Song Premiere: Veinmelter, "All The Waves"

Veinmelter is a new adventure for multi-instrumentalist Winston Harrison. He began his musical career playing bass for singer-songwriter Gabe Dixon after they graduated from music school in Miami, Florida. After touring for many years, he began to release ambient music under the name Fuzzmuzz. Creating textural music with a very open structure just felt like the calling he had missed in his early music career. While he loved playing bass in a rock band, the calling as a bass player is to be holding things together rhythmically and harmonically all the time. Ambient music was freedom. It was a world of many sonic possibilities and surprises.

All of his solo work to date has been creating slowly evolving ambient music that unfolds without a rhythmic pulse. When Winston began writing songs over some of these tapestries of sound, he found that something new was happening. Adding voice and electronic drums felt too wide space to held together under the name Fuzzmuzz. So, Harrison brought together his work as textural ambient artist Fuzzmuzz with these dark and hypnotic songs to create Veinmelter. The name came from an interesting moment when someone mispronounced his middle name, which is Van Meter. But is also the title of a Herbie Hancock song.

Winston writes the kind of songs he wants to hear: mesmeric and cinematic pieces with ambient elements. On his debut EP Still In The Air (out on Nobember 20), he creates a sound that evokes a dreamy landscape pulled out of a Haruki Murakami novel; you are not sure where it is taking you, but you want to follow. Textures and beats are woven together with his sweet and vulnerable voice. He is always searching for the right texture to evoke all the feelings that do not make it into words, but sometimes sounds awaken words.

Much of the thematic material comes from personal experiences that were difficult to express in other mediums. A song like “All The Waves,” which Ghettoblaster has the pleasure of premiering today, the opening line ‘You take the boat out in the water, and all the waves move back to me’ sets it up.

This is what he had to say about the song:

“When one person is having problems and chooses to isolate emotionally, that all creates turbulence for their partner. You cannot be an island in a relationship.

“Musically, I wanted to portray this with the use of tension and modulation. The first note of the chorus hits the major 7th and slowly moves up to the tonic to create a rippling effect harmonically. In the keyboards I made use of sweeping filters, noise, and frequency modulation to create tension and calm. I imagined a pond that was still and when a wind picked up, you could almost see the air moving and creating ripples and small waves.”