MILD SORROW INTEGRATED - Interview

ETHEREAL.PRESS

Tell us about Mild Sorrow Integrated.

MILD SORROW INTEGRATED

I’m Esteban, I’m from Argentina and I make electronic music. Mild Sorrow Integrated is a project/alias that started in mid 2020, only a day before releasing the first Meadow Platinum album.

ETHEREAL.PRESS

Why the name Mild Sorrow Integrated?

MILD SORROW INTEGRATED

It doesn't really have a deep meaning, I think. I did the classic "open random Wikipedia articles to find cool words and ideas for your name" strategy and those three words caught my attention. It sounds like the name of some black metal band but it has a "randomly generated phrase" feel to it that I like.”

ETHEREAL.PRESS

Can you tell us about the three distinct volumes of the Meadow Platinum series?

MILD SORROW INTEGRATED

During the 2020 quarantine year I spent a lot of time indoors only listening to music and chatting with people on forums and Discord. Long story short, I met a group of users who were having a listening party of an album called "Cauterize the Mountains". When I asked what kind of music it was, they told me it was brone.

Just a few days before, one of the users who was present at that LP, known as The Calendar August, had had the wonderful idea of sampling brostep tracks and paulstretching them in Audacity to create these drone-plunderphonic-noise monsters. Of course the idea of mixing brostep with ambient and trying to make that sound good is very funny, and while I also approached that concept without taking it too seriously, I felt that in the irony of that mix there is the possibility of exploring some very cool sounds!

I have a real, honest love for brostep because it is the genre that introduced me to the world of electronic music and to developing my own personal tastes when I was still a kid who only listened to the rock and folk music that played in my home. I'm a third-world zoomer: I can't look down on the brostep sound as many do because I didn't grow up with the golden years of classic UK Dubstep, but rather my first encounter with the EDM sound was in the 2010s through Spanish Minecraft videos and the crazy bass sound design of Skrillex and Virtual Riot. For a few years all I wanted to listen to was bass music. I religiously followed every Monstercat release too. It was a matter of time before my teenage self eventually discovered Porter Robinson, and then deadmau5, and then Boards of Canada, and then Radiohead, and then the existence of FL Studio. And while my tastes have grown a lot since then, I still love it and find a lot of value for the skill it takes to engineer that kind of sound and energy, because my 14-year-old producer self knows how complicated and technical it gets. It’s funny and embarrassing to listen back to some of my early attempts at imitating my EDM idols, but hell did I learn a lot about music production from that.

That’s why I was so captivated by the idea of brobient when I first heard it. What if I approached making ambient music with the wacky sound design techniques I would usually use to make growling basses, trying to genuinely make cool noises? MPV1 was made in less than 24hs after I heard those first two brobient albums, and it’s thrash! but to my surprise some people were actually fucking with it and a little brobient community was forming. With Vol. 2 I took a bit more time to work on it (only a little bit) and there are some tunes I'm proud of in there; I released it with the nice people over at Vivarium Recordings. Volume 3 is the last Meadow Platinum album and definitely the one on which I best executed my vision. John Zobele liked it and it dropped on Business Casual last year.

ETHEREAL.PRESS

Talk to us about the album art for Meadow Platinum, Vol 3.

MILD SORROW INTEGRATED

As with vol. 2, it’s a fragment of some old and obscure artwork. A few fellas know where they come from. It encapsulates very simplistically the tale that formed in my head while structuring that album.

ETHEREAL.PRESS

Tell us about the phrase in your Bandcamp bio which briefly states, 'inner love.' What is the significance of this statement?

MILD SORROW INTEGRATED

It’s part of the title of the first track from Meadow Platinum, Vol. 2. It’s related to a talk I had with someone a while ago.

ETHEREAL.PRESS

What do you wish to accomplish as a musician?

MILD SORROW INTEGRATED

I aim to make the music I would like to hear, as close as I possibly can.

My goals for each project change depending on what I'm interested in at a given moment, but my general rule is always to try to make something better than the last time. That’s why each time my records are taking longer to be finished.

ETHEREAL.PRESS

How does electronic music influence your creative process?

MILD SORROW INTEGRATED

I think both the worlds of electronic and “non-electronic” offer me very different mindsets to work with and that’s pretty cool.

Writing on a DAW’s piano roll still takes me back to the more intuitive zone I was in when I was starting to create music as a kid, making me a little bit less aware of the theory of what’s going on with chords and tonality and all that stuff; the voicings and harmonies that come out are more unique than what might come out of a guitar. Making music electronically also makes you pay way more attention to texture and the tone of whatever synths and sounds you’re using, which can be great or an obstacle sometimes. Pianos, guitars and other instruments just have great timbres by themselves; you just pick them up and start focusing on the writing without having to worry about that. With synthesizers I can spend a lot of time tweaking knobs just trying to get a sound that is timbrally interesting, but not too crazy so that it is pleasant to listen to and also useful for composing, and that slows down the process so much sometimes. That’s why there are so many resampled acoustic instruments and simple almost chiptunesque synths in my new record, it helped me focus on what’s important.

In a way, I combined both worlds while crafting the album, which goes hand in hand with its general theme. For example, a lot of these melodies and chord progressions were written with my guitar and voice first, almost like short pop tunes or motifs, and then turned into beats. Or I would write something on a synth and then chop a sample of a real instrument to play it. There’s so much you can get out of mixing the two approaches.

ETHEREAL.PRESS

What's next for Mild Sorrow Integrated?

MILD SORROW INTEGRATED

My new album comes out August 5th. It sounds nothing like what I’ve dropped before, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s called “arbol.” and it draws a lot from indietronica and the warmer side of glitch music. I didn’t feel like there was a necessity to make these songs sound dense or big; instead, dynamism and memorability were the main concerns here. And even though all the crazy sound design was left as a secondary priority, there’s still a lot of attention to detail and textures that might not be as apparent behind the minimal arrangements. In fact, this is the project that has taken me the longest to produce!

As proud as I am of Meadow Platinum and the Eye Girl EP I dropped with No Agreements, my love for pop and melodic music is not present on those records as much as it is here. Regardless of how weirdly it may contrast with the rest of my releases, this LP is a very honest reflection of the electronic music I like to listen to and a style I want to keep exploring.

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