Three Music Thingz with Solsten
Oh hello, it's another rendition of Three Music Thingz, the blogseries where I ask musicians for three thingz that are essential to their music-making.
Today we have Solsten! Alexander Solsten is a Montreal-based music producer who put out a new album called Ghosts of Uranium City in August.
Okay: one of my husband's favorite musical stylings is dub. The clang of a reverbed drum fill or the extended thrum of a ghostly bass line will cause his eyes to shine as he happily murmurs, "Dub influences..." to himself. I will soon have to share with him Ghosts of Uranium City, which uses dub to cast a particularly gloomy pallor over industrial-style techno. But rather than drag the mood down to total abjection, the dub influences here soften any harshness and create a pleasantly mysterious aura—a mollifying effect, like filling a deserted dance floor with fog machine soup.
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I particularly liked "Snipers On Sunset," intriguingly credited in the liner notes as being recorded "on the road" in Los Angeles (the rest of the album was produced, engineered and mixed by Solsten at Eightfold Recording Studios in Montreal). Its drums ricochet with friction that never boils over into agitation; I recently watched the movie The Batman, starring Robert Battinson, and this song would not sound out of place blasting at the gritty Iceberg Lounge.
Solsten mentioned when he sent me the album that he had made it as a way to process his father's death in 2022. I was considering the role grief might have played in the shaping of the music (for some more enhanced music-grief thoughts, look no further than Nora Nygard on this blog 🙏) and the more I thought about it, the more the physicality of grief seemed to make sense in the compositions—the spare, hollow bass sounds like it might be booming through the walls of a big empty house, but that emptiness is offset by the steadiness of the drums: isolation + presence. Ghosts of Uranium City is an intense collection of songs, and a very lovely one.
Solsten shared his three thingz with the blog...read on to see them...
- Beauty
I don’t know if this is just me, or it’s just a reality of being a millennial in 2024, but a lot of my adult life has been quite difficult through only some fault of my own. I wouldn’t say that I’m religious whatsoever but part of being able to make it through these extremely tough situations is being able to find something positive in whatever you’re experiencing. I think it’s really easy to become overly focused on how things are ugly or are some kind of cosmic plan against you (and believe me, I have a lot of reasons to think like that), but I have found it so extremely helpful to draw on the lessons of mindfulness and Buddhism to see the beauty all around us in our everyday life.
I see some of the moments in my life as having a cinematic quality, and one of the things that I strive most towards in my artistic output is being able to relay a sense of how I felt in the moment while I was creating it. For me, the true purpose of art is to provide an essential & grounded counterpoint to the chaotic & negative vibes that can often exist in our world. - Perseverance
I wouldn’t say I’m a “late bloomer” per se, but one thing I’ve realized over the years is that a lot of expectations (self or no) that you feel in life are not only misguided but magnified by what other people think you should be doing. I spent many years obsessing over what “the correct thing to do” was, but I’ve realized now that not only is it perfectly fine to do things at your own pace, you can’t force anything regardless. You’ll arrive where you’re meant to be, at the time you’re supposed to, as long as you’re doing what you should be doing. One of the most important things I learned from my parents, who are both sadly passed now, is to keep going. Could not tell you how many times I saw them fail but they got back up every time. “Success” is obviously extremely subjective but in a lot of ways, it’s being the one still standing. - Open-mindedness
This paragraph is going to be funny for anyone who knows me personally, as I have a bit of a reputation of having quite high standards for certain things, but I really believe in stuff like this. I’ve met so many “wunderkind” type people who think that they know it all, but if I learned anything in my life it’s that you don’t know shit. I’m just as happy to learn something from someone double my age, or half. Everyone has something to bring to the table if you are open to it—this could go for collaborations or simply discussing the issues of the day. Plus I think it helps you live gracefully if you’re willing to accept that not only things always change, but can change for the better if you accept the new reality.
Thank you Solsten! Listen to Ghosts of Uranium City and follow Solsten on Instagram and Twitter.
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