?
AP: Yeah, essentially. Most of the songs on the album were written very linearly, start to finish. I stumble upon an idea and then I just see where it takes me. I find it very difficult to start creating something with a specific idea in mind because I typically don’t meet my expectations for its execution. Then I run the possibility of getting discouraged or the music becomes hard to salvage. That’s one of the many reasons why it took so long to write the last song: I knew exactly what I needed it to be before I started writing it, and that was actually a problem. So, yeah, I just try to let things happen, and, like I said earlier, a lot of the meaning from the album emerged well into the writing process. For example, I only settled on the track list a year-and-a-half into writing the thing. I realized that the order of the songs could reflect the chronological progression of this time in my life, but I couldn’t have predicted that a year prior. There are still things I’m learning from the album, and I wrote the fucking thing. I think having a really fluid relationship to your music is important.
DF: How do you know when something is done — a song or a whole project? You strike me as someone who will tinker with many little things. When do you call it?
AP: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think the majority of the time it’s just when I feel like a song has fully explored both the emotional and sonic space that it occupies and has come to some sort of conclusion about them. Like how do I feel after I listen to it? Have I said everything I wanted to say? Have I explored all the possibilities within its sonic palette? On that note, I consider “reasonsnotto” to be a very self-indulgent piece of music. The harmonizer is such a big part of my life and “reasonsnotto” was deeply exploring that sound and all the different things I could do with it. But what doesn’t cease to amaze me is that even though that track covers a ton of ground, I’m still discovering new ways to use the harmonizer I’ve never previously thought of. That really says a lot about it being an instrument; like how a piano will never feel old or stale.
DF: I was curious about your approach to dynamics. I feel like that fuels a lot of the emotion in the project. When do you know to make things loud or quiet?
AP: Typically, my sounds are relatively quiet. Like, when I’m creating sounds, I err on the softer side, and I mix with low volume. I used to be really caught up in the loudness wars. SoundCloud doesn’t normalize perceived loudness, so louder songs can feel more impactful. But I’ve totally rejected that at this point. I think just utilizing silence and the space between sound events is more important; creating contrast between really loud moments and really soft moments and fluidly moving between them. I don’t know, it’s pretty intuitive. I could try to give an overview of my thought process, but there are a lot of examples that are fringe cases that would kind of just subvert that. It’s just whatever feels right. Going back to how I think about sound design and rhythm: it’s all in terms of gesture. Like how a sound event progresses over time and how it can exist at multiple scales. Like, from the millisecond, to the sixteenth note, to the melody, to a section of the song, to the song itself, to an entire album—it’s all scalable gestures and movements through time. Dynamics play a big role in that. That said, when you think about composing in this way, many things are not expressly considered. Like, I never sit down and explicitly mix or master my music; it’s all happening simultaneously. The sounds and the composition create certain necessities and are sort of mixed on the fly. So, composing via gesture, a lot of things like rhythm, dynamics, pitch, and texture are just happening all at once.
DF: What has the reception of the album been like? How has life changed?
AP: It seems to be well received from what I see in comments or from messages I’ve gotten, or, most importantly, from my artistic peers. They’ve all been more than just supportive because of our friendship, they’ve genuinely connected with it.
DF: Okay, this is my last question. Where do you see yourself going in the future? Has this album served you in discovering a sound that you’ll continue to refine?
AP: Yeah, so as far as the sound is concerned, I think it’ll keep evolving and I’ll keep seeing where it goes. That’s my natural inclination when I go to write something that feels very genuine and self-expressive. It’s less thinking consciously about my sound and more about the next step in me making art. Once again, it’s a very intuitive thing. There’s a lot of ground I haven’t covered and a lot of ground that I don’t even know exists because the sonic space is very broad. There’s also a lot that I’m learning on the technical side with audio programming and I’m also discovering new music, and that will all inform my self-expression going forward. I already have a bunch of music that I’ve written both before and after Nascent, all touching on ideas that were not tackled in the album at all. Right now, I’m particularly interested in electronics in live environments. Like pushing electronic sounds into rooms and seeing how they become a part of the physical space, making sounds within these spaces, and bringing them back into the DAW (digital audio workstation) and processing them. That adds another layer of physicality and humanity that I haven’t even touched on.
DF: I’m excited to hear it.
photo by Alexander Panos.
album artwork by Alexander Panos.
