Soft Power by Memory Scale

"Ten pieces slide across 50 minutes of delicately woven and fragile ambient electronic bits and bytes on Soft Power by Memory Scale (aka Arnaud Castagné, from Bordeaux, France).

Contemplative and a personal foray through serene landscapes, drones drift as microscopic melodies dither and fade, allowing each sonic artifact to create its own surreal vista. At times brittle and broken, Memory Scale applies subtle and natural elements that pop, fizz, and sputter as guitar plucks and piano keys gently unfold. And yet as the album traverses atmosphere and modular entanglement, its warm and fuzzy data bursts are surrounded by emotive passages floating at low elevations that we can almost touch as they fade into oblivion.

A spellbinding, all encompassing, and organic collection of tranquilized audio miniatures capturing the essence of microtones and abstract ambient projections. A tangibly cinematic aural universe."

Source: Igloo - Electronic Music Magazine


"Soft Power is the result of working over distance, made of precision and freedom, research and accidents, unpredictability and introspection.

Composed by Arnaud Castagné alias Memory Scale, Soft Power spreads out over time, an expanding world where the instruments used are exploited and sometimes diverted from their original sound to flourish inside constructions with moving serenity, driven by an inner energy of appeased beauty.

Memory Scale builds spaces where musicality seems to bounce on bubble wrap carpets, melodies stored in mille-feuille layers, traversed by suspended tablecloths and miniature sounds hidden between the cracks.

Soft Power is the reflection of a microscopic world teeming with scattered events and poetic swings, a mirror effect of stories buried in the depths of a memory with erased scars, a fantastic epic freed from all form of weightlessness. Magical."

Source: Silence and Sound

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I created this musical project in 2018 with the idea of bringing together my experiences, my memories, my encounters and to feed my compositions. In addition to reorganizing my ideas, I have also reorganized my creative space by orienting myself towards tools and instruments that also represent my feelings.

And I'm talking about my studio because it's a central part of this album. This is where I went regularly for 3 years, once a week, to have a special time, time for exploration and introspection. The rules were not to think about the composition, on the contrary. Focusing on a single instrument, experimenting with different recording processes (even absurd, utopian, aberrant), using the cassettes of my recordings as a child, immersing myself in a modular synthesizer patch, developing a plugin, trying to play the guitar,… Each session was an opportunity to discover things, to be amazed at the result of my trial and error, to let oneself be lulled by infinite sound loops.

And record. All. All the time.

One year ago, I gathered all this sound material to compose, this time. This album is therefore special for me because it is the sum of different moments, states of mind and instruments. Part of what I compose under Memory Scale is related to rhythm, pop or rock artefacts, chords. Here, due to the nature of the recordings, I made up pieces like mixing plasticine. Personal, contemplative, and melancholy moments. A snapshot of my studio at night, finally.

A cinematographic universe based on sound textures and synthetic melodies, Memory Scale mixes electronica and ambient to create a hybrid and contemplative pop.

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