Today i-D launches a new a new music initiative curated by a select edit of our favourite musicians composed to help you doze. Allow Tropics to send you to sleep with his Slumber Mix Session…..
Signed to Planet Mu, Southampton based electronic artist Tropics is 25 and multi-talented. Influenced by the Arthur Russell and Pink Floyd, Christopher Ward, aka Tropics, grew up surrounded by music, composing his first album whilst at uni writing a dissertation on synesthesia. His Popup Cinema EP translates the progressive disco sounds of the 80′s into current electronic soundscapes. i-D finds out what Tropics does in the day, read on and listen to his exclusive slumber mix session. To drift away, just click play.
“Recording music is always the priority and sometimes I have to remind myself it’s the weekend. Although right now I don’t record so much where I live. I’ll get up, check my laptop for the rare interesting email, have a coffee with my flat-mate Morgan, who plays drums in my live show and then sit at the piano in the lounge to evoke some ideas. Huge pieces of collage art that Morgan has made encompass the walls. I think being surrounded by art and vibrant colours definitely evokes inspiration and good vibes! I’ll work on the foundations of a Tropics song here, it’s where I feel most comfortable, open, and able to hear my thoughts. Between the addiction of social media, I spend time creating the basics of a track on my laptop and piano.
Some days this is followed by travelling over to Southsea, a town about a 20 minute drive away, to my late grandmothers house, which is now owned by my family, and people are rarely there. It’s a lovely old house, with a lot of open space yet I spend most of my time there tucked away in a little room at the back of the house that Ive set up as a studio. It’s a good feeling being somewhere with such a history tied to your family. My mum and her four siblings grew up there and I spent a lot of my childhood there also, visiting my grandparents. I almost feel compelled to write more songs about my family, I feel I kind of owe it to them if I’m going to work there. I’ll stay there on my own or occasionally with the guys from my live show if we’re rehearsing, sometimes a few nights in a row and spend hours on song writing. If I’m on my own and in the right frame of mind, it becomes a recurrent cycle of creativity. I’ll get up at 9, be making music by half 10 and just trying to come to a finish at 1 or 2am, thinking where has this time gone?! All spent rewriting and re-recording one line of lyrics or tweaking a certain sound in the song. I get so caught up on the precision of the little details that sometimes it can take forever to get a song finished. And it’s hard to tell yourself when the working day should end but I get so into it and excited by what I’m making, nothing else will matter! Along the road outside the house is a number of swanky little french style cafes, so in the very likely event that I’m having a writers block, I’ll hang out in one of these spending too much money on coffee, sandwiches and eating up the wifi! The day usually ends with a call from friends telling me to come home and come out for drinks!”
soundcloud.com/tropics
Text: Milly McMahon
