I Went on Vacation and Came Back with a New Album

Volume 97 - three minute read

August 3rd, 2018

When you go on vacation, you typically expect to do almost nothing productive, right? You’re supposed to escape from your work and take time away from the day-to-day routine you have at home. For whatever reason on this last vacation, I couldn’t get away from working on music.

I’m a pretty sensitive person in all honesty and find it frustrating to express myself sometimes. I like to keep to myself and not “burden” others with my emotions. I confide fully in very few people and even then don’t open up often to others. Loneliness and overarching existential fear can sometimes get the best of me and leave me feeling defeated and unsure of things in life despite how easy I feel life is for me compared to a lot of others.

How do you cope with something like this in a productive and healthy way? For me it’s music and that’s what my last trip to Florida lead to.

Being off from full-time work responsibilities left me with quite a bit of free time to spend with my family and also by myself. Free time for me equals time to think, which can sometimes lead to the emotions I explained above. I wanted a way to vent and a way to try out deep ambient music styles in my Cordio discography and found this to be the perfect opportunity.

I decided to make and release an album in about 4 days.

I got up early each of these mornings and worked on music while the rest of my family was at their day jobs. I quickly discovered my workflow for making deeply ambient tracks and became addicted to working on them. Pure and raw emotion was easily felt ringing throughout the tracks, each with their own mood and levels of eeriness that seemed to sonically convey struggles and emotions I felt come with my introverted personality.

I decided early on this album would be based around introversion and named the album before even finishing the first track. I went with a play on the original word introvert, creating Vertintro.

Each of the track names also represents certain aspects or stages of being an introvert that I feel closely in tune with; Afraid, Anxious, Alone, Adamant, and Avoided. I won’t go into explaining each of the tracks to allow your own interpretation, but believe it’s helpful to provide that initial context when you’re listening.

Like all my album covers, I wanted the album art to convey emotion and mood as a visual aid here. I’ll spare you from me showing each iteration of the album art, but am exceptionally content with the final version. I feel it does a really great job at attracting a listener and providing a visual feel and cue for what you’re about to listen to.

While Vertintro is stylistically different and minimal in comparison to my other bodies of work, I believe it to be a great addition that will not only compliment my other work, but become another style of expression I want to keep pursuing in the future.

Long story short—I finished the album in time, finalizing the artwork laying on the guest room bed at my mom’s house. As usual the album was made with just Ableton and OP-1, with the main background melodies being digitally generated in Ableton with no hardware. It was an experience-and-a-half to make, and I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Give Vertintro a listen here →

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Dennis Cortés
Designer that also codes, illustrates, writes weekly articles, and produces music. Hispanic. Pokémon Master.
www.cortes.us