Flup Volta Releases ‘Myosotis’ EP

When the forthcoming release of ‘Myosotis’ reached our inbox from alias ‘Flup Volta’, I was intrigued to hear what the former Insight artist had been up to.

You’d have to rewind the clock back to 2018 to remember the collaborative single ‘Durgun‘ from their former alias ‘Fluxton’ that later made its way onto our ‘The Singles (2015-2020)‘ compilation album. Since then, the artist has been experimenting with sound design for video game soundtracks as well as working alongside YouTube channels and independent game developers.

We reached out to the Flup Volta in wake of their latest future garage EP ‘Myosotis‘ and to discover what the last 4 years had brought them as well as diving into the concept of the 4-track EP. You can follow and support the artist on Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Instagram and Twitter.

I am a music producer and composer from Central Europe. In the past few years I have been lucky enough to be able to work on music for various projects like video game soundtracks, background music for YouTube channels and trailer music for indie games. However with all of that I started feeling like I am sacrificing my artistic vision and I didn’t have too much time for writing music for personal enjoyment only. I was also going through a lot of introspection, since I tried to figure out some very personal things about myself and my identity. On top of that, when the pandemic hit the world, I switched to completely working from home and found myself completely isolated. Social media and messaging apps suddenly became the main way to stay in touch with others and meet new people.

All of these things combined led to me starting to write some very personal music again and figuring out how to make music only for myself. It might sound selfish, but I think this is one of the biggest ideas behind the Myosotis EP. I just told myself I would work on a few tracks that I would enjoy listening to. I noticed that melodic future garage with some deep dubstep influences is easily my most listened genre over the years, I often listen to it when I’m working on non-music things, when I’m home alone or when I’m walking outside. It easily puts me into this almost meditative mindset, it sounds soothing. In the past, I’ve also been very perfectionistic when it comes to my personal music, which means I haven’t released that many tracks over my 11+ years of music production despite having hundreds of unfinished projects. It almost feels embarrassing that in that time I haven’t made a proper 4-track EP before.

This gave me a very nice framework to work in – write an EP where I can express all these thoughts and feelings, don’t focus on making it perfect but instead really focus on making it personal. At that time I was wearing a bracelet from a music festival (one of the only events that happened in 2021 that I could attend when the pandemic wasn’t hitting that hard) so to hold myself even more accountable, I promised that I would only take off this bracelet after finishing the EP.

And hey, wouldn’t you believe it, creatively limiting myself + giving myself some sense of pressure + having things to write about and an atmosphere/feeling in my head led me to being probably the most inspired and productive I’ve ever been when it comes to writing personal music. I finished the whole EP in 2 months. All of the tracks were written very fast, I just gave myself some extra time to mix them and produce them a bit more, which was probably my perfectionism kicking in again, but at least I managed to wait until most of the songwriting was done.

Another fun challenge about writing the Myosotis EP was pushing myself out of my comfort zone – each track on the EP has some specific scenario behind it, whether it’s using a DAW I haven’t used much before or using a technique I wasn’t so familiar with.

One of the tracks on the EP is with one of my all time favourite artists – F0x3r (formerly known as Blackbird). I’m really happy he wanted to be a part of this EP. We worked on our collaboration track when I was staying over in his studio for a few days – working on music with someone else in person is just a completely different workflow than online collaboration, where you usually just send audio stems back and forth. Ephemera ended up being the fastest written track on the EP, we finished it in one or two days. I’m definitely grateful for this experience – I’ve learned a lot from F0x3r and he has been a big source of support both for my music and in my life.

Instead of releasing the EP under any of my existing aliases, I just really felt like it would be right to release under a new alias. It might not be conventional since a few friends told me I should just focus on releasing music under one alias and building a “brand”, but that’s exactly what I was tired of from my work. I just wanted to write music without anyone else’s expectations limiting me. To me there was a big shift in the philosophy behind how these tracks were written that it deserved a new alias – Flup. Part of it is also the fact I am heavily using my jackal/maned wolf character as an online persona to represent myself – or well, the artist behind the music. One might think that this might make the whole project less personal but to me it’s the quite opposite. I think this way I can be much more personal and creative, plus it’s nice to have a character that can be used in artworks and for telling stories. The artwork for this EP was made by Demicoeur, a really talented artist. His artwork of my character was a big source of inspiration for me and it solidified the idea of using forget-me-nots as a theme for the EP.

In the end I am very proud of the final result, what started as a way to give myself freedom to write personal music without too much pressure to make it perfect turned out to be a series of tracks that I wrote for myself first and that give me the introspective feeling I mentioned earlier. Even if nobody else liked the EP, I’d still be very happy about the way it turned out, which is a very refreshing feeling since I am usually very critical about my own music.

I don’t really want to go too much into what each track represents to me because I’d prefer everyone else just listening to the music and seeing how it’s going to make them feel. To me that’s part of the beauty of listening to music, imagining your own stories and coming up with associations or interpretations of things.

Many thanks to the artists that designed the images featured in this post, Kosse, Nightonox and Vile.