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51 - A Last Picture From Voyager

51 - A Last Picture From Voyager

Giannis Kampiotis
February 14, 2023

Hello music people 👋

Today in the spotlight, A Last Picture From Voyager

Coming from France, he has spent years playing the guitar in bands, primarily in post-rock and post-metal genres. After going solo he wanted a way to fill the empty space. Listen to his, full & melancholic, music and you'll hear he has succeeded.

We get to see his beautiful studio while he tells us about his process 🎶

Read Time: 8 minutes 📰

Studio

Gear List

AMPS & GUITARS

Fender - Hot Rod Deluxe
SUNN - Model T Reissue
Telecaster - Deluxe Reissue
Travis Bean - Bass TB 2000

PEDALS

TAPE GEAR

Tascam - 414
Fostex - X-26
AKAI - 400DS MKII
Some cheap cassette players or tape players (Loewe Opta … )

SYNTHS

A modular synth
Casio - SK-5 Keyboard Sampler
Bontempi - B3
Bunch of vintages cheap synths

RECORDING

RME - Fireface
Logic Pro X

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Interview

Who are you and what is your relationship with music?

My name is Vincent and Ι live in Avignon, south of France.

I started playing music around 14yo. Ι am 41 now. My first instrument was a trumpet, then guitar and shortly after Ι joined some bands to make music with other people. I played for 20 years in bands, making post-rock, post-metal…

Making music never generated a sufficient income, however professional I try to be. Job wise I teach industrial design and graphic design. I have more liberties, more freedom in making music than in my other creative practices.

What's the one thing in your studio you can't live without?

Guitar pedals, so my pedalboard(s).

This is what Ι use for every track and every practice. Ι use it for guitars, but also after my modular synthesizer, for keyboards, at with tape players ….

And I can’t chose one pedal in particular. But, Ι must confess that micro-loopers are my favorites.

What is the least expensive piece of gear that gave you the most results?

Definitely my Loewe Opta Reel-to-Reel.

This is a simple tape recorder and player, bought for 10 euros at my favorite second hand store. I use it to listen to all the old tapes I find around, and with this little tape deck, I discovered some of the best samples I used into my albums and EP.

This is a part of my process: I am constantly looking for some kind of archive sounds I can manipulate and use to create music pieces.

Walk us through your process for creating and producing music.

As I said before, I am looking for old sounds I can use into my tracks.

My actual project « A Last Picture From Voyager » is a kind of musical tribute to the Voyager probe and its Golden record. So I use to pick some sounds from this Golden record, but from other sources too.

I am looking for sounds or voices or short part of music that have something I can relate to an idea that is close to the concept of the Golden record: to give an image of humanity, to speak about distance, about ourselves... The famous text from Carl Sagan « A Pale blue dot » is a source of inspiration too.

Sometimes I find the « archive sound » first, other times I have a guitar melody first or a synth part. It doesn’t matter to me, I am in a constant evolving process. I love to try news tricks, to experiment some « what if… ? » and see what happens.

What is a production technique that you always come back to?

Tape loops, cassette loops, loops.

This is my « time traveling process ». I love the non synchronized feeling tape loops can gave. And I love to increase this feeling by recording sound on sound on these loops.

So yes, tape loop is a technique I am always coming back.

How would you explain your style?

I know I put a lot of melancholy into most of my tracks. So perhaps a melancholic-ambient-post-rock genre ?

My references are MONO, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Russian Circles, Sigur Ros …

What’s your biggest struggle?

To get out from a melody I found that do not work.

I used to try too much to rearrange things because « I am sure that will work ». I wish to be able to stop as soon as I have doubts. Because I learned, that in my case, things must have some immediacy to work well. If I work on an idea for too long I know it will systematically fail. One of my tricks is to record some audio « notes » ; make some short videos of me playing a new melody or chords, and listen to it some weeks later.

If it works again, then I can try to make a track.

Has building a hardware setup changed your perspective on music or life in general?

When I was « only » a guitar player in bands, hardware was simple.

I had a few exotic guitar pedals, but mainly classic delay & reverb. When I started to play alone, I had to find ways to fill the audio space by myself. So loopers, tape loops, cassettes, multi-track cassette recorders, micro-loopers …. everything that allows me to let a sound live by itself changed my way of thinking about music.

When I played in post-metal bands, everything was metronome driven. We were playing gigs with metronome, video background on stage was synchronized with it… Today, I play most of my music without metronome, and to go further, most of my track have no synchronization. Things are moving slowly, layers intersect and shift. This is thanks to the cassette loop technique and its hardware.

One tip on how to spark creativity?

Spend as much time as possible making music, think about it all the time, even when you can't make music.

A book, movie, article, or album that has inspired you?

An excerpt from Carl Sagan's book Pale Blue Dot, inspired by an image taken by Voyager 1 on 14 February 1990.

As the spacecraft was departing our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, it turned it around for one last look at its home planet. On this picture, Earth appears as a tiny point of light. This text is all about our humanity, our « delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe »…