Sally Decker Tells Us What Its Like In The Tender Dream

Sally Decker talks about making In The Tender Dream with The 13th Floor.

Marty Duda spoke to experimental electronic artist Sally Decker about In The Tender Dream which she describes as “a documentation of my evolving understanding of what self-love really is”.

Listen to the interview here:

Or, read a transcription of the interview here:

M: So, the album that you’ve just put out, tell me about, is there a concept, an overarching reason why you made it?

S: It spans a pretty big chunk of work for me. The earliest piece on there is probably 2017 and then the most recent was made…one of the tracks I made in quarantine…so kind of a three, four year period of music. The main thing that’s different in this work than other work I’ve recorded is I used electronic feedback a lot in this work. It really creates a specific sound world of these harsher sounds and a specific type of texture and movement of sounds but also the process of working with the sounds themselves is a little unruly and unpredictable. And that interestingly reflects a lot of the more emotional and dramatic concepts of trying to understand what external elements you can control and what you can’t…sort of finding acceptance within uncontrollable elements and then finding acceptance too within the parts that you can control like internal things.

M: Probably more of that kind of thought would be good for everyone because it seems people are just refusing to accept the reality of what the situation is these days ……

S: I mean it’s painful to accept reality sometimes.

M: Sometimes yeah, exactly. What is it like, when you’re in the studio, are you working by yourself? Do you have other people around usually? What kind of headspace do you have to get yourself into?

S: It’s mostly by myself and it’s a lot of, with the feedback at least, a lot of the recording process is improvised. I mean it has to be improvised because you’re kind of collaborating with the system and then I’ll have a session where I just sort of improvise and then those improvised takes get layered. So it’s a lot of sort of layers of different improvised moments. The vocal recording is another through line of the album.  That stuff I usually, it’s kind of late at night by myself and I have to get into a specific headspace just being really present and then apart from the solo work, there are two tracks that feature other people so I collaborated with…I went to Mills College…and those were two colleagues (Briana Marela & Emily Cardwell) I had at Mills and bringing them in was really great. It was a cool process to…I kind of composed the delivery and the reading of the text for them to read so the unison like in that piece that they sing together, speak together comes from composed text and just giving them my words to speak was like another process honestly, of giving away the control.

M: That’s true because there’s only so much you can do by yourself.

S: It’s true, yeah.

M: So the two people that you’re talking about, Briana and Emily?

S: Yes.

M: What was it about them that you thought they would fit into doing what you need to do?

S: Well they are both really incredible vocalists that were at Mills. My friend Briana, is a close friend and I wrote that piece Affirmation for. I wrote that piece specifically for Briana because the piece is really about, within this one phrase exploring with delivery and sort of that in between of sung and spoken. I knew specifically that Briana does that really well and kind of has a sensibility with improvising vocal stuff. So that’s why I specifically wrote that piece for her.

M: When you leave things to chance, for certain things, are there surprises that you can remember that happened while making the record or were there things that were like oh no, what was that?

S: Yeah, there’s definitely with the process of working with feedback, there’s so much of that…so many sounds that surprise me and sometimes a not great way. Like I hear the sound…and it mostly happens in performance actually and that’s a real practice of acceptance to realise like oh, that one sound that popped out that I really didn’t like, it actually is just part of the process of somebody watching me use this system. Those kind of surprises make more of an impression on me than the listener I think. With working with Emily and Briana, when I first gave them the text to read, there was a surprise of hearing it come out of their mouths and it sounded totally wrong because I didn’t realise that I needed to really direct and compose the way they read it and they just kind of went for it. So that was a really good learning moment of realising oh, the way that I speak texts is really specific and I need to direct and that needs to be part of the composition.

M: Why didn’t you want to do the vocalization yourself?

S: I mean, there’s so much of my own voice speaking words in the album and in the work. I think I really wanted to see what it would be like to have somebody else carry the words and say those words. I had this feeling like it would give them some kind of different power having them be my words still and also my delivery…the way that I would say them…but just coming from different voices like that, it sort of had this expansive feeling to me about what that would mean.

M: One of the tracks I wanted to touch on was Abode, which almost as it gathers steam, turns into kind of a 70s prog rock thing or something. Tell me what you had in mind when you were putting that together.

S: That track is the one the most reason one, I made that in quarantine. And it almost has like a, it kind of feels a little separate than some of the other work in the album I think because it came from a really different time. But what I really liked about that track and why it ended up in the album is, it feels like a breath of fresh air after the first three tracks are pretty dark and the third track is pretty grim, so kind of like a breath before carrying on. Because I was kind of thinking that I needed that puzzle piece so that’s a little bit of what I was thinking about and then Abode, the word I mean it comes from spending a lot of time in my house and the joy and the lightness that you can feel when you do cultivate a space that feels like a foundation like home so yeah.

M: When you were working with all this feedback and stuff, things that you didn’t have complete control over, what did you learn about the creation process? Anything reveal itself that was unexpected that you hadn’t had to deal with before just working with synths and things that you can push buttons on and know what it sounds like?

S: Yeah, I think I realised that…one big shift was that I think before I was using just more traditional synthesis and synthesizers where you can control the parameters. I was using those sounds to get at some sort of compositional idea. Like, I’m gonna use these sounds to get at this feeling of, usually some emotional space. But then what I realised working with feedback is that it’s like the actual process of working with the sound and my relationship with the sound was the emotional content which is really different. It’s kind of this more direct felt thing and you can feel that in the sounds that the process had a certain emotional tone. And I think specifically because I am interested in these emotional ideas of control, it translated really well. Like that relationship with the sounds I wanted that to be felt by the listener if that makes sense.

M: It does indeed. Do you ‘perform’ these so to speak in front of people at any time?

S: I do. These are recorded versions of performances really, that’s how I think about it. Like the title track that kind of centerpiece in the middle of the album, that form, that basic form existed as a performance for a really long time before I nailed down this version. So that’s, I mostly think about the practice as a performance practice but these recordings came out of a couple of years of really working with and trying out different texts and combinations of these textures and sounds.

M: And how much is technology a part of what you do? Does it inform when you’re actually creating and thinking about how things are gonna go together?

S: Yeah, that’s a great question. So much of it doesn’t actually feel tied to technology, it feels more like figuring out what wants to flow out. And a lot of  that does happen with words and with text and with vocal work. So that feels a little more immediate. But I work with synths, I work with electronic processing, I work with the feedback certainly requires a lot of mapping out, signal flow and schematics and stuff so there’s…

M: The glamourous part of the job that would be.

S: Totally, I think there is a foundation of figuring out a system that worked for me and then now that I’ve got that set, it’s like I can almost sort of forget about the technological aspects and just, I’m working with it.

M: Before you made this record, you recorded under another name, under was it, Multa Nox.

S: Multa Nox, yeah.

M: How has changing your persona affected the music that we hear?

S: I think, well I guess they just felt like really different eras to me. I moved out to the West Coast to go to Mills so all of this music is more of a West Coast time for me. The moniker, I think it served as like, I think I just felt not quite ready to use my name. I wanted some sort of external project and container to be where I explored and recorded music and stuff. And then it just felt like second nature to drop it with this work because it felt like I started to make things that this work felt just immediately more relevant and personal and exposed. It’s like I couldn’t hide behind it anymore or something.

M: Are you thinking in terms of what you are going to do next?

S: I’m trying to be really present with the feeling of this work finally being out instead of rushing to the next thing which is hard. It’s hard to not rush to the next thing. But I am thinking about it. I’m excited to make things that feel a little bit more like songs because I love songs. I think some of these feel like songs but whether It’s using my voice in new ways or finding new harmonic foundations, I’m excited for whatever comes next.

I couldn’t do a release show cause covid is bad here right now and there hasn’t been the stability to really plan on shows so that’s a bummer to not celebrate with a performance but I just celebrated here on my own. I took a listen through the album on my own.

M: What do you listen for when you listen to your own records?

S: This time around I’ve been taking a lot of space from it because I was so deep in it right up until giving it off to be mastered and stuff. So this time around I think I was just interested in the full experience from front to back and just how it all blended together and the more holistic experience from beginning to end.

M: And it passed the test? You’re happy?

S: Yeah, I am.

M: Excellent. Well thank you for talking to me about it, it’s great. Good luck with whatever it is you’re up to next.

S: Thank you so much. Take care.

Sally Decker is a composer, performer, and writer based in Oakland, CA. Her work explores the subtle emotional body and sound as a vessel for practicing presence.

Her approach to form and process is psychological and sensory, rooted in the intent of strengthening a reflective focus toward our internal intuitive worlds. Recent interests include feedback systems, the voice, and utilization of language in performance.

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