Influences: Giraffage

San Francisco producer completes the circle...

Sometimes you just need to go back home.

Retreating to his bedroom, San Francisco producer Charlie Yin sought out his old records, the reasons he fell in love with music in the first place.

Allowing these influences to seep back into his work, he found renewal, and no small degree of inspiration.

The new Giraffage album 'Too Real' is the result. Out now, it's a marvellous return, a creative, otherworldly return, fusing his nascent electronics with a myriad of other sounds.

Here, Giraffage tells Clash a little about the sounds that informed his new project…

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Soichi Terada & Shinichiro Yokota – 'Got To Be Real'

I love the vibes and sounds of this song. A lot of the electric piano DX7 sounds that are present throughout Too Real are heavily influenced by tracks like this. Soichi Terada sonically was heavily influential on this record. I definitely tried to emulate a lot of the sounds that he utilised with his work in the soundtrack for the Ape Escape video series, for my own sonic palette.

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Interpol – 'Obstacle 1'

I’ve been listening to Interpol since I was in middle school. It was unlike anything I had ever heard at that time and it inspired me to try and learn guitar.

The whole record 'Turn On The Bright Lights' has been heavily influential to me throughout my youth and a lot of the melodic sensibilities and harmonies have invariably crept their way into my songwriting today. When I was writing my song 'Slowly' I tried to emulate that 'Obstacle 1' bassline during the verse.

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Lone – 'Airglow Fires'

Lone has some of the best chord progressions in modern electronic music. A lot of tracks were influenced by the way he approaches harmony. Tracks like 'Edge' and 'Green Tea' are harmonically very influenced by Lone’s chord progressions.

'Airglow Fires' has such a weird chord progression that doesn’t make too much sense, but still manages to sound so good. I tried to channel that ethos into a lot of tracks on 'Too Real'.

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Boards Of Canada – 'Over The Horizon Radar'

The fuzziness and lo-fi nature of Boards Of Canada was very influential on the making of this record. I distinctly remember putting this track through spectrum analysers and multi-band analysers – isolating different frequencies and ranges in order to analyse the song and try to figure out how Boards Of Canada managed to glue all the sounds together.

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My Bloody Valentine – 'When You Sleep'

I’ve been listening to a lot of My Bloody Valentine throughout the writing of this album. I really like the way they use repetition to really drive a theme. I also really love the huge wall of sound aesthetic that they use for a lot of their songs.

For my track 'Maybes', I recorded a bunch of guitars during the drop, using effects and pedals that were reminiscent of My Bloody Valentine stuff. My Bloody Valentine was a direct influence to the way that track sounded sonically.

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'Too Real' is out now.

Catch Giraffage at the following shows:

February
7 London The Jazz Cafe
8 Bristol Thekla
9 Leeds Belgrave Music Hall

For tickets to the latest Giraffage shows click HERE.

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