A chance encounter with an old school friend provided the inspiration for It All Levels Out, the 10th album from the Bristolian electronic producer Minotaur Shock, aka David Edwards. The original plan for the album was to make something a bit looser than usual; more ambient but still melodic, like the 90s music that made a big impression on Edwards, such as Global Communication and Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol 2. But as it turned out, this random reconnection took the album in a different direction — not so much musically, but more in the inspiration and mood.
It All Levels Out is the result, a hopeful meditation on getting older. This is Edwards’s most personal and reflective album yet and arguably his strongest, the closest to a pure ambient record he has made. The nine tracks ebb and flow perfectly, with echoes of the environmental music of Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Surround; Steve Reich’s minimalist masterpiece Six Marimbas; the murky ambiance of West Mineral Limited; the fluid new age vibes of Visible Cloaks; and even the meditative post-rock of Bark Psychosis.
“I think there’s a point that you get to in life where you finally get to know yourself,” explains Edwards. “It doesn’t mean that you stop worrying and overthinking, but you kind of don’t care as much. It’s easier to work out what’s important — or maybe it’s just easier to know what isn’t.” It All Levels Out, the title track and album opener, with its pensive piano loops that cede to forceful chords and playful melodies, is about “that realisation, the relief it brings, and the nagging feeling that you probably wasted a shitload of time caring about and chasing things that didn’t really matter.”
Now back to that serendipitous meeting… “We were close at school, but kind of drifted apart and, for whatever reason, life got in the way of staying in touch,” Edwards explains. “We got chatting and it was lovely. I confessed that his dad introduced me to mayonnaise and he told me that my dad’s driving used to terrify him. We’re now the age our dads were back then. He makes amazing clay pots.” It is one of Matt’s pots that provides the cover image for the album, while the resulting track combines flurries of synthetic violins with warm, tonally resolute cascades of melody.
How to listen: There are a couple of ways to proceed. First, you can listen to the whole album, which you will find below, and then read the notes. Or, read the notes as you listen to each track. This will completely change your perspective on the release and bring you closer to the artist and their work.
Words by Minotaur Shock
When it comes to making music, I’ve always been keen to avoid repeating myself. So each release should be different to – and a reaction to – what came before. Well that’s how it should work, but the challenge then is how to make it sound like a Minotaur Shock release. How do you keep changing without losing what makes the music unique to you? What do people ‘expect’ from a new release from an artist they’ve heard before, do they want more of the same or do they want something different? Does anyone actually care? Some of my favourite artists found a really good sound and just stayed there, really digging in and owning a space. I’ve never been able to do that, I think I get bored too easily.
My previous music has mostly been influenced by technology or techniques I was excited about at the time – whether that’s a new synth I was trying to learn (eg the Digitone on Qi), or some music I’d heard that I wanted to have a go at, or some arbitrary challenge I set myself. So when I started thinking about making a new album, I tried to consider what I hadn’t done before.
I’d also been having this gradual realisation that as I’ve got older I’ve relaxed and become happier – more accepting of things, less likely to compare myself to others and just more aware of my place in this funny old world. I’m a couple of years on the wrong side of 45, and this was the year that my youngest turned 18, meaning that neither of my kids are technically kids now.
So this compulsion to not repeat myself combined with this general mellowing out and undeniable aging kind of squished together and formed the concept of this album. One thing I’d never done was write instrumental electronic music that was an expression of where my life actually was and how I actually felt. And naturally, as you get older you just somehow magically become wiser, so I think in my head I felt kinda like a folktronica Gandalf.
Going into this project I wanted to make something grounded, reflective and pretty, with a bit of melancholic self-doubt that gives way to an overall sense of hope and positivity. Which is pretty much how I’d describe myself in my social media bio.
It All Levels Out
I think there’s a point that you get to in life where you finally get to know yourself. It doesn’t mean that you stop worrying and overthinking but you kind of don’t care as much. It’s easier to work out what’s important (or maybe it’s just easier to know what isn’t). This track is about that realisation, the relief it brings, and the nagging feeling that you probably wasted a shitload of time caring about and chasing things that didn’t really matter.
I really wanted the opening track to be a kind of statement, to set the scene that this isn’t going to be a knotty electronic record. My last few releases have been quite rhythmic and electronic so I was going for something a bit looser. I also wanted to write something simple and easy to grasp. And this is what came out.
I’m not really a piano player, and I don’t have a piano, so this was all done on the ol’ laptop. But I did want to try and write something that could be played by a human, and I tried to avoid quantising the notes to the grid. So it was a series of single takes. Ha ha, that’s such a contradiction, but I know what I mean.
I’m a big fan of music that sits in a weird kind of space between synthetic and real, and using ‘realistic’ samples felt interesting to me; the other options would be to use a clearly fake but nostalgic M1 piano preset or to actually record a piano. This middle point felt right. The ‘strings’ are actually a weird physical modeling synth sound I made that sort of sounded like it was going backward.
Oh and I was so pleased with myself when I came up with the piano bit that starts around 3 mins, and yes the synths that double up there are a total nod to Ryuichi Sakamoto, RIP.
Memory Crates
This track is the direct result of a weekend spent tidying the garage. I have crates of CDs, promos, test pressings, LPs, minidiscs, broken old musical instruments, wires for forgotten devices. It would have been a great time to get rid of it. However, I’ve got a notoriously bad memory and I’m pretty sure I’m on a one-way street to losing it totally. So I kept all the stuff on the off chance that it will trigger some long-lost memories when I’m in assisted care or whatever.
I wanted to do something that was just electric piano but I couldn’t manage it. These days I’m really drawn to music that doesn’t have many instruments – Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Music for Nine Post Cards was a big influence on this track. But I wanted it to be slightly aggressive and tense rather than too ‘ambient’, because it’s basically about fear of dementia.
About 2 and a half mins in there’s a synth pipe that plays a computer-generated melody using the same rhythm. Whenever I play back the source file for the track the notes it plays are different – of course, it’s only really me and the mastering engineer that will ever notice this (or perhaps if I ever play it live and someone came to more than one show and has amazing attention to detail). It meant that each time I worked on the track, this bit was different each time. And every mix-down is melodically different.
Also, if you listen carefully in the second half there’s some birdsong that gradually gets mushed into a digital resonant soup. Both of these things are my way of trying to articulate how memories change, get overwritten and eventually we all just end up as resonant soup.
Recognise You Anywhere
Last year I bumped into an old friend by chance. We were close at school, but kind of drifted apart and, for whatever reason, life got in the way of staying in touch. I hadn’t seen him for maybe 25-30 years. We got chatting and it was lovely. Matt makes amazing pots now and was never really into tennis, that was something his dad wanted him to do. He confessed that he was terrified of my dad’s driving when we were at school, and I told him that his dad introduced me to mayonnaise. The title is similar to what he said to me, but I’m paraphrasing because we were in the toilets at a gig – in a town neither of us lived in – and my surprise to see him meant I wasn’t listening properly. We are dads ourselves now, the age our dads were in the 90s when we used to go and see shoegaze bands together.
Meeting Matt again was another big catalyst for the ‘theme’ of this record. Thinking about how our lives just cleaved gently and we followed our own paths. His creative outlet is conjuring pots out of nowhere, and mine is making music. Pots and cups are undoubtedly more useful than inoffensive ambient-leaning electronica, but I liked the synergy. Matt kindly made a pot for the cover of the album – which was important to me as it is an object with meaning that exists in the world.
The track tries to capture that feeling – if you can call it a feeling. The feeling of time passing, parallel lives, pottery, mayonnaise and turning into our parents. There’s a lot of physically modelled (ie synthetic but attempting to sound real) percussion sounds that sound quite pot-like.
This is also the most improvised track on the album, for me it’s basically a jazz track. The brushed drum outro was me realising this and then deciding to lean right in there and have a jazzy snare. Which again is fake and programmed.
Moral Progress
This is about trying to stay positive. It was originally composed as part of a score for a theatre production about quantum physics called The Ethics of Progress. The bulk of the track is a one-take live Elektron Digitone performance, with some overdubbed woodwinds and stuff at the end.
I wanted to make something with a lot of strands that weaved in and out of each other. Something that kept changing but sort of stayed the same. There’s a lot going on in the world at the moment isn’t there?
Brother
This is the most personal track on an album full of personal tracks. It’s about persistence and patience. I’ve been listening to Broadcast a lot lately and there’s a line in their track ‘Black Cat’ that keeps going through my head: “Awkwardness happening to someone you love.” This track is about that, and the melodic peaks and troughs in the music are entirely deliberate.
It’s mostly overdubbed live takes using a Roland JX-3P synth. I recently got the opportunity to hang out with a bunch of artists for a residency, and I played this track to them. It was terrifying. I was awkwardly sitting there next to a laptop playing music that I had pretty much designed to turn me into an emotional wreck. Not recommended.
Molding Physical Air
I’m not great with my hands, and I find it fascinating when people are. I’m lucky to know some really talented people (like Matt the potter) who make beautiful physical things out of nothing. And other friends who can fix things, or grow things. I’m bad at all of that, so I wanted to make some music that kind of captured that feeling of gathering stuff that doesn’t exist and bending it into something else. To make me feel better about all the stuff I’ll never be able to do.
There’s stuff in this track that I’m barely controlling, and I hope that struggle comes across. I used a lot of swooshy filtering and a little resonator box that exists permanently on the edge of feedback. It also features the kalimba I got for Christmas last year, which I probably won’t use again so it’s nice that it ended up on a track.
Deflecting
This is a simple song about avoidance and/or acceptance. It’s about when you feel self-conscious about doing stuff that you suspect you might be a bit old for, but you’re not ready to give it up yet.
I have a tendency to cram too much into music, wanting things to significantly change too soon. So I really had to fight my instincts and let this stretch out a bit. I love really simple FM synth plucky tones so it was nice to give them a bit of room to breathe.
There is some quiet feedback stuff going on that was a nod to Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas, which I bought on cassette in 1990 from Woolworths in Tenby, South Wales. We were on a family holiday and I remember listening to the tape on my walkman sat in the back of the car and my mind being blown. I can remember stuff like that vividly, which gives me hope for when I’m old.
It was satisfying to me that just shifting the harp melody a beat gave it a more interesting melody. And my favourite bit on the whole album happens about 4.45 into this track where the synth kinda slides up and it goes all chimey at the end. I guess it sounds like I’m being a bit self-congratulatory but I can’t really remember what I did or how I did it, so it’s a nice surprise that it happened at all.
Launching the Kids
An American ex-boss I had used this term for a bit. I don’t know if it’s more common in the US, but I’d never heard it before. She told me her kids had been launched, meaning that they were at uni or working or whatever. It stuck with me. I’m going through the process of launching my kids now, and it’s a strange feeling. Toy Story 3 vibes.
So this track tries to capture that bittersweet feeling. Empty nester, is that what they call it? Normally you think of mums when you think of that, but this one’s for the dads. I see you.
With Me?
This album started with me wanting to make something ambient and melodic, like the stuff that made a big impression on me in the 90s. This is the closest to that music I think, or my interpretation of it. In particular, I was thinking about Global Communication.
It was going to be the first track, to set the scene. The title has a double meaning – as in ‘Do you understand? Are you with me? Are you on board for this ambient odyssey we’re going on?’ (which made more sense when it was opener), but also hinted at that melancholic self-doubt: ‘Are you sure you want to do X with me? With me, of all people?’
I guess it’s the darkest sounding track on the album, which seems strange when I’ve said that my intention was to make something melancholic but hopeful.
One of the last sounds you hear on the album is me rummaging in my memory crates, around the 8-minute mark. That’s how we’re all going to end up eventually, isn’t it?
Grab it here.
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