ARTIST OF THE MOMENT: Aspetuck
Rooted in those rare moments of tranquility throughout a parent’s life, Early Color is the auditory memoir of Griff Fulton aka Aspetuck through his time as a stay-at-home dad to a growing toddler making sense of the world. Ranging from field recording ambient musings to hazy thumping house, the album showcases the wide ranging production chops of Aspetuck to a point. To celebrate this occasion, we sat down with Griff, and dug into the details surrounding his seminal release on Never Late.
The album has a very intimate, personal, emotional tone to it. What is the overarching inspiration behind ‘Early Color’?
A recurrent theme throughout my music recently has been my experiences raising my now 2 year old daughter. I’m a stay at home dad during the week so the majority of my time these days is spent doing things that 2 year olds like to do - playing with legos & animal toys, hanging out at playgrounds, long walks with the stroller, visiting farms, etc. Time in the studio for me the past 2 years has evolved quite a bit & has become a way for me to unwind from the busy times of parenting & reset a bit. I think recently the music I’m making involves a lot of internal reflection around the growth of our little girl. There’s a certain melancholy it gives me, watching time go by so quickly & knowing that this chapter of a child’s life is such a tiny blip of time. On the other hand it can also be so intense & all encompassing, it’s completely exhausting but I find myself constantly trying to be as present as I possibly can because it’s going by so incredibly fast. One moment they’re crawling & blabbering, the next they’re climbing huge ladders on the playground & listing off different species of owls. So there’s an intense juxtaposition / contrast of emotions for me constantly which has also been a very broad theme across a lot of my music. A lot of parents describe parenting as the days being long but the months & years being extremely short which I’m completely understanding now.
What does the name ‘Early Color’ mean?
‘Early Color’ came to mind randomly one day last year when I was watching our kiddo playing with her toys on our living room floor. Seeing a toddler’s brain develop as they start to understand the world around them is a really beautiful & fascinating thing. For some reason it made me think about an analogy of someone entering the world seeing only in black & white & then ever so gradually color starts to appear. All of the sudden, the world around them is vibrant, interesting & full of things to explore. The name is about those specks of early color coming to the forefront of my daughter’s consciousness - senses developing over time & the world rapidly expanding around you.
There’s a variety of field recordings sprinkled throughout the album that really give some of the tracks a time & a place it seems. What are they / where are they from?
When the majority of the tracks on the album were coming together, similarly to my last album ‘Inanimate Distraction Object’, I was spending a lot of my time just entertaining our kid with toys & games on the floor. I take a lot of iPhone recordings of moments throughout any given week which is a way to catalog random memories that seem interesting or funny at the time. I also am constantly thinking about how I can involve them into music I’m working on in the studio. A lot of the time they just end up sitting in my phone but every once in a while I’ll be working on an idea & it’ll need something else to bring everything together or give it a more personal touch so I’ll go back through those memories. The recording throughout ‘Zoom Deck’ is from a particularly nice morning when I was up early & the birds were waking up. There are recordings across the album of her learning how to talk (in ‘Steel Wool’ for example), shaking shakers, smacking random toys, etc. It’s bittersweet to listen back to all of them, hearing how much she has grown in such a short amount of time. I’ve always viewed my music-making as a way for me to catalog memories in an abstract way that I can’t really express as easily in words. These recordings give the music an even more vivid personal connection to the time it was made.
How has your creativity changed since becoming a parent?
I’ve had to get a lot better at being hyper efficient with my time. For like a year & a half, everything throughout my day was broken up into 2 hour segments (because of nap times, etc) so now I’m very accustomed to working on ideas for 2 hours at a time. It has been challenging but change always has an interesting influence on my creativity & I’m realizing I’m happier having less time in the studio as opposed to more. It can feel super strange now when I’m able to have a longer amount of uninterrupted time which is something I never thought I’d hear myself say. The whole experience has allowed me to build up creative motivation in my head so that when I sit down in my studio during naptime I have some clear ideas already & can just get right to work. My workflow has always involved a lot of tinkering / experimentation to get ideas going but lately for example, I’ll passively come up with some modular patch ideas in my head I’ve wanted to try & as soon as it’s naptime, I can hop in the studio & bam, a new song pops out. I try to wake up super early as much as I can so I can get a few uninterrupted hours in the studio before my wife goes to work, which is always really nice when it happens. I do not consider myself to be a morning person at all but when I’m able to get up early and have that creative time, it’s just so peaceful & then I can come back to a new idea later that day.
Did the album come together in one specific point in time or are the tracks from various stages of a broader period?
The majority of it was made over the course of about 6 months, from late summer of 2022 into the winter of 2023. I find that a lot of my favorite studio output happens during seasonal transitions which is what happened with this album (late summer into fall and winter). A select few of the tracks on the album were made a few years ago, when I was living in LA during COVID & they just fit with the rest. FGH for example was a new take on an old idea from back in 2020, same with Atoll. When we first came up with the idea of doing a label together, I sent Gilles & Zach a pretty big playlist of unreleased music that felt to me like the beginnings of a new album. They decided the playlist should become our first release on Never Late & they helped narrow it down into the current tracklist which was incredibly helpful because I couldn’t really decide on which tracks would fit together best.
Can you tell us about how Never Late came to be?
I’ve been a huge fan of Delayed for a few years now, it has always been a platform that felt so special - a group of like-minded friends that share a super passionate love for the dancefloor that are eloquent, thoughtful & so supportive of up & coming artists in the scene. I’ve been sending music to them since the very beginnings of my Aspetuck project. Gilles & I gradually became acquaintances / musical pen pals over the internet these last couple of years & I ended up meeting him & Zach in person one afternoon in Brooklyn last year. I give a lot of the credit for the creation of the label to Jongmin from Oslated who originally suggested we all try to get together. Just over a year ago, the guys invited me to join a big crew to see John Talabot at Good Room which was when the label idea popped up. I’m sure a lot of people would agree with me that so many great ideas come from dance floor experiences!
What is your studio looking like lately and what gear was used to make the album?
It’s growing quite a bit.. I’m currently trying to figure out how to downsize things actually & make it feel cleaner / more intentional & less of a mad scientist’s lair. I’ve never been a huge gear guy but I’m starting to really enjoy daisy chaining lots of synths together, etc. but it gets really messy though. My studio is constantly covered in cables which is driving me nuts. I’ve been having a lot of fun recently recording sequences with my Moog DFAM & a bunch of modular gear I’ve started to collect. It’s a fun way to generate quick rhythmic ideas in short periods of time which fits in nicely with my stay at home dad schedule. It’s also teaching me so much about synthesis which is opening me up to tons of new creativity. I hadn’t quite started my modular journey when this album was made. A fair amount of sounds on the album came from in the box plugins like Omnisphere, a 303 clone, some Arturia emulations of synths like the DX7, CS-80, as well as samples from my sample collection & field recordings. I used my Behringer MS1 a fair amount as well as my EMU XL-7 which both have been studio staples of mine for a while.
Can you talk us through the creation process of the artwork?
A main visual theme Gilles, Zach & I all very quickly agreed on when we started Never Late was the use of collage. Our music tastes are quite broad & abstract so we felt like collages were the best way to visually express the music we’re interested in releasing on the label. I’ve had a lot of fun doing graphic design experiments for my self-released music over the years & decided to take on the artwork myself for this album. I wanted it to be a bit more analog & handmade this time, instead of only using photoshop, so I collected random bits & bobs from around the house & scanned them into the computer. I printed, rescanned over & over to just see what kinds of textures / grain would come out. It felt like a cool way to give the artwork a sense of time & place, similar to the idea of using field recordings in the music. It includes a leaf from my yard which reminds me that most of the album was made in & around the fall, a piece of foam block (the yellow sun on the artwork), some string, a little bit of green crayon scribbled by my daughter, & combined all of that with some clippings of old photos I took while living in LA. The blue for example is a zoomed in portion of a photo I took in Palm Springs last summer, the sailboat is from a photo of some boats off the coast of LA & the hand with the mandarin orange is my wife in Laurel Canyon. The final product involved a few dozen scans of printer paper with lots of different layers. It took me a while to finally nail the arrangement of everything but it was a really fun experience where I had to really push myself on something visual I wasn’t very confident I’d be able to achieve. I’m really excited to keep attempting them for future Never Late releases.
What are you inspired by musically at the moment? Are there any particular artists that are really catching your ear?
It’s an ever-changing thing for me but here’s a list of artists that I’m really into at this specific moment (the majority of which are featured in my mix):
Tammo Hesselink - his music & his DJ sets are so fascinating to me & I’m loving his latest album ‘Beam’ on Nous’klaer
VC-118A - I’ve just loved everything he’s put out the last couple of years. Heady, repetitive experimental electro tinged techno that is constantly moving. Machine music that sounds human.
Caldera - he has been an artist I’ve admired for a while & his output recently has been so so impressive. He makes really complex music seem easy to make, he’s also a super impressive DJ who is full of energy.
Alex Tomb - I love Alex’s stuff, his mixdowns are laser sharp & he makes emotional music with modular gear which is something I’ve been trying to do this year. It’s really hard!!
HVL - everything he releases is fascinating. His rhythms are amazing and he has this uncanny ability, like VC-118A, to make very human-sounding techno with gear which is really really hard to do.
Donato Dozzy - an obvious one but his discography is just too inspiring.
o.utlier - his album ‘Alaya’ on Appian is absolutely stunning. I love everything Appian puts out and this one just blew me away.
What’s next for Aspetuck?
I’ve got a couple of tracks coming out on compilations on friends’ labels. There will be a track on Far Blue’s first compilation in November called ‘Luge Lessons’. A track called ‘Two Hearted’ which will be on a Wex sub label vinyl-only compilation early next year. Also I just finished a track called ‘Bernie’s Grotto’ which will eventually be released on a vinyl comp on Metropolitan Soul Museum’s Kulture Galerie label.
I did a 4-track EP with Gilles & Irina (Moon Patrol) earlier this year which we’re super excited about. There are no plans for where it’ll release just yet but hopefully it’ll see the light in 2024. I might put together some more self-releases soon since I haven’t done one in a while now & have a bunch of finished material that’s ready to go. Other than that I’m just constantly chipping away at new ideas, refining old ones & honing in my studio.