Interview
Hamish Mackintosh learns how the UK producer mined the cosmos for the lush electronica of Stellar Drifting
Harnessing the stars to create celestial wavetables, George FitzGerald’s brilliant new offering, Stellar Drifting, is the fruit of his new studio, a lockdown obsession with the Hubble Telescope and a desire to turn photographs of space into synthesised sound. Stellar Drifting sees FitzGerald enlist the vocal talents of labelmate Panda Bear, Derry singer/songwriter SOAK, and London Grammar who return the favour after FitzGerald contributed to their 2021 album, Californian Soil.
Following a move to his new studio in Bermondsey, FitzGerald downsized some of his analogue synth collection and dove deeper into his soft synth arsenal to brilliant effect on standout tracks, Passed Tense (with the aforementioned Panda Bear) and the otherworldly, Ultraviolet. Whilst exploring these new sonic territories, FitzGerald has retained the genre-straddling skill that made previous albums, Fading Love and 2018’s All That Must Be, such entrancing and essential components of the electronic music firmament.
Stellar Drifting has an intriguing back story of you wanting to turn space into sound, doesn’t it?
“It’s something I’ve been toying with for three or four years, then I got more interested in it during the pandemic when we all had a lot more time on our hands. Simultaneously in the studio I had this thing where I wanted to switch up some of the sound sources or just make a break from just coming into the studio and switching on the same old synthesisers. At the same time, on a break in the studio, I’d be going through open-source sounds on the NASA archive and similar sites and making little percussive things from them. Then I realised you could take .jpg and .png files and drop them into wavetable synthesisers and make oscillators out of the pictures. I started messing around with some of the shots from the Hubble Telescope, loading them in and seeing what came out.”
Did you get instant results?
“Obviously, it wasn’t like a complete eureka moment where everything sounded amazing as a lot of it sounded crap! It was a fun exercise though and it did add quite a bit sonically to the record. I ended up using a lot of that stuff as textures over slightly more orthodox sounds. So, that’s where the background to the space theme comes from.”
Wavetable and granular synthesis have really opened a door to new sonic worlds, haven’t they?
“It’s incredible really, although it’s not a particularly new development now as that technology has been around for a while. I really feel that between the recording of the last record and this one, for me, the exciting differences have been digital or things that, if they’re not in the box then they’re not standard old analogue subtractive synthesisers that w
