Overview
In early January 2014, Christian Henson and Spitfire’s Production Director Stanley Gabriel drove down to deep rural France and up a steep, winding mountain to a small and unassuming crofter’s cottage. Tines, screws and sheets of fibre glass lay sprawled around the premises, revealing the inner sanctum of a creative genius. This much anticipated day was preceded by two years of emails, a degree of coercion and a splash of circumstance and it was all about to pay off. As they stepped through into what they’d later refer to as “the Aladdin’s Cave for any music maker”, they saw shaped pieces of stainless steel hanging from the walls. Plastics of every shape and colour filled the room. Every utterance, every word, footstep or noise sent all of the wonderful resonating surfaces into a sympathetic chorus. Some reflected wistful and tine-like sounds, some like a feeding back sine wave, and others like a distinct and arcing thunderstorm. Inspired by their surroundings, Christian decided to commission the world’s first Titanium Euphone. It was finely crafted, and delivered by hand to their studios in London.
Background
Alongside its obvious sonic similarities to the Cristel Baschet, the Titanium Euphone has a more wholesome, consistent and musical nature across its broad dynamic range. Having used the instrument extensively on his scores for Alien Isolation and Robot Overlords, Christian gained an intimate understanding of the instrument throughout the spring and early summer of 2014. Once wrapped on those projects, Christian and the Spitfire Crew decamped to Air-Edel studios for a week of sampling. Euphone has been sampled in three configurations. The first two are with the 3 resonator cones in ‘Shrek formation’ (one at either side of the instrument) and the stainless steel resonator attached to the front. We recorded this setup with the stainless steel sheet in a ‘relaxed’ configuration, and then in a ‘restricted’ one, i.e. with the sheet pulled back. We then produced a series of crossfading modulators that mimic the extraordinary and chaotic sounds produced when the sheet is ‘pinged’. The third configuration had the stainless steel sheet removed, and the three cones placed in a line at the front for a more mellow and direct sound. Each configuration has ben deeply sampled with over 7 continuous hours of samples being delivered in our raw sessions.
This library contains 3 dynamic layers (which you access via your modulation wheel) for each configuration alongside some extraordinary percussive work with the instrument being played with soft vibraphone beaters over 3 dynamic layers. Plus an extensive library of live effects and additional techniques, including some remarkable harmonic glisses, some abuse of the instrument with a towel and some beautifully curated cluster chords.
