Passenger Null by Yukio Bergholdt

What was supposed to be a few short ‘dawless’ excursions into the deep sounds of dub techno quickly evolved into a love affair and an exploration into dub techno combining elements from other genres such as ambient, minimal, reggae and cumbia.

The sound for me was very important on this album. Wanting to create my own dub sound with deep chords and added glitchyness and dustiness, I experimented and found various techniques to achieve this.

Many of these techniques were found only because I worked within a framework imposed by the main machine behind this album – the Polyend Tracker. Having 8 tracks for monosamples and midi in total is of course limiting but also encouraged me to dive into other aspects of sound design and sequencing.

I would use granular synthesis extensively and try to squeeze in small details on a per step basis sometimes revealing new unintended result that I would recreate again and use as method to achieve a certain sound.

I did of course collect suitable dub samples from my sample libraries, but for lead sounds I would always use my own hardware synths. Most notably the Yamaha CS and Arturia Microfreak combined with some heavy reverb and delay from the Source Audio Collider and Boss RE-20 Spaceecho pedals made a lot of the deep chord sounds found on this album.

For glitches and the dusty sound, I put vinyl crackle and noise samples through the effects of the Polyend Tracker. I confess that I have been overusing the effects and granular synthesis on it, but they are a good fit for dirty dub techno and the fill effects surprised me and added that bit of glitchy randomness.

I sometimes find “Passenger Null” best described as space dub or micro dub, but that does not cover all the tracks. I certainly poured my soul into each and every track on this album. That does not mean it was hard work though. Somehow stitching it all together felt easy to me because I enjoyed every bit of it. I hope you will enjoy it as much listening to it.

Copenhagen based Yukio Bergholdt has been producing electronic music since the mid 90's, cutting his teeth abusing hardware synths and outboard gear. He certainly has an ear for the nostalgic, and his evocative beats and mellow tones should appeal to fans of dub, techno, and ambient genres.

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