Hey everyone - welcome back at the discotheque.
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For today's post, I thought I'd talk about how I made my debut album as dreamer eighty seven - '87, which was released independently through Bandcamp on September 2nd. In this post, you'll get the full breakdown of everything - from sample techniques, the backstories and inspirations for every track, and how I somehow pulled off my greatest work at the most stressful period of my life thus far.
Without further ado, let's get started!
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THE BACKSTORY:
Before we get into the making of '87 - I think a little backstory is needed.
Before I started making music as dreamer eighty seven - I was singularly known as Hackurr, and I mostly produced jungle, rave music and 90s inspired electronica, with the odd bit of IDM and house thrown in there for good measure. While producing this kind of music, across 2023 and 2024, I started to get more interested in future funk and French house music - I loved how funky and fun it was, and it made me feel happy and excited whenever I listened to it (and it still does now!)
Naturally, this made me interested in producing it - however I never quite managed to pull it off properly - a lot of attempts were either unfinished or deleted when I first started, and when I would make something I liked - I never quite knew how to release it to an audience of rave music fans, so I held off for a while, bar a few obvious examples.
In September 2024, I started my final year at secondary school (for all of the non-UK readers, basically the end of high school for us!) - and it was not fun at all. I hated the stress, the amount of free time I had significantly reducing, and the looming threat of exams which constantly hung over my head. To stay positive, I started listening to future funk (and especially French house) even more - and a few days before my first round of GCSE mocks, I finally decided, with the spare time I had - that I was going to really start trying to produce future funk and sample based house music - as I wanted to make music that was uplifting, fun and playful in these tough times. So, I did!
Across the next eight months, I mostly focused on flipping disco and old pop records in my bedroom and turning them into club jams - and despite the pressure I was facing at the time, I had some of the most fun times I've ever had producing, making these tracks. Over time, I built up enough ideas and tracks for an album, and here we are!
Okay, now you've got an idea on the backstory for the album, let's get into the tracks, one by one!
TRACK ONE - INTRO
The opener for '87 is a simple, slow filter house-y intro with some gritty synth work included for good measure. It was the last thing I did for the album - and it was initially intended to be the final track, aptly titled Last Orders - however after going on a heavy SebastiAn binge in late July, I decided to slow it down from it's original tempo of 128 BPM and shorten it, to essentially make my own version of Hudson River (although, I have to admit, that track is way more epic than '87's intro!)
Intro samples Give Up The Funk by BT Express - for it's chopping, I pitched up the original sample by two semitones and ended up making some very sporadic, slightly jittery chops directly from the song's opening, from about thirty five seconds in. I also used the hi-hats from Justice's Let There Be Light for a hi-hat roll mid-way through!
TRACK TWO - SUMMER HAZE
The first ever track I produced under the dreamer eighty seven alias - Summer Haze was recorded in two days at the start of November 2024. I was feeling particularly inspired by the work of ID Chief, FIBRE and Night Tempo for this track, so I decided to sample some 80s city pop, to give it that true future funk feel.
Summer Haze is built off of the opening riff of Tatsuro Yamashita's classic track from 1982 - Music Book. I pitched the sample up by a semitone, did a crap ton of chopping and added some thumping drums and a syncopated shaker loop, and I was pretty much there - however, to be extra quirky and strange, I decided to add some breaks during the second repetition of the main sample, and decided to add Funky Drummer by James Brown - because it sounded super funky (and it's one of my favourite breaks!) - after doing some mixing, a small bit of mastering and I finished the structuring, Summer Haze was done!
Fun fact: Summer Haze wasn't the track's original name - it was initially going to be called Ice Cream, before I changed it to Popsicles. After thinking it over at dinner, I decided to rename it Summer Haze - however if you look at the YouTube video for it, you can still see that the FLP file name is Popsicles!
TRACK THREE - CHEMISTRY
Produced and released a week after Summer Haze, Chemistry was my first attempt at trying to do a house track that was DJ friendly and built for clubs - and I think I did quite well!
Chemistry is built off the opening of Hiroshi Sato's city pop / R&B classic I Can't Wait - released also, in 1982. For this track, I pitched up the original sample by four semitones, created a small, three second loop based off of some stabs I took from the original, and went from there. About halfway through the song, I decided to go and include some samples from a show I enjoy - and my initial plan, was to sample Ramona from Scott Pilgrim Takes Off - however I later stumbled upon some iconic Breaking Bad samples, and inspired by the sampling techniques of The Phantom's Revenge, I decided to use them instead - hence why the track isn't called Tea, but is aptly called Chemistry.
I also decided to dig deep in the crates for some drum breaks to use during the bridge, and I eventually decided to use the break from Life Could by Rotary Connection, which remains one of my all time favourite breaks - as it's funky, short and super sweet.
TRACK FOUR - J-CARD
Written and produced a week and a half after Chemistry's release (man, I really was on a roll in the early days of the project...) - J-Card is my tribute to the disco era of the late 70s. For this track, I was heavily inspired by the work of The Phantom's Revenge - and this can be noted through the use of the hi-hats from Let There Be Light by Justice (again) and the frequent use of time stretching and tape stops, prominent in his early work.
I decided to use an extremely famous disco track for the main sample - that being Disco Inferno by The Trammps, most commonly known as one of the tracks on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. I hadn't seen anyone do anything with it, so I decided to flip the first verse - and the result I'm still super proud of. Although it's probably the most basic of the tracks on the album, I still play it regularly in my sets, and I think it has a whole lot of groove, still!
TRACK FIVE - CLUBS IN OSAKA
Ah, Clubs In Osaka. The oddball of the D87 project so far.
Remember how I said in the backstory section of the post that there was "the obvious example" when it comes to me releasing sample based house music? Well, Clubs In Osaka is that example - as it was produced, recorded and released nine months before the dreamer eighty seven project even started.
To sum it up - in early 2024, I was becoming obsessed with future funk - and after finding a city pop classic - Midnight Pretenders by Tomoko Aran one winter Saturday (in particular, February 17th 2024) - I decided to give sampling it a shot. Before this, my attempts at anything house based, or anything future funk related were god awful - hence why I said earlier that most of my older projects, I deleted.
Keeping that in mind, when I started playing around with the sample, I managed to pitch it up and find a good loop very quickly, making sure to chop it up frantically, especially as it had already been sampled by tons of future funk artists already. Slowly, what began as a 4-bar-loop idea became my first French house / disco house track - which I had completed by the end of the day. I felt super proud of it - and for a first proper go, I'd consider it a decent attempt!
It was initially released on my Bandcamp page under the Hackurr name, where it stayed for ten months - before I decided to re-release it as part of the D87 project in late December - hence why I consider it the oddball of the project, as it took ten months to get there!
TRACK SIX - FIFTY-FOUR (INTERLUDE)
Fifty-Four is the halfway point on '87 - it gives listeners a chance to breathe and reflect on the first half of the album, before launching them into the second half. Just like J-Card, Fifty Four is meant to be a tribute to the late 70s disco era - more importantly, it's meant to serve as a tribute for legendary Manhattan based night club Studio 54.
For the interlude, I decided to use a news report aired in July 1978 about the club - those that know their future funk well, will know the same news report was used in the beginning of Challenger by SAINT PEPSI - one of my all time favourite future funk tracks. I thought it'd be a nice touch, as I myself have fallen in love with disco thanks to starting this project - and I wanted to try and call back on the era that started it all.
TRACK SEVEN - BLADES
The opener to the second half of '87 - Blades is, in my opinion - the best track I've ever done. For it, I was heavily inspired by a lot of the artists from the bloghouse era - particularly Justice, The Phantom's Revenge and FutureFlashs. Blades is built off of The Sylvers' 1981 post disco classic I'm Getting Over - and it was recorded over a period of two days during my Easter holidays - just three and a half weeks before my final exams began.
It was initially planned to be a basic future funk track - however, I decided to scrap that idea entirely and start fresh - the first section I fully completed being the main chorus with the majority of the track's chops. I mostly based that section off of a two second loop, located about a minute into the original sample, and upon finishing the main chops - inspired by SebastiAn and Justice, I started to add minute details, such as tuned risers, sound effects and finely pitched hi-hat rolls - with one of them created to give the illusion of glass shattering (I did this by gradually increasing the pitch of four tiny hi-hats, before pitching up and time stretching the fifth!)
I then fleshed out the rest of the track - taking lots of time to do the build ups, the introduction and the outro - before I got onto mixing - which took me an extremely long time - as the first draft had way too much low end - it took fourteen headphone tests to get right!
Despite that, I'm incredibly proud of Blades, and I still consider it to be some of my best work. It was also the first French house track I've done to be released on a label - although it released on SoundCloud in mid-April, it was officially released through Creux La Nuit on April 30th - just a week and a half before my first major exam!
Huge shoutout to Opierm for giving me the opportunity to release it on CLN!
P.S - be sure to check out the remix that DJ Chidow and Myujikku did for their album Bits and Pieces Volume II!
TRACK EIGHT - PHASE
Phase is perhaps the most interesting track on '87 - particularly because of it's production, and the extremely long process of making it.
Phase was started on December 27th 2024, just days after Christmas. At the time, I had been listening to a lot of late 90s and early 2000s filter house, and I wanted to make something that could absolutely destroy clubs, with that kind of sound. So, I went sample digging on YouTube, and very quickly found Groove Me by underground disco artist Fern Kinney. I got to work in FL Studio - and I took the track's opening hook, pitched it up, and quickly was able to build the first three minutes with ease.
For the drums, I decided to do a lot of sampling - the main percussion loop featured throughout the track is from Daft Punk's 1997 classic Phoenix, and the main kick drum was initially lifted from The Furious Five by The Phantom's Revenge - this was later changed. I finished the first draft of the track on New Years Eve - and it sat on my hard drive for two weeks as a sweet, simple, 3 minute filter house workout which I hoped to mix at some point in January. A few weeks later, I returned to the studio, and listened to the track again, only to realize that it felt very empty and repetitive, so I decided to do some re-structuring, and added some vocal lines from the original track in - which worked perfectly.
I kept working on Phase throughout January, and by the end of the month, it was a DJ friendly, nine minute track which at it's first half, was a French house track, and by the second half, it turned to future funk. Then, I began the mixing process, and oh boy - it took me a very long time.
And by that, I mean it took me until August.
As I kept trying to mix Phase down properly - I kept running into issues - there was too much low end on my headphones, but it sounded great in my speakers. Then, there'd be too much high end, it'd be too quiet, too loud, and the list goes on and on. This led to there being over 150+ mix downs of the track, and after one final day of work in late July, I managed to mix it to a degree I was happy with, before doing the mastering in early August. That being said, Phase practically drove me insane, and I would often have to take monthly breaks as I had gotten so tired of the track and hearing the same "dun, dun dun..." loop almost daily while I worked on exam techniques or revised poetry.
However, now it's been released, I'm incredibly proud of it, and I'm glad it got done in the end, especially after all of the work I put into it!
TRACK NINE - PROJECTILE
The penultimate track of '87 - Projectile is essentially meant to be a follow up to Blades - high octane, extremely energetic, and a whole lot of fun. Projectile samples The Limit's 1982 electro disco classic Crimes of Passion - particularly, the first minute and a half. For the track, I pitched up the sample by about a semitone, and did tons of chopping inspired by Welsh filter house duo Vanguard (hence the huge amount of short, accentuated chops) while trying to sprinkle some Ed Banger flavor in there, too.
After all of the main chopping was done for the track, I decided to repeat the process I did for Blades, by adding lots of minute details such as vinyl crackling, hi-hat rolls, kick rolls, some synth stabs, tons of disco percussion samples, and a vocal sample from Bananas by The Phantom's Revenge, hidden in the main drops. Unlike Phase, the mixing process for Projectile was relatively easy, and it took about a day to finish up the mixing and mastering process.
That being said, this track actually had numerous different variations that I had worked on as far back as April - the first version - titled Crime, was a simple, 120 BPM, chillout version with minimal chopping, lots of effects (by that, I mean tons of phasers and reverb) and it was inspired by Cape Coral. The section version was titled Pseudodisco - and I got as far as doing some of the opening chops, before abandoning the project. and the third version was a draft version of Projectile with completely different drum work, a guitar bassline I programmed in that was meant to sound like the one in So Much by Vanguard, and barely any mixing - this was done in May. I later picked the idea up again on the Friday before my last exam, and did the production in a night!
TRACK TEN - BLADES (DOUBLE DA FUNK MIX)
While I was thinking of ideas on how to close '87 in late July, I had tons of ideas - I wanted to do a 2015 style future funk track inspired by ID Chief - I wanted to do a very long French house epic with tons of breaks and crazy stuff included - but I eventually settled on doing an alternate mix of Blades which is built for DJs and playing in sets.
For this edit of Blades, I was heavily inspired by Armand Van Helden's mix of Daft Punk's Da Funk (hence why I named this edit the Double Da Funk Mix, haha!) - and I wanted to create something that was a lot more deep and groovy compared to the original track - so I managed to recreate all of the original chops - added some extremely punchy drums with lots of low end, and kept this mix relatively minimalistic, to maximize the groove.
Overall, I'd consider it to be a very nice closer to the album, and I think it rounds it off on a nice note - we start off grooving, and we end, grooving!
There you have it, everyone!
I hope you enjoyed reading this post, and I hope you've found it interesting - I made sure to put a lot of work into this one!
Find '87 here:
As always, keep enjoying your stay at the discotheque.
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