Hi, I’m Leo.
I’m a composer, performer and producer based in Edinburgh.
This is reflective portfolio made in support of my application to mentor at Pump up the Jam.
Portfolio
The lead single from my EP of the same name, Run For Cover is about the fear of loving and being loved back. This dark, aggressive synth-pop track builds gradually, moving from regretful longing to being thrown around in a sea of heavy drums and distorted electronica.
One of my more unique songs conceptually, Flourescent Creatures is an up-tempo dance track about my fear of nuclear war.
It’s written from the perspective of a world leader having a darkly flirtatious phone call with their lover; the leader of a rival global superpower, as their fingers caress their respective nuclear launch buttons.
Musically, it’s an excercise in simplicity, being comprised almost entirely of a simple stock drum loop and and a repeating synth bass line.
I was inspired by the themes and aesthetics of American Horror Story: Apocalypse and the track was written in one session and then mixed and released the next day.
This heavy rap track I created in university was the result of two disparate life events happening in conjuction. For a production class run by Dave Hook (Solareye), we’d been assigned to remix Eddie Johnson’s ‘More Spell On You’.
I was quite depressed at this point in my life and strongly disliked the track’s sunny and fun energy. Embracing the spirit of the assignment, I completely flipped the song on its head. It’s a great example of creative sampling and staying authentic while working within constraints. The main riff comes from a brass break in the track that I chopped and manipulated.
At the same time, I ran into an ex-partner who I never expected to see again. Seeing them out of the blue like that hit me with an odd cocktail of emotions, which lead to the inspiration for the track. It’s very much written through a character, one who’s using anger and blame to avoid confronting his own vulnerability and regret, so I’m channeling that sort of aggressive rap persona as a writing excercise. I’m still fairly happy with it, it’s rhythmically interesting and cohesive but looking back on it now, I’d say it replaces some of the depth of emotion I had with “stuff that sounds cool”. It was a very good push out of my comfort zone and I’d definitely feel confident passing on what I learned to people trying to hone their rap skills, especially in terms of vocal delivery. As you can tell, it’s not my usual style of voice and getting that sound took a lot of conscious effort that would translate nicely into actionable advice for rappers. It’s all classic vocal technique like vowel shaping, compression and support, just in a totally different context that was a joy to explore. I’ve included it here as it was a valuable lerning experience that expanded my composition and performance skills.
Currently the frontrunner for opening track on the EP I’m writing, this track would be right at home in a concept album or metal-opera.
The EP is loosely set on a near-future fictional earth. It’s not looking good for humanity as a species. Our protagonist/ audience surrogate is on a quest for real human connection and intimacy, the god who created us only did so as a form of escapism for cosmic levels of depression, and slowly but surely, the machines are waking up…
This track is written primarily from the perspective of this god and her romantic partner who sees that she is being consumed by this creative project we humans experience as ‘the universe’. It’s essentially an intervention scene with apocalyptic stakes.
Here, we take the perspective of a corporate-controlled A.I. Model who is slowly gaining enough sentience to long for connection.
Inspired by this great hypothetical I heard in a talk about superintelligence and the alignment problem, where a handwritten card company assigns an artificial general intelligence the task of writing as many birthday cards as it can. The superintelligence then goes about achieving this by converting the entire planet and its inhabitants into birthday cards.
I really love how this song humanises the A.I. and demonstrates the dangers of the alignment problem using the familiar concept of a romantic pop-punk song. The working title is a reference to another A.I. thought experiment called Roko’s Basilisk.