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CMU Approved
Approved: Alev Lenz
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 3 October 2019
Songwriter and composer Alev Lenz has just returned with her latest album, ‘3’, a stunning collection of twelve largely vocal-led songs, spanning trad folk, electronic music and contemporary classical. You may already have come across one track from it, ‘May The Angels’, in Netflix series ‘Dark’. Exhilaratingly experimental, the songwriting is also tightly and meticulously crafted, resulting in a wholly satisfying listen.
As complete as it feels, it also has the potential to live beyond the confines of a traditional album, because she’s also releasing an accompanying sample pack for other music-makers alongside it. Featuring drones, vocals and textural beds created both from sounds used on the album and others inspired by it, it’s promoted as being “designed to enhance your cinematic scores and add haunting textures and ambience to your songwriting”.
“I recently did a score where I used parts of my sounds and voice, re-worked them, modulated them, distorted them and pitched them”, says Lenz. “[It] led me places I wouldn’t have gone just by envisioning it. I hope these sounds will get you motivated to go on a painting spree. To take the paintbrush, to get your hands in and plant new strange seeds”.
“Making this library was quite the journey for myself too”, she adds. It took her back into the creative process, but was also “a deep dive into the question [of] what the core of creative work is. I thought it would be a much more technical journey but it was a philosophical one”.
She goes on: “As a singer and an album artist … what I do comes literally from within myself, so how do you sample humanity? And would you want to? I tried perfectionism, I tried internalising the machine and oh my… that wore me out. I am not a machine, as hard as I try. But up against my sheer computing powers, through this journey of making a sampling library, I discovered my essence of my writing yet again. And with it the album, again!”
Find out more about the sample library – and watch a walkthrough with Lenz herself – here. And watch the new video for album track ‘The Chair’ here:
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