Exploring The Varied And Vintage Sounds Of Washed Out's Paracosm

For his new album Paracosm, due out August 13th,electronic artist Washed Out (aka Ernest Greene) took an entirely new direction from the purely sample-based work he'd previously made. Paracosm was crafted using over 50 different instruments—and it's not just the amount that impresses but the variety he used, choosing to research and dig up sounds from old and rare analogue electronic instruments, some of which are over 70 years old.

Greene couldn't get his hands on the actual instruments so instead used their virtual counterparts, plugins which allowed him to explore these otherworldly sounds and mix them into his musical cauldron, blending old and new. In part one of a two part documentary which delves into the sounds and methods behind the new album The Creators Project takes Greene to The Audities Foundation in Calgary, Canada, a living museum and recording studio where old electronic instruments are preserved along with their lineage and history. Greene met with founder David Kean to experience and play some of the original instruments he sourced on the album—you can see how he got on in the video above.

Greene in his recording studio. Photo: Blair Greene 

For the album Green balances these old analogue rarities with popular instruments like the acoustic guitar, xylophone, and trumpet along with digital methods. It makes for a sonic melting pot of acoustic, organic, and modern that showcases Greene's musicality. t also reflects the album's title, Paracosm, which refers to a fully-formed fantasy world, usually conjured up in childhood, complete with characters and its own history.

We fired off a few questions to Greene to find out a bit more about the album.

The Creators Project: How does using these old electronic instruments combined with the more popular ones relate to the idea of paracosm? 
A paracosm for me is very vague sort of daydream—so I kept asking myself what that would sound like. So there are quite a lot of backwards sounds on the album, especially in transitional moments. There are also a lot of sounds with very strong associations to dreaming. Like the classic harp glissando which signifies dreaming to anyone who's ever seen a classic Disney film. Or the sound of a vibraphone which has a dreamy vibrato sound.

However, I didn't want to make a retro, classic Disney-sounding record, I wanted the opposite—a very modern sounding album, so it was important to use some more familiar sounds as well.

Why did you want to break away so dramatically from the musical style of your first album?
In some ways it is a break from my older songs—but in other ways it sounds very much like WO. I never want to do a complete 180 degree change that has no connection to my past, because I feel like that's much too easy. The challenge is moving forward while still maintaining a connection to where you started. For me, that meant using some new sounds, but I think the songwriting and melodies are still pretty similar.

Greene playing an ondes Martenot at The Audities Foundation

Was there an initial moment or event that spurred you or inspired you to want to make this album the way you've done it, using so many different instruments?
I spent a lot of time touring over the last couple of years, and the downside of that lifestyle is that it leaves very little time for creating or recording. However, the good side is that there is quite a lot of time for thinking about music and listening to music. So by the time I was finally able to slow down from touring, I had a million different ideas of what I wanted to do. I had already researched most of these instruments, and having that working palette of sounds made things really easy to jump write into the process.

Greene in his studio. Photo: Blair Greene

Below are a couple of the old electronic instruments Greene used on the album:

Novachord

Released in 1939 this was produced by Hammond and although it was made by an organ company it's actually a 72 note polyphonic—and the world's first commercially available—synthesizer. The sound is eerie and haunting, Greene calls it "like the future". It was used as one of the instruments in the Twilight Zone and Outer Limits soundtracks. Ondes Martenot

Image via

A strange hybrid electronic instrument that has three speakers, a wire that can be played by wearing a ring and produces a theremin-type sound through oscillating vaccum tubes, and a keyboard. The keyboard has moveable keys which can create vibrato and the instrument features a pull-out draw which contains a timbre-controlling device. Remember the spooky, high-pitched sound from Ghostbusters that appeared throughout the film? That's an ondes Martenot.

Mellotron

This electronic keyboard was originally built in England in the sixties. Housed inside it are banks of magnetic tape strips for each of the keys, so when you tap each key you can play back pre-recorded sounds that were featured on the strip, like strings or a flute. It was popular with prog-rockers and the Beatles, who used it to produce the flute sound on "Strawberry Fields Forever".

Listen to Washed Out's new single "Don't Give Up" below.

Stay tuned for part two coming soon when we take a tour of Greene's home studio where he discusses the sounds used on the record and visit Tree Sound Studios in Atlanta to talk about old modes of recording vs. new.

@stewart23rd