Artist Spotlight: Tyresta - ”Facing Ourselves”

Tyresta is the experimental music project of social worker and musician Nick Turner.  Nick is based in Chicago, Illinois and makes music utilizing various instruments including Buchla Music Easel, eurorack modular, mellotron, and guitar.  He also helps behind the scenes with the ambient, drone, and experimental music labels Past Inside the Present and sub-label Fallen Moon Recordings.   

 

You can find his music on Bandcamp or through your streaming service of choice.  

 

Piece description: 

 

I wrote and recorded "Facing Ourselves" during the Coronavirus shelter-in-place order in April 2020.  Outside of my life in music, I am a mental health therapist so I have directly witnessed what happens when people (myself included) are forced to give up certain routines and distractions and face themselves.  The four parts of "Facing Ourselves" sort of represent the various emotional states that both I and the people I work with have gone through since the Coronavirus outbreak.  Though at times uneasy and tense, there have been moments of deep love and connection, which has been interesting to witness and experience.  

 

Like many people, when working with the Easel, I can get lost in shaping sounds for hours on end.  With each of these pieces, I was working with both the Easel and various effects  (Strymon Timeline, Strymon BigSky, and Valhalla reverb) in order to land on sounds that adequately represented the emotions/feelings I wanted to evoke in the listener.  Effects, both in and outside of the box, help inform my approach to sound design and also assist in determining the direction I go in with certain patches on the Easel (timbres, waveshapes, tempo, envelope shapes, etc.).  

 

Mastered by Nathan Moody at Obsidian Sound.