GHIEST on how they made their Zukunft LP

Previous releases for record labels such as Diynamic, Mobilee Records, Last Night On Earth, and Watergate Records have put Berlin-based production duo GHIEST in the conversation of electronic music’s future stars.

Alongside their work on the previously mentioned list of imprints, GHIEST have also been hard at work pushing their sound via their own RADAU imprint, where they recently released their inaugural studio album, Zukunft (German for future).

We got in touch with GHIEST to find out more about how they put the project together, and they happily agreed to talk us through the process of making some of the albums key inclusions, including Egos, Unfinished Sympathy, and Ashes, among others.

Egos

Egos is a very special song for us, that we actually made in one studio session. The synth you hear at about 3:56 in the break was actually the start of the idea. For this we connected the clap rhythm of a Roland 808 with the Juno 60 to trigger the arp. The cool rhythm we got out of this process inspired us so much, we almost had the feeling someone else was guiding us through the rest of the writing process.

Ashes

Ashes actually started out as a club track with the vocal, which we really liked, but after a while something felt wrong. So we started remixing the whole track and basically got rid of the whole instrumental. The main tool became a HQ sequencer which is a digital sequencer that we used to trigger the DRC polysynth from Imaginando. The “up-filtered” bass pattern inspired us to come up with a new chord progression, in combination with the vocals we already had.

We Are Not Alone

This was the first song of the entire album and it felt more like traditional songwriting than working on a club track, but it was so much fun and very emotional at the same time. The chords just felt right and we used the baseline to constantly change the feeling of the chords with changing it over 16 bars from the keynote to third or fifth.

Doing this basically maintains the whole vibe throughout the song and a couple of weeks later we came up with another synth melody to compliment the track. To us this was the missing element, but it was not easy to find the right sound at first. We wanted a sample sounding synth, with lots of movement, and we found it more or less by coincidence. It’s a very special sound that we really love, created with an Oberheim OB-6.

Shoot Your Lies

We made this track using a completely analogue setup. Again we used the arp trigger of the Juno 60 in combination with the Roland 808. Sometimes you can get crazy sounds by miss-triggering the arp through late drum attacks. We also used the Moog Matriarch on this track, what we love about this is the ‘half’ modular options that you get through all the patch options, and it’s very cool to play chords with the paraphonic system.

Furthermore, the drums are just from an 808 which we usually run through an amp to give them more grit and saturation. The last one was the Sequential Prophet REV2-8. All these synths get a clock trigger from our DAW, which is translated by the wonderful ERM Multiclock – that really makes our life better!

Unfinished Sympathy

This was more or less a song that we did in one jam session. So many cool things can happen while jamming, you might not always end up with a song that you are going to use later, but we can say you will always get an idea with a very human and organic feeling.

One special sound here is the melodic pattern that turns up for the first time at 2:22. The synth is our Moog Matriarch with a truly weird patch, we generally use the arp of the Moog, which was side chained to our DAW here, but not by the kickdrum – instead we used the Cableguys VolumeShaper, with a half bar LFO.

GHIEST – Zukunft LP is out now on RADAU.

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