Premiere: Prieste5s - No Webs Between My Toes (NAGA)

Peace Portal · Premiere: Prieste5s - No Webs Between My Toes (NAGA)

Gracefully gliding her way into the catalog of Vancouver B.C. label NAGA, Prieste5s renders dreams reality with her Dances of the Birds of Paradise EP.

Preiste5s is Hellen Q Wu, a Berlin-based producer and live-coder. Drawing influence from the natural world, Hellen often includes field recordings and found sound in her music, opening conversations between organic and synthetic sonics. This is particularly true for her project Immaterial Earth, a record label exploring the relationships between ecosystem, organism, and the feelings evoked by one another.

On Dances of the Birds of Paradise, Hellen reimagining the transformation of strelitzia into their avian namesake beneath the enchantment of the full moon, conjuring flight from flora over the course of the record.

Peace Portal is pleased to premiere No Webs Between My Toes, in which Hellen weaves bird song with babbling brookes, evoking images of murmurations in the water. Its bass-driven halftime creates an immersive buoyancy, balancing between lunar firmament and earthen grounding. Perfectly poised for the come down, this is the sort of track to lull listeners into lofty dreams of their own before releasing them into the night.

The full EP, available now for pre-order, releases on Bandcamp Friday September 18th.

Below Hellen shares some thoughts on the release in her own words:

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I find it magical how music can place organic sound in unexpected contexts, building imagined worlds out of the familiar, such as the conversations of bird song and water in this piece. What do you feel is the power of recontextualizing the natural world in this way through music?

A lot of my work revolves around the idea of introspectively exploring one’s own inner world through one’s relationship with nature. I’ve always seen the natural world as a reflection of one’s inner emotional universe, and for me, the process of personally connecting with nature mirrors the process of reconnecting with oneself.

I also deeply believe that the magic and emotional depth we feel in this life is created within our own minds by our unique interpretations of the sensory/tactile input from the world around us. In childhood, everything seems so warm, beautiful, and magical; more than it does now as an adult - not necessarily because it was, but because as children, we view and interpret our experiences through a lens of wonder, curiosity, and playful intrigue. When we think back to those childhood memories, we also often see them in this hazy glowing light, . For me, recreating that feeling has been a central goal of a lot of my less dance-focused / floor-focused music.

It’s a big part of what I try to do with Immaterial Earth, my more ambient-leaning project. As a child and a teenager, I spent a lot of time outdoors, and it really influenced the way I connect intrinsically with myself. With my productions on Immaterial Earth, I always use a lot of field recordings I’ve collected myself over the years from hikes, travels, and random walks in the forest as well as found sounds from documentaries, radio shows, movies - recontextualizing these sounds to give them a new meaning while keeping their innate characteristics.

For example, most of my pads, atmospheres, and drones are created by manipulating bits of field recordings in specific ways; stretching them, resampling them, using spectral effects, you name it. I’ve always found it really fulfilling to be able to change a raw sound to a point where it is unrecognizable from its original form. At the same time, there are also many sounds I leave more or less in their original forms (e.g. recordings of streams, foley as percussion, etc). I feel like this process is symbolic for how we each go through life, with experiences sometimes changing parts of us completely, while also leaving other parts unchanged. It’s also what I tried to do with “No Webs Between My Toes”. You can hear many nature sounds as they are, but a lot of these raw sounds were reworked to create glitches, drones, and textures meant to evoke the image of a distant memory or a nebulous dream - ethereal, hazy, faraway.

Ultimately, a lot of the techniques I use when making music are quite simple, but personally meaningful. For me, producing is a highly symbolic and intimate process, and I find it really fulfilling being able to imbue my work with elements from the real world, from my personal life, from nature and the beauty of the every day.

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What part of the transformation from plant to animal do you feel No Webs Between My Toes represents in particular?

No Webs Between My Toes represents the initial moment when the flower turns into a bird. There is a feeling of astonishment and surprise regarding the transformation, as well as happiness and relief towards the realization that the transformation has granted it the power of flight. It is overjoyed that it is no longer anchored to the soil, and thankful that it has not become a flightless water bird, and instead, a creature that can enjoy the freedom of the skies.

I wanted the track to simultaneously capture emotions of awe, joy, and relief - the feeling that you get when things in life have somehow (by fate) worked out the way you had wished, even though the circumstances were out of your control.

Moments of change always carry an undertone of uncertainty, hesitancy, and doubt. I wanted to convey that feeling through the juxtaposition of organic and glitchy sound design, as well as a certain rawness and awkward randomness in the composition. At the same time, change within oneself (which is what the flower/bird experienced through this transformation) brings about feelings of excitement and awe, particularly in relation towards the possibility of further self-discovery. I wanted the track to convey this through an overall uplifting and hopeful atmosphere, created with warm pads, airy textures, and calming, evocative natural sounds.

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Can you share the process of interpreting your dream into music?

I am able to recall many of my dreams, but at the same time, the moment when I wake up is often more or less a hazy blur. I often can’t immediately remember the details about specific events that happened in a dream, but what I get left with is a general feeling, some colors, and bits and pieces of disjointed memory. When I first started making these tracks, I started with a feeling - colorful undertones of red, purple, and yellow, a warm mistiness, and a comforting whimsical sensation.

To be honest, for quite some time, I was really lost about the style of the EP. I knew the concept of what I wanted to make and that the dream I wanted to express, but after coming up with a few drafts of tracks, I wasn’t really satisfied any of them. It took several more attempts before I felt like I was able to convey that feeling and that story the dream had left me with. And of course, I wanted the names of the tracks to reflect not just the different moments / happenings of my dream, but also the magic and otherworldliness I felt when waking up.

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If this piece were represented by a particular Bird of Paradise, or its dance, which would you say captures the essence best?

Personally, I think the Greater Bird-of-Paradise would represent this track the best. Its colors and plumage look the most similar to the flower, so it’s not a far stretch of the imagination that some of them have undergone this magical transformation under the full moon. Its dance is a bit awkward-looking, which I feel like really captures the vibe of the track, and makes a lot of sense for a creature which had been a plant only a day before!

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