In the final part of his Post-Euphoria series, Guy Baron discusses using stripped-down electronic dance music motifs to suggest ambivalent euphoric experiences and capture fleeting moments.

Initially recorded as a vocal sketch on an iPhone, «Emotional Call» was the track that kick-started the work on my album Post-Euphoria. The song was inspired by feelings of emotional awakening, confusion, and conflict, which informed not only its lyrics but also the production choices I made while developing the arrangement.

The track’s sonic palette draws from synthesizer-based electronic dance music productions. Such productions are often associated with euphoric sensations and are said to create heightened sensations among dancing crowds using repetitive musical structures and gradually intensifying arrangements (Malbon 1999, 86, 105; Solberg 2014, 61, 64). In «Emotional Call», however, these elements are presented as missing and incomplete – partly due to the absence of a four-to-the-floor kick drum, which is deemed fundamental in post-disco dance music productions (Rietveld 2018). This arrangement strategy made me think of ways in which dance music euphoria and intense emotional experiences can be musically portrayed as lacking and ambivalent.

Perpetual Echo

After recording this song I created an additional reworked version of it titled «Epilogue». Here, the original track is processed in its entirety using a reverb plug-in set to freeze mode – a function that perpetuates the ending of a reverb, creating an impression of an infinite, never-decaying echo. I captured this sustained echo by recording the output of the reverb return channel while muting the original affected channels.

What emerged is a dim, drone-like remnant of the original recording, wherein the musical material is presented as vague and obscure. The freeze reverb in «Epilogue» is used to prolong the echo of former track «Emotional Call», as if in an attempt to capture or freeze a moment in time. I have in this way wanted to convey the idea of lingering on fleeting moments – also explored in my previous work through slowing down audio samples (Baron, 2020) – while likening a sonic echo to the echo of a lost, yearned-for experience.

By including both recordings in the same body of work, I sought to highlight their mutual affinity and to emphasize the sonic transformations induced by the application of the freeze reverb. And as «Epilogue» references, deconstructs and alienates the musical material in «Emotional Call», it creates a mutated re-manifestation of the latter track, suggesting a sustained remnant of the emotional experience it portrays".

The order in which the tracks are incorporated in the body of work further implies an overarching narrative – starting with the not-yet-realized sense of emotional awakening depicted in «Emotional Call» and culminating with «Epilogue’s» residual and faded echo of the same experience. Framing my album Post-Euphoria, these tracks encapsulate my attempt to make sense of a longing for perceived euphoric experiences that appear lost and decaying.