Land Across the Sea

COLLABS / EVIA / SINGLES

4:37 - Vocals, Concept, Violin, Drums

Cover design by Lexi

Standing close by the ocean
It draws me towards the sea
It's fearsome and frightening
But I trust the melody

Going on board,
I entrust my fate to nature's hands
Taking my only chance
There's no turning back

Now, the waves are wild and tight
But I will not drown
The storm will come
And soon be all around

I won't let fear prevail
I'm no longer bound
Time to set out
For the Land Across the Sea

Beyond the horizon,
I hope the storm will end
Thinking of failure
Is hard to comprehend

Staying on course
Is the only thing that keeps me sane
I'll never be the same
I can't go back the way I came

Now, the waves are wild and tight
But I will not drown
The storm is here
And raging all round

I won't let fear prevail
I'm no longer bound
Time to set out
For the Land Across the Sea

Will I ever reach
The land that I seek?
The land of my dreams
The Land Across the Sea

The sirens are calling
It feels like I'm falling
Losing control
Losing my soul
It's getting cold

Now it's too late
My memory starts to fade
What's left is just a shade

Will I ever reach the Land Across the Sea?

Land Across the Sea is the second single I released with the three wonderful siblings of EVIA. After the meditative, trance-like production that is Mesmerized, Land Across the Sea goes into a more typical Indie Pop direction with drums, acoustic guitar, bass, and my electric violin.

The drums are the most notable feature of this song, at least for me, as this was the first song I ever produced with real drum recordings. And we did not record them in a studio. Because of good connections to members of beautiful Z10 in Karlsruhe, we managed to book the café for two days just for ourselves, including their Allen&Heath QU-32 mixing desk and all the drum microphones they had, which were 11 in total (crazy!). We set up Christoph's (EVIA's drummer) drum kit in the café, padded some of the walls with fabric, connected all the microphones to the mixing desk and that one to my Mac, and here we had our semi-professional recording environment that we used not only for Land Across the Sea, but also for several songs of my upcoming album, A Moon Colony Covered in Space Dust.

Anyway, after two days (in total at least 15 hours) of recording, we had everything we wanted. In prior, we had already recorded the guitar and bass tracks in my flat, just as we had done before with Mesmerized. Vocals were also part of the game, and Eva and Julia delivered as sovereignly as usual. My violin was recorded way more smartly this time, using my mattress as acoustic treatment for my room, oh and there also was a new Saturn poster I had... wait where were we?

Land Across the Sea was also the first song to undergo a dedicated mastering stage. So not only did I have a first with the drums of the song, I also first-time mastered it. Yeah, in the end it all turned out quite okayish. I'm quite happy with it.

Feel free to discover all the small little sonic details I added, like the "orchestral tuning" starting 1:40 (what a couple of pitch shifting inverted delays and reverbs can achieve... wow), or the sirens which are calling from afar, matching the lyrics, at 3:34... Oh, and did you notice the only synthesiser I used in the entire song, first audible at around 0:24, way in the background? I felt it was too empty only with the guitar, so I padded it a little with a... pad.

Oh! And there is one more story I want to tell. Land Across the Sea is a song about a journey on a boat. Over the sea. Toward a land. I wanted to set the mood with a couple of ambient recordings right at the beginning of the song. I looked through the common red-iconed video streaming platform we all know and found some footage of a creaking old wooden boat with waves. I don't like using pre-made samples, so I thought we'd recreate that ourselves. Christoph at the time was doing a vacation somewhere in southern Europe, so I asked him whether he could sample some waves when he was there. He did, and I got sound files from waves in Croatia. Quite dry, and very close-up. At the same time, my own parents were on vacation in Denmark, also near the sea. So I also asked them to do some phone recordings. If you've been to Denmark, you know it's quite windy there most of the time, and there are a lot of seagulls along the coast. And this is exactly all I could hear in the recordings - wind and seagulls. No creaking boat, even though a lot were sitting around the port all the time. So I only used the high-pitched seagull screams, and filtered out all the wind using a standard highpass filter. But you can also hear a boat creaking in the record, so where's that from?

Well, that's all about Yan, a friend and colleague of mine, who was living in a small flat in Karlsruhe as well. The first time I'd been there, I had immediately noticed the old wooden floor panels all over his room (like those big ones, up to one meter long, and 10-20cm wide). And they were creaking hideously. Perfect for our song. So I took my H2n over to his flat once and sampled his floorboards with a super high sampling frequency (96kHz), already planning to pitch it down afterwards. Long story short, we creaked a lot of boards, and in Ableton later on, I did exactly what I had planned - pitching it down by 12 semitones yielded exactly the 48KHz frequency I do all my studio recordings in. By tuning it down that way, the floorboards sounded like super large wooden boards, which could easily come from a ship. Some EQing and compression later, we had our creaking boat. Beautiful!

There surely are a lot more stories to tell about this song, but that's all for now. I like it very much, and I am thankful for all the amazing gigs and recording sessions I was able to have with EVIA. All the best for you! And Thanks to you for reading all of this. Thank you for dedicating your time for listening to me, for reading my creative output. You are beautiful!

All the best, Phil