e4444e, Photograph by Brendan Frost
Early in his career, Romy Church – the Mulubinba/Newcastle-based musician who releases under the name e4444e – earned a reputation as a prolific creator.
The project’s first three LPs, Coldstream Road, Autumnal Eve and I Spend All Day Drawing A Circle, were all released within a year of one another, the former two via Spunk Records and the latter through Dinosaur City Records.
I Spend All Day… is a patient, introspective album full of contrasts – organic and artificial, human and vegetable, sound card and acoustic guitar, double-tracked vocal and incidental studio noise. After its September 2022 release, Church created another contrast: where once there had been activity now there was silence.
e4444e didn’t release music for nearly two years, and when Church resurfaced, with the 2024 EP Soft Sighing Dusk I Never See You, he’d slyly updated his sound. It had become more direct, more open-faced, and not so elliptical.
This trend continues on e4444e’s fourth album, Authentic Natural Tradition, released by Dinosaur City in late May. The album is, on one hand, Church’s most straightforward singer-songwriter record to date. But it’s also his most expansive, with arrangements recalling the baroque pop of Sparklehorse or The Magnetic Fields, while songs like “Forward Upward” would sound at home on cult experimental label Kranky.
Church recorded, performed and mixed the album himself, with the odd bit of guitar or percussion added by one of his friends. Here, Church tells us about some of the album’s more curious influences, including the OpenAI image-making tool DALL·E 2, a frequency modulation synthesiser, and many big pots of coffee.
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The things that influenced e4444e's Authentic Natural Tradition
DALL·E 2
I made this album in late 2023. Around that time there was a version of OpenAI’s image generator called DALL·E 2. Since then they’ve updated the engine and made it very different, and for my particular interest, very boring. This version was very easy to confuse and to make images that didn’t make sense. I was asking it to do things that weren’t necessarily visual, a lot of things about transcendence, everything going toward an apex in the sky, devotional feelings, etc. It would make really strange, wonderful things.
Recorded music for me is a really visual, internal world-reflecting practice. One of the reasons I like recording so much is because you can paint with all sorts of textures, shapes and directions. I think watching myself write out the prompts for these images made me more aware of what I was going for when I was making music. Batches of songs will come out of worlds that seem to come out of nowhere, like portals. And looking back on the album, it seems like there are moments where the songs get sucked into a big apex in the sky, or where a timeless feeling draws everything out. I wouldn’t say I did any of this too intentionally, but looking back I notice things like that.
DALL·E 2023-08-08
Large coffee percolator
We are talking abusing intoxicants while recording. I would drink so much coffee, a large percolator’s worth. And not eat in the morning. Horrible stuff. But it can get you flying so high! For me it’s about being consumed. Consumed by the sound, consumed by the fire.
DALL·E 2023-08-08
Elektron Digitone
This is a really popular and user-friendly FM synth made by Elektron. It made me dream of oceans of folding sound and harmonics. I think it’s on almost every song?
One of the ways to perceive this stuff for me was creating a relationship between clearly defined arrangements, acoustic sounds and instruments, and this deep ocean or mist of synthesised sound. Having the two interact with each other, fold in on each other.
I also think, upon reflection, that the marriage of these two things – this eternal textural, oceanic sound and a soul-like, narrator based song – is something I’m going for a lot in my music.
DALL·E 2023-08-08
Authentic Natural Tradition launch shows
Fri 8 Aug – Dayliketoday Studios, Mulubinba/Newcastle NSW
Sat 9 Aug – Paddington Uniting Church, Gadigal/Sydney NSW
Fri 12 Sep – Tha Cactus Room, Naarm/Melbourne VIC
Tickets here
The album is out now via Dinosaur City Records.
