With the foghorn having become a massively prevalent sound in D&B over the past year, many deep bass fans may think there’s not much more to be done with the blaring honk heard round the world. Not so, says Covert Garden with his new EP, Left Hook. The three-track release out today on his new label shows that there’s much more to be explored here, and it’s not just a one-note trick.
Covert Garden’s beats always have a lot of space around them, with snappy snares and echo deadeners to make his tracks tight and controlled but in the case of Left Hook, he’s gone even more minimal with the beats and way more cinematic with the ambient sound. In this case it’s all in the name of featuring that foghorn and it’s a good thing he’s done this because there’s a lot going on in that fog.
The title track of Left Hook, for example,features the foghorn sound coming in at odd intervals and Covert does a number of sound manipulations which really showcase how the foghorn is actually a sine wave. Normally it fades in and gets louder, pitching up slightly to mimic the sound of an actual moving foghorn on a ship. In this track, Covert reverses the sine wave of the foghorn, cuts it up so it sounds abrupt rather than fading in and changes the volume. All this combined with his characteristic deadened beats and snares and a lot of heavy ambient sub bass-level synths makes for a foghorn track that turns foghorn on its ear.
It doesn’t end there for Left Hook. In “Cast Away,” Covert plays with the possible tones of the foghorn and fades it in and out quickly, playing even more with that sine wave. In possibly the deepest track on the EP, “Submersive,” the wave gets a quick poke which sends ripples through it like the waves made proverbial ships whish carry the foghorn’s namesake.
Rather than being defined by the foghorn waveform, Left Hook seeks to redefine the foghorn. It turns out there’s a lot to experiment with there and it sounds like Covert Garden is just showing the tip of the iceberg when it comes to said experimentation.
Left Hook is out today, September 2 on Covert Garden’s own imprint on Beatport exclusive.