static motion

an album written by seraph (age 14-17) | 2020-22

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introduction

This is static motion — an album I’ve been writing for the last two years.

As of this point in time (December 2022), the album is still a work in progress (the vocal recording process has not been started yet at all) but the writing and production for the album is nearing completion.

This is everything I’ve been working on for the album since July 2020 (although the actual writing and production process only really started taking shape in 2021). It’s a very personal part of me, and it records my lamentations and sentiments from ages 14 to 17 — and as a result, it’s also a capsule of my own growth and personal development.

I’ve been writing songs since I was 10. I’ve loved creative writing for as early as the moment I’ve started to have a seeming grasp on the English language. In a strictly academic sense, English has been my favorite subject growing up because of just how much I loved writing and creating, and how learning literature allowed me to read between the lines, learn about all the different ways to craft beautifully-written lines with meaning. In addition to my love for writing, introspection is the hallmark characteristic of my personality. So you couldn’t imagine how thrilling it was for me to discover the excitement of writing a song for the first time. I’m infamously not a great communicator in real life, but I love to talk in metaphors, to tell stories in my own unique voice, and so the songs I write became the voice I needed to explain myself and who I truly was.

So songwriting soon became the primary cathartic outlet for the entirety of my adolescence, and so over the last 7 years I’ve written well over 100 songs, of which a selection of those that are not in static motion can be found on the other page I’ve linked to further down below.

When I was 12, I started teaching myself production on Garageband. Since then I’ve genuinely fallen in love with music production and the intuitiveness of it all. The excitement of finding sounds that match the idea in your head, or just coming across something ethereal-sounding that you can incorporate creatively in a song. The manipulation of sounds using plugins to get it closer to that ‘ideal’ sound, or just to clean up the mix. And it is still immensely satisfying when I figure out how these technologies work by myself, since it does seem so daunting and complex when you look at it for the first time — but with intuition, repeated practice (and the occasional YouTube video tutorials), you familiarize yourself with the interface, and you feel that unbeatable sense of pride and accomplishment that I find is so exclusively attributed to music production over any other skill I’ve acquired in my life.

static motion marked the first work since my switch to Logic, and represented a point in my musical development in which I first somewhat started to find my own ‘sound’, as well as a newfound sense of maturity that was absent in the works preceding it. Below you’ll find the produced tracks in their current mixed form, as well as the lyrics to my songs. (As the vocal recording process has not begun yet, unfortunately I couldn’t provide the melodic lines for my songs as a reference, but I hope that the lyrics and produced tracks will be enough to provide an idea of my vision for your reference!)

Sometimes I feel as if I’m not good enough of a writer or producer to be saying all this, but nevertheless the process of ‘mastering’, or at the very least refining, my songwriting and production craft has been so rewarding thus far, especially as I’ve been doing all of this alone.

Though I’m still a considerable distance from where I want to be at this point in time, I do believe that the right guidance, collaboration and more experience will expedite my development such that I’ll be able to fully actualize my musical vision in a short amount of time. While I’m well aware of the imperfections in the mixing and production (it’s an album far from perfect, obviously), I genuinely hope that I will one day be able to bridge the gap between my music and a polished, professional, ready-to-be-released album. And, from the bottom of my heart, that is truly what I want more than anything.

Thank you for your time, and I hope you enjoy the album :)

Seraph

the album concept —

tread lightly over quicksand.

this was what inspired the album title static motion in 2020 when i first came up with it. this was what i wrote on july 28, 2020:

‘static motion’ feels quite like being stuck in quicksand

there is no moving forward

no moving backward

the only motion is down

sucked deeper and deeper into my own thoughts

I’m not regressing. I’m not making progress.

just stagnating.

in this album i talk about reminiscence. social anxiety. memories i romanticize. fears and aspirations. mindsets. attitudes. feeling inspired. feeling stuck. feeling revived. feeling drained.

the past.

the present.

the future.

static motion is a product of my quarantine, and in some way a showcase of who i have evolved to become as a person. it’s introspective, vulnerable (call it oversharing if you will), messy, and overdramatic.

but above that i wanted static motion to be a catalyst for change, to give me the ‘motion’ that i needed but was very much lacking in my life

my initial interpretation of the name ‘static motion’ was more pessimistic: it’s the feeling that time and the world is moving forward, but you’re at a standstill. ‘static motion’ is an oxymoron in nature, and i felt it was fitting thematically because it represented the contrast between the fast-paced, constantly everchanging motion of the world and a version of you that feels stuck or stagnating.

yet writing this album attributed a new meaning to the name ‘static motion’. in order not to be a static, motion is required for you to break out of it.

this album is about how it feels to be a static

and will document the process as i try to get out of it