Now Is

London-based musician and producer Ryan Lee West, aka Rival Consoles, creates driving, experimental electronic music that makes synthesisers sound human. His consistent desire to create a more organic, living sound, sees him forming pieces that capture a sense of songwriting behind the machines.

A sense of euphoria is reached with the pulsating title track which bursts into colour like the appearance of the summer sun, while Echoes is a vivid exploration of rhythm and sound for summer nights. The track starts with a dense collage of modular synths, fragmented metallic tones, broken sounding drums and a downcast melodic synth line. “This is a piece where the main melody has been in my head for a long time and was just waiting to come out. I kind of think of it as the sonic equivalent to an impressionist painting in that I wanted to explore the sensation of lots of small layers of different colours and textures that are constantly moving around each other.”

Elsewhere, Running is a piece of music West had been trying to create for many years despite the simplicity of the track. “I am very into classical music and the kind of structures and ideas they often use, and love the works which take a single melodic idea and create multiple variations from it. That is what I tried to do with this piece, where every single thing is a variation on the opening ten second theme. I spent over one year exploring a huge amount of variations from light to very heavy. Over much time I ended up being more inspired by the subtler, gentler variations, which allow the idea to breathe, which is a theme on this record.”

There is an otherworldly, dream-like feel to The Fade – a recurring recording of the outside world West made during lockdown, while A Warning is a piece of music that merges the beauty with the noise and mess and explores the contrasting worlds. “When I make music, I tend to explore and let the ideas guide me, with the exception of pieces where I have specific ideas such as A Warning where I wanted to explore jazz influenced drums, abstract textures and almost pop-esque melodic synths.”

Tracklisting:

1. Beginnings
2. World Turns
3. Eventually
4. Frontiers
5. Vision of Self
6. Now Is
7. Echoes
8. Running
9. The Fade
10. A Warning
11. Quiet Home