New Music Wednesdays - "Qi Flow," by Michael Dissect

This week's instalment of new music is courtesy of Michael Dissect, established composer of drum and bass music. His most recent work, "Qi Flow," really embraces the fluidity of the circle of fifths while remaining edgy. Take a listen to it on his Soundcloud.

When I asked Michael about his process of writing and the inspiration for this song, this is what he told me.

"Qi Flow was composed roughly a week after playing a 2 hour set of mid 90's "intelligent" Jungle music on Origin FM. I am a real sucker for the jazz inspired, digitally composed, future thinking sound from then and find myself listening to a few artists output from that period a lot in my downtime. The drums were on an old hard drive and already layered and structured for use in a different track, but unfortunately this never really got finished, so after scrapping all the additional sounds and bass from before I became really excited to use the drums again. After playing through a few of my favourite old Jungle samples in my sample folders I imported the whole lot into Cubase and found a nice pad which immediately had me feeling a little nostalgic. The intro to Qi Flow was born. As the drums were already in place and sounding quite tight I was pretty much on easy street about what to play over them due to the drum patterns and edits taking a lot of the ears focus. After getting a riff I liked down with the nostalgic pad all the additional sounds and atmospheres to go around it pretty much fell into place really quickly. The bass followed and is somewhat out of character for me due to it being fairly clean and all played from one synthesiser. I added a vocal sample from an old manga cartoon which I felt added to the fantasy factor of the track, however I am unsure as to how long I will leave the sample in its current form as listening back to the track now I think it's calling out for a smooth female vocal instead with additional effects rather than the cartoon vibe. We'll see where that little experiment takes it and I should imagine the track will be fully finished and ready for signing in the next month!" 

I encourage everyone to follow Michael on Twitter @Michael_Dissect, and keep an eye out for his Origin FM broadcasts!