Rare, Forever
DJ and producer Leon Vynehall has spent the best part of the last decade producing electronic music that inspires instinctual dancefloor movement as much as it does an emotional response from its listeners. His 2018 debut LP*Nothing Is Still* was the culmination of five years spent researching his family history and writing a novella that, along with its accompanying music, produced an impressionistic account of his grandparents’ emigration from the UK to New York. When it came to his second full-length project, he decided to take a different tack. “I didn’t want to be constrained by a set of rules,” he tells Apple Music. “I wanted to reject the whole idea of narrative and story—like abstract painters following where the painting was telling them to go, I would sit down, pick up an instrument and experiment.” That path, however, left Vynehall confounded. “When I listened back, I didn’t even recognize the person that was speaking to me through the monitors—it all seemed so confused,” he says. He decided to put the project to one side, he had his 30th birthday and took a trip to LA. There, he experimented with psychedelics one evening and, as he came out of his trip, he felt his mind clear. “I realized that I wanted to use music as some sort of therapy, that I don’t have any answers, it’s just a reflection of an ongoing process,” he says. The result is *Rare, Forever*—a work that is at turns freeform and yet, in typical Vynehall fashion, deeply personal. Tracks like opener “Ecce! Ego!” and “Farewell! Magnus Gabbro” sweep through a cinematic orchestration of synth strings in an approximation of Vynehall’s own artistic process to find purpose, while the club-oriented “Dumbo”, “Mothra” and “Snakeskin ∞ Has-Been” take charge of an inner sense of freedom and playfulness. All the while, references are made to everyone from Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa to philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Read on for Leon Vynehall’s thoughts on this deeply immersive and intuitive record, track by track. **Ecce! Ego!** ‘‘Ecce ego’ is Latin and it means ‘behold me’. I named the song that because I wanted this to be the introduction to the record and it feels like a continuation from *Nothing Is Still*. It starts off with a similar string arrangement and build-up in textures but then I wanted it to flip, almost like when you spin a mirror around and you see a new image. I feel like this song’s twin is “Envelopes” from the last record and funnily enough “Envelopes” was the first song I wrote for *Nothing Is Still*, while “Ecce Ego” was one of the first things I wrote for this one.” **In>Pin** “This is a representation of the internal conversations that we have with ourselves when we’re trying to make something, the imposter syndrome or all these different voices that speak to you about where you should go and what you should be doing. The vocals on the track are a mix of poems from a Portuguese writer called Fernando Pessoa, and another from the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard, as well as my own words. It’s ultimately like the hesitation just before you do something—it is the set-up to the whole thesis of the record.” **Mothra** “‘Mothra’ plays like the kind of left-field club track that I’m more known for, but I wanted it to feel like it was something growing and then as it gets to the middle eight—the big crescendo part and that swelling sense of euphoric epiphany—it all slips away before it’s fully realized, leaving you to drive forward to the next track.” **Alichea Vella Amor** “This is a love song for my partner Alice, who is always there for me. Alichea is the nickname that my partner’s family would give her when she was younger and ‘vella amor’ means ‘old love.’ I wanted to put this track in the record as a reminder that, even though this is an album that is about the self, about the psyche, you can’t have the self without others around you, and especially the people that you love.” **Snakeskin ∞ Has-Been** “I wanted to make this track super clubby but I also wanted to make sure that it wasn’t like anything I’d done before. I’ve always been fascinated by why and how snakes shed their skin. They constantly leave this artefact behind of what they were and I’d like to think about my old records as these memories of where I was at that time of making them. The infinity sign is the snake that eats itself and it’s symbolic of me needing to evolve and move forward, to push through the thoughts that you are a ‘has-been’ before shedding that skin and becoming anew.” **Worm (& Closer & Closer)** “The worm is the idea, the thing that you’re trying to find wriggling around under the surface to give you a sense of purpose. The snippets of singing that are soaring over the top, saying ‘getting higher and higher,’ ‘I feel it,’ ‘I keep it,’ and ‘it’s taking over me,’ are a representation of you beginning to find it. I’m not really a lyricist. I’m more someone that loves words and then tries to make them feel rhythmic. I find phrases and then make uses for them. **An Exhale** “This a release—finally letting out that tense, deep breath out that you’ve been holding in. This song is the one that I attribute most to the psychedelic experience I had in LA. I wanted it to feel like it’s constantly unfurling, building up and being joyful. It’s the highest point within this overarching record—a moment where you feel like you’re getting somewhere.” **Dumbo** “‘Dumbo’ is meant to be really fun and playful—it’s the most tongue-in-cheek song on the record. I take what I do really seriously, I put everything into it, but on a personal level I’m kind of an idiot. This track is more about embracing that inner child and that super free version of yourself because, as much as you need to be considered, you also need to be playful and experimental and just let go.” **Farewell! Magnus Gabbro** “This is probably one of the most honest pieces of music I’ve ever written. I was very stuck when I wrote this—I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere—and I really wanted it to be a snapshot of how I was feeling. I’d been on the Isle of Skye and the mountain ranges there are made of this rock called gabbro and I felt like what was inside me was this big rock that I needed to move. So I got into the studio and I started playing this drone and I made these two organs oscillate at different points so it felt like I was vibrating within the room and meditating within the sounds. Ultimately, this song became a meditative drone track to say goodbye to that big boulder inside me.” **All I See Is You, Velvet Brown** “This is the final gesture of the record, the end of this particular conversation. I wanted to try and personify the feeling of having a guiding force in explorations like these, and the image of velvet kept coming up, which I tried to put into sound. I found the poem that goes with it very reassuring, as it illustrates how we learn important lessons at times of self-discovery and, although we might not use them again, they’ll always be there.”
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