by Alex Panait
I started recording my own music about seven years ago, when I was 14, by myself in my bedroom – like a lot of people do. I haven’t formally released anything over this period of time, but I still organized my songs into albums and made artworks for each of them. I’ve got about 11 of these ‘albums’ which I’ll probably never release, but they are certainly a good way to document my evolution as a singer-songwriter.
That being said, this first LP Postponed Arrivals means a lot to me – not only because it’s the first one, but it’s also the most uncomfortably personal thing I ever wrote.
Listen to the album while reading the text.
Most of the material that’s on the record was written in the winter of 2017/2018. I was a first-year undergrad, studying music in Brighton, England. I was born in Brasov, Romania, and lived there for most of my life, and 2017 was the first time that I was away in another country by myself. The whole album is mainly focused on specific processes that were going on in my life – suddenly losing contact with most of the people I cared about, finding myself in a foreign environment and struggling to adapt, waiting for things to get better. Right before I moved to England, I went through a painful breakup, which influenced most of the lyrical themes on the album.
The majority of the tracks were recorded inside the main campus studio at the University of Sussex, using the equipment provided – which was pretty awesome because I was broke. Writing the album didn’t take that long, but it took me about six months to fully record it, as I was going through severe depressive episodes and was losing my motivation – I assume this affected the overall mood of the record to a certain extent. In between the recording of the album and its release I spent a lot of time mixing and mastering it, which sort of turned into an obsession at some point. I’m still not very satisfied with all of it, but thankfully I managed to let it go.
I guess you could say that one of the main themes on the album is loneliness, but I felt I wanted to portray a certain sense of communion and connection between the lonely people who are feeling the same. I wrote ‘Falling Collective’ as a way to represent this idea – it’s the clichés we all experience which ironically bring us together.
As for me, this project has been a long time coming, I’m glad that I finally got to release something, and even though it’s not perfect, I guess it had to start from somewhere.
Ego Store – Postponed Arrivals
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