What the Blizzard Composed
A song should change with the weather
A “bomb cyclone” is what they called it.
The Trumpian term for the storm that battered the East Coast to start that final February week. An insult to the snowy injury inflicted upon us a month earlier, whose frozen remnants still lined the sidewalks, greyedbrownedblacked by the minutiae of metropolitan living.
Come into my studio you icy force. There’s music for us to make.
3:30 pm - Sunday 2/22
Snow begins to fall, but does not yet accumulate. Merely an annoyance as my no-longer-white Air Max 95s slosh in puddles along Knickerbocker Avenue.
Bomb Cyclone (let’s call it BC) took over Ableton while I ran doomsday-like errands.
In the 90 minutes I was gone, this beachy track was in perpetual recording, with the wind controlling the punch of the bassline, the snowfall controlling the shimmering tremolo on the top lead (how much it wavers, and how fast it moves), temperature running the distortion and reverb on the second melodic layer. Light snow, light wind, the track sits relatively clean. The lead cuts through clearly and the drums stay close to the grid.
The calm before.
This would soon change as the grey afternoon turned to white night.
9:30 pm - Sunday 2/22
Snow was coming down pretty hard an hour ago, but being soft upon the nature around it, like Arnold Schwarzenegger doing ballet. The bare branches of cold trees appear strong beneath the mass of 5 inches of powder. The wind is here too, but the snow is sticky, unmoving from the things they cling to. If I were from an equatorial country, this would begin to look like a winter wonderland. But standing on my back porch watching the gangly branches shudder in the gusts, I know well the omen being foretold.
The lead that cut through cleanly this afternoon had now blanketed itself over the track. The tremolo, deepened by hours of snow accumulation and stronger winds, had turned into something wider and hazier. The drums are drifting now as the L train delays pile up, pulling them off the grid. Can you catch the groove in the gusts?
9:30 am - Monday 2/23
Waddling down Irving Avenue for a coffee like a psychopath. Walking in the middle of the road at an exaggerated lean to offset the snowy headwinds. The sidewalks are untouched; no one in their right mind would step outside in this tundra. This was the peak of the first classified “blizzard” in NYC since 2016, and I was getting a drip coffee.
The music went relatively unchanged from 12 hours ago; BC was working hard on the night shift. The lead still shimmering at blizzard speed, keys swimming in reverb, and the drums still loose as the MTA struggles to keep up. I sipped my joe while BC turned the knobs in Ableton back home.
On the walk back from the cafe, the kids in the park began their day of play. The snow had the consistency of corn starch, ideal for snowballs or snowpeople.
3:30 pm - Monday 2/23
A small but capable army of snowmen had taken over Maria Hernandez. This was the winter wonderland my jaded city-native self could get behind. With shitty Keurig coffee in travel mug in hand, I had to get outside for a moment before two hours of work calls took the remaining sunlight from my day.
With snow no longer falling and wind minimized to a light breeze, the song had returned to a resting state. The tremolo slowed back down, the drums tightened up, and the distortion on the second lead pulled back. The track remembered what it sounded like on a quiet afternoon.
Kids and dogs frolicking, and adults acting like kids, BC left us better off.
Consider This
A collaborator lacking human form, but rooted in human experience.
No AI composed any of this. Every note is mine; the blizzard we faced just controlled how you heard them.
What if a song’s journey didn't end once it dropped? What if it kept composing itself not by an algorithm, but by the actual world the artist places it in?
Maybe instead of making more songs, we should reconsider the possibility of what a song can be in its finished form.
That’s what I’m building. Much more to come, which I’ll document here.
If you want to hear how it sounds right now, click here.
Happy daylight savings, we’ve earned these 7 pm sunsets.
Elias