World Premiere: Ray Swamp – Ground

Behold the world premiere of Brooklyn artist Ray Swamp’s debut single “GROUND”. The track is a bedroom pop gem full of Casio Sax and dreamy vocals with a heavy backstory involving a friend’s death. Here’s how Swamp describes how the song came into being:

“I should’ve known something was up when I invited him to play with us at the old practice space. He didn’t look unhappy, more so a little unhinged, and distracted. The last time I saw him, we passed each other on the street, I was just waking up, getting a coffee when I saw him moving down the block, dressed in all black, towering over the buildings. He was smiling and we made plans that would never come to fruition.

Sometime after the funeral service, I dusted off an old Roland R-70 drum machine and put down a pattern. I had a bigger room then, where I could fit my massive JC-120 amp. So I plugged my guitar in and came up with some chord variations and added a bass line. When I opened my mouth, all that came out were fragments. It’s so hard to make sense of something while you are going through it. I wanted to preserve that feeling in the songs final form – grasping for clarity or at least some sort of explanation, when all that comes out are unfinished accusations pointed at yourself. The constant drilling, repetition, and…, and…, and…, which formed the structure. I added a midi kick to drive the track. I knew I wanted it to be pounding and grounding, to set a structure since the rest is essentially just mixed up, mashed up, half finished riffs on the theme.

So there’s the beginnings of the song. It was refined over the next year or so. And after a few months of pandemic quarantine living, I thought I should finally finish it. I sent the song to John who laid down some saxophone parts which I chopped up a bit. One of my favorite sounds is saxophone run through a delay pedal. It seems to always do all the talking, when the words you try to say make no sense.

I polished off the mix and sent it to Tony G who did a wonderfully danceable remix. When I first heard the ‘There’s no going back’ sample he built the song around, it clicked, of course, there’s the hook. All these questions, all these half finished thoughts, accusations, are destined to remain unfinished. “Inside the ground are feelings, yea”.