Alight by Atoll Escape

This musical endeavor started out as a pandemic project to learn GarageBand with the intention of creating music that I could run to, as I was tired of the same old playlists, didn't have the patience to track down new music, and wanted something more energetic than the podcasts I had been listening too. I started with a few parameters: make music with only the equipment I had (with the exception of buying an audio interface): an electric guitar I bought around 2001, an acoustic guitar, a used 5-string bass guitar I bought from a friend, a Yamaha S80 keyboard I bought around 1999, and my Mac Mini. Use only freely available software and loops or samples. I didn't have a drum set, so virtual drummers and drum loops became my friend. I don't have a good microphone and nor much confidence in my voice, so instrumental tracks became the MO. I focused on a steady, driving beats and grooves, set to tempos optimally timed to coincide with running foot falls. The first track I put together is Cirrus Protocol, which exclusively used GarageBand loops and was an exercise in working on song structure. Next came Massive Beckoning which added guitar to the mix, inspired by a Massive Attack vibe and guitar work by Jeff Beck. The rest snowballed from there as I experimented with adding keyboards, different song structures, multiple layers of guitars, using different parts of the guitar neck, adding harmonics, etc. Some people might pooh-pooh the use of the virtual drummers and GarageBand loops, but I saw it just as another parameter to work within. To quote Dame Shirley Bassey from the Propellerheads song History Repeating, "Why ask your head? It's your hips that are swinging." I've listened to these tracks hundreds of times, dogfooding them on my runs and tweaking them here and there. I finally feel like they are ready to be shared and enjoyed by others.

The idea for the album cover came from the macaw sample used in Cirrus Protocol. Its title, Alight, came from the idea that the word means "to land", but I always felt made more sense to mean "to rise", as light things are apt to do. This contradiction is reflected in the macaw in the album art (based on a photo by Parrot Wizard): it is landing or taking off? Metaphorically, is this my career in music taking off or will it also be stopping here? The album is landing, but the songs are heading out into the world.

Atoll Escape was formed as as a challenge to myself. After growing up playing the saxophone and falling in love with improvising on the piano in school, buying a second hand acoustic guitar in college and teaching myself to play, buying a keyboard and electric guitar a few years later, then a bass guitar a few years ago, it was time to see what I could be capable of if I put it all together.