For this weeks album feature, we are glad to host Ryan Malony, aka Uun and Araceae. He has presented us with an absolutely stunning ambient techno album based on hundreds of field recordings from travels, nature, and the varied moments of his life. You can now hear all the tracks in this continuous mix, synthesizing raw emotion and the strains of the natural world. This is the perfect music for a relaxing moment, introspection, and beautiful journeys. Listen, enjoy, and dont forget to read more about the album in the interview:


-Please tell us how you started the whole Araceae alias, and how its connected/different from Uun?

It mostly came about because I really felt like I was ready to try something a bit different. For the most part Uun is very percussion focused, as that is the kinetic feeling I like to have when playing live. With Araceae, I wanted to shift that focus to ambience and atmosphere. Also, the BPM is a pretty large difference, with Uun typically sitting around 130bpm and Araceae around 110bpm. I still love the heavy stuff and I am still very focused on Uun, but I’m also excited to be able to showcase a bit of a different sound from time to time with Araceae. When you produce a lot of music I’ve found it is important to have a few different projects going at the same time to keep things fresh. Before this would mean having 3-4 Uun tracks I was working on concurrently, but I noticed that I started reusing some ideas and some of the tracks would start to sound too similar. Since I’ve started Araceae, it has really helped my creativity because I can work on multiple projects that have completely different BPM’s and feelings. This has helped me immensely, and has given me more ideas for my Uun material as well.

-This album awakens so many beautiful emotions, what are you trying to tell us? dig more into this

I’m happy to hear you feel that way! I feel music is very subjective, and I want it to be open to interpretation. But for me specifically, each track is a snapshot of the emotion I was having at that particular time. Lunae Semita means Lunar Path, and I see the album as the many emotions and feelings that one might go through during a lunar cycle. The track titles hint at this as well. The overall feeling of the piece to me is awe of the natural world. Not only what we typically think of as nature, but cities and societies as well. In many of the tracks you will hear recordings of streams and wildlife mixed with sounds of subways and crowds, I see all of these things as different aspects of nature.

-Are the tracks connected? and how?

Yes, I see the album as one piece of music. The basis for the whole project was hundreds of field recordings I made over the last year. Many of them were made during camping trips in the Michigan wilderness, but I also have quite a few from recent trips to Berlin and Amsterdam. One from my time in Amsterdam that stands out is used in Waterway Path. I was walking to meet some friends for dinner and recording the sounds of the canals as I was going. It actually started raining pretty hard and you can hear it kind of pick up as the track moves along. I felt this gave the track an energy of atmospheric conditions changing that I also tried to convey in the other elements that I added later.
I tried to use these field recordings such as these as a connective tissue to make the album a whole. The continuous mix I made for Monument actually emphasizes this connective tissue a bit more, as I was able to draw out some sections between tracks to really give a sense of travelling from place to place. I tried to mix the recordings I had of more natural sounds with recordings of city and urban sounds in interesting ways. The field recorder I have is a Zoom H2N, and it has a pretty cool feature where after you make a recording you can put a note in to go with it. This is helpful because I could enter in the note exactly how I was feeling at the time of making the recording. For instance one of the recordings used on Nocturnal Beyond was made by a campfire at a pretty remote place in Michigan called Wakeley Lake. You can hear the sound of the fire as well as some wildlife, and the place itself was so remote that everything surrounding the fire was completely dark. It filled me with a feeling of unknowing, which I noted in my recorder and tried to convey through the finished track. This process made creating this album much more personal for me. Once I had all the field recording work done, the creation of the album itself came pretty naturally; I completed most of the album during a particularly snowy week in Detroit.

-Where would be the perfect place to present this kind of music?

With Araceae I wanted to create music that could be enjoyed at home first and foremost. I had an odd entry point into techno where I listened to it alone for quite some time before hearing it in a club environment, so I have always valued this home listening experience. However, I am looking forward to hearing it in a live environment as well. The techno parties I always enjoy the most are ones that have ambient rooms so you can take a breather from whatever is going on in the main room, and I feel Araceae would fit in well there.

-Where do you see Araceae going in the future?

First and foremost is the release of the album that this continuous recording was based on, Lunae Semita. It will be coming out on Faint which is a really great ambient techno label based out of Valencia run by Warmth, who also runs the label Archives. I approached him with the entire album completed and he wanted to release it as is which was really nice. I’m also really grateful to have been able to work with Go.70North to create the album art. He does amazing nature photography and I think his work adds a lot to the feeling of the release. I am also working on converting the Araceae material into a live project, which I will be debuting in May during Detroit’s legendary Movement weekend at the Modern Cathedrals Eden event. This is really special to me as I will be sharing the bill with one of the biggest influences on the Araceae sound, which is Rod Modell as Deepchord. His Echospace collaboration with Stephen Hitchell specifically had a huge effect on me. I also have a new track coming out next month on Faint. It is titled Primeval Forest, and is a bit of an addendum to the album proper. I think the Araceae project is a really nice counterpoint to my Uun material and I look forward to producing and performing as both in the future.

-Can i please take mushrooms and listen to the rest of this album now?

Haha, please do!

Links
https://faintmusic.bandcamp.com/album/lunae-semita
https://www.facebook.com/Araceaemusic/
https://www.facebook.com/uuntechno/