Detroit native and Brooklyn resident Lauren Flax has released her new EP Out Of Reality. The six-track project comes with five originals and a Skream remix, covering the gamut of what electronic music can be. There are tracks that bring the acid and change tempo like “Body Control” as if she was mixing BPMs on a DJ mixer, smoother, atmospheric tracks like “I’m Gonna Get You” and the ambient finale “The Endless Knot” that ties the knot on this project.
This is one of the biggest projects of Flax’s career today, following up numerous other EPs and collaborations over her nearly decade making music. We wanted to get a better idea of how this project came together, so we asked Flax to show us How It Was Made in a new feature. She breaks down the production process behind the project with the synths, drum machine, guitar and cello used. The Prophet 6 was critical to this.
Get your copy of the EP now and listen as you read.
“With Out of Reality, I boiled it down to the absolute essentials. A drum machine, 1 synth, guitar, cello and voice. This is one of the sparsest tracks I have written drum wise, so it gave me a lot of room for those lush delays. Every synth sound comes from my Prophet 6 and funny enough; I didn’t realize the Prophet was out of tune until I started to write the guitar parts. So instead of re-recording the many layers of the Prophet, I ended up detuning my guitar.”
1. Prophet 6
This entire Out of Reality EP was honestly an exploration of my Prophet 6. I already use the synth religiously but I decided to go deeper in terms of what she can do as an arpeggiator. I never really got into the arpeggiator before this so it was fun to see how far I could push it. I started to love putting more complex chords in to see what would come out while playing with the different mathematical settings. The results were really fun and interesting, especially on the track on the EP titled “Asher.”
2. Roland TB-03
I really enjoy the ease of use of the Roland TB-03. Although its not true analog, you can still get huge acid lines out of it. It’s a very stable machine. I tend to go back and forth between this and the x0xbox, since the x0x is a bit more unpredictable but sometimes unpredictable is inspiring. Sometimes happy accidents can do the trick as well. The one we have here in the studio is modded out. For “Out of Reality” and “I’m Gonna Get You,” I kept strictly to the TB-03.
3. Roland TR8S
For an all around drum machine that goes a long way, its hard to beat the Roland TR8S, especially for the cost. 808, 909, 707, 606. While this machine comes with plenty more to work with, I am all for the classic drum sounds so its no surprise that those are the kits I used for this EP. Plus when playing live, its important to me to create movement in the drums so being able to effect the decay and have it sound so natural is huge for me.
4. Cello Made By Gottfried Raabs
There’s nothing more beautiful to me than cello. I was lucky enough to get to work with Adele Stein on this song since her Broadway show, Dear Evan Hansen was unfortunately on hiatus for the time being due to COVID. It’s my favorite thing in the world to combine classical and contemporary sounds on a song and she is so versatile so it ended up being pretty magical. I love what she wrote.
5. Fender Telecaster
I bought this guitar when I was 17 years old. It’s the guitar I wrote and toured with as CREEP and I still record with it today. It’s been a minute since I’ve played guitar on anything since I’ve pretty much just been focusing on underground dance music the last 5 or 6 years. It felt really great to get back to into it.
