Deep Dive: Mistrust – Sunlight

British musician and remixer Tim Blackburn has worked with the likes of Tom Bailey (Thompson Twins), Michael Harding (ex-1000 Mexicans) and Banco de Gaia over the years but has recently returned to synthpop under the name Mistrust. Tim spoke to us about his Sunlight single as part of our Deep Dive series.

Genesis of Sunlight

The inspiration for Sunlight came from my visit to the historic village of Port Sunlight in Wirral, North-West England. I’d always wanted to make a “concept” album and thought the village would make the perfect subject!

Certain things stood out – the different house styles, the almost empty streets. There were children playing in the school playground right next to the Founder’s Tomb in the local churchyard, totally ambivalent to the history of the village.

The song

I’ve got into this thing of imagining what a song looks like. Not from a technical or musical or lyrical perspective, though. It’s hard to describe, but it’s almost visualising a song – how it feels and the memories and emotions it evokes, along with what the “official music video” will look like. I didn’t really work out the lyrics until I had recorded and arranged most of the song.

The lyrics of Sunlight

“Come to Sunlight!”

The lyrics are a modern take on convincing the workers of Lord Leverhulme’s Sunlight Soap factory, and anyone else what it meant to live in the model village created by (Lord Lever/Leverhulme).

The “Perfect Place to be” where everything you could ever need was provided for you and where everyone would be happy. It’s almost a travelogue or an audio description of the village and its history. There are almost sinister overtones in the sentiment of the song, saying “You will be happy here!” Shades of the 1960s cult TV series The Prisoner!

The structure of Sunlight

I tried to put together a catchy, unashamedly “pop” song.  It begins with a stripped-down version of the chorus with no lyrics.  The first verse is fairly low key and there’s a shortened version of the sung chorus.

Verse two is more uptempo. I find songs interesting that use the same chord progressions for both the verse and chorus, but each part with different melodies or sounds to make an obvious distinction. Sunlight is no exception!

There’s a definite build-up throughout the song, and a drop which takes the song in a completely different direction before the chorus kicks in again. There are also different elements drifting in and out until it all builds to a crescendo.

Recording Sunlight

I’ve been using Ableton Live to record my music for over 5 years. I like the flexibility of creating small elements to build up a complete track. Like many of my recent songs, Sunlight was recorded with a mixture of chopped up pre-existing MIDI chord clips, and playing in melodies, using my AKAI MPK Mini Plus MIDI keyboard.

I also programmed some of the notes directly into the Ableton MIDI editor for more complicated or improvised melodies or drum patterns. My playing technique isn’t great, and this allows me to come up with things that I can’t do on the keyboard.

The vocals were recorded using a Behringer condenser mic through an M-Audio interface, directly into Ableton Live. After years of remixing other people’s songs and making instrumentals, I’m a bit out of practice with singing. I’ve had to learn different microphone techniques and use built-in effects to take some of the low end from my voice. I’ve also worked really hard on intonation to find something I’m happy with.

Instrumentation

The intro has been likened to Pachelbel’s Canon in D. It sounds like a church choir with a dramatic chord progression. I didn’t deliberately set out to do that but wanted something quite stirring and dramatic.

I wanted to build up to something big. I was playing with voice and choir presets that come with the free Arturia Analog Lab Lite and used that for the dramatic elements. I also used Ableton’s built-in arpeggiator to generate an almost counter melody type pattern which jumps in and out of the song.

The video for Sunlight

The video is a visual tour of Port Sunlight with a guest appearance from my family! I recorded small clips of video on my visit to the village with the song and music video in mind. This was before I actually wrote the song!  I put the clips together in an app called Canva, which has a great storyboard type feature where you can quickly rearrange clips and make quick edits to fit the music and lyrics.

Where does the song fit within your overall sound?

It definitely fits in with my synthpop “sound”! The song is the title track of my latest album, and most of the songs on the album have similar musical themes and structures. My vocal style has been described as deadpan, almost spoken, and understated, so it definitely sounds like a Mistrust album!  However, the vocals on Sunlight are a bit more “sung”.

There are definitely influences from bands like OMD, early Human League, and Kraftwerk, along with my own songs of 30 years ago!

Performing Sunlight live

I haven’t played live for over five years and never really sung any of my own songs in front of an audience, so it was something I really wanted to do with Sunlight. I have a stereo mix of the song in Ableton without the vocals and add live vocals and effects “in the box.” I also play a few parts live on my mini midi keyboard using virtual synths. All of this is done in my laptop.

I’ve performed Sunlight live in three HMV stores recently and a couple of open mic nights. Every time I’ve played the song, I have deliberately not sung the lyrics for the first chorus. I think it gives a bit more of a build-up and adds a bit of a surprise to the performance.  I’ve had a great reaction from audiences, with people singing and clapping along!

The Sunlight single and mini-album can be downloaded on the Mistrust Bandcamp page. Tim has live appearances lined up in Liverpool, Salford, and Wigan in the coming weeks. For venue details check out Mistrust on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.