Those familiar with Gregg Kowalsky’s past solo work might expect the former purveyor of meditative ambience to continue to explore the same minimalist ethos heard on 2017’s L’Orange, L’Orange, yet with his latest record Eso Es, Kowalsky embraced the unpredictable chaos of MIDI, returning to the software world of his formative years via a completely fresh creative process. The resulting record is a captivating listen – both tranquil and messy and somehow also sprawling yet minimal. We caught up with Gregg to discover more about the process of making the record, and learn more about his journey as a restless creative…
1 Firstly, we really enjoyed the new record, Eso Es. It’s a really captivating, lushly produced listen. What was the starting point?
Gregg Kowalsky: “I didn’t have one for a while and I was struggling. My last record was around five years ago. I always want to do something different so I just started playing around with an app on my iPad that was just a basic sequencer. I just started programming sequences just for fun. After a while I kind of liked the way that they were sounding. I ended up feeding them into Ableton Live’s audio-to-MIDI converter. That’s where everything sort of clicked. I’d never used MIDI aside from the odd track here and there. This was the first time that I really utilised MIDI data, the whole album became built around it.
“Aside from converting
