Album Premiere: Echo Point Drive | Louf (Louis Fitton) Q&A

Who are you? How are you? Where are you?

I’m Louis, and I’m living in Stoke Newington in North East London with my partner. I’m doing well at the moment! Writing these answers a week before the album comes out. I’m currently updating my live set for the launch party. I’ve also just left my full-time job after 4 years to finally go freelance, and we also got a dog recently, so life has been good.

What was the driving force behind wanting to dedicate a large portion of your life to music production?

My dad was always trying to get my brother and me to play musical instruments in some way or another when we were kids. I got really into guitar from playing Guitar Hero when I was about 12. I became obsessed with it. My dad used to record me playing guitar on Logic but eventually, I figured out how to do that myself, and have been producing music ever since. Not sure why I keep coming back to music, but I think I just need a creative output of some kind. If it wasn’t music I would probably be doing visual art.

Do you remember what first drew you to write an album? 

It was always on my to-do list but it was such a daunting prospect. The idea of writing an album wasn’t the scary bit, more about investing so much time into something than having to get it signed to a label and not being in control of the release schedule, etc. I had always released EPs but found the process of releasing music was getting more difficult, (vinyl delays, saturated market, etc) so I was itching to put out something more substantial.

Two years ago my brother sadly passed away, and so I really slowed down and took the pressure off with music for a bit as it was a difficult time, but I would still make it on occasion. Then as time passed, I started to realise I had quite a lot of album-worthy material, and Tom (Tom VR) and I came up with a rough tracklist, and it suddenly started to come together.

Echo Point Drive, talk to us about where the name came from. 

Echo Point Drive is a road in the Blue Mountains not far from Sydney. I went to Australia to see some of my family who live there, and we visited the Blue Mountains at the end of our trip. Echo Point looks out onto this mad valley, and when we arrived I went for one of the most amazing runs I’ve ever been on. It was unusually misty and I was running on the edge of a massive cliff. The town itself had a weird twin peaks vibe, seemingly stuck in the past. That trip was the first time we’d seen that side of our family since my brother passed so it was quite a tough trip, but also really special. So the album is sort of named after a run I went on, the incredible location, with the emotional context around it that I was dealing with at the time. I also just loved the name as soon as I saw the street sign.

Wall-to-wall the album is an immersive and thought-provoking experience. What were some of the key things running through your mind when making it? 

A few different things going on with me and also how I approached making music at that time: I think dealing with grief affected the music. When I’m making music, I’m not intentionally channelling any emotion or theme, I just sit down and work on an idea with no preconceptions. But I think the music ended up sounding ‘colder’ with a harsher sound design than my previous work.

I was also taking my music further from club culture in general. Previously, I’ve always tried to make something compelling to listen to at home but also could be played by DJs. I think that has held me back a bit in the past. Plus, I’d been developing sound design and composition techniques, particularly with vocals, during the time of making the album, I was able to really experiment and felt like I’d created a new sonic signature for myself compared to my old work.

There’s a pretty touching story behind the artwork and visuals you’ve married with the audio, can you tell us about how they all came to be? 

Yeah, the artwork on the album is a sketch my brother drew who sadly passed away in 2022. He was a graphic designer and illustrator. We had always chatted about him doing a comic book one day, as he loved drawing comic-style images (spiderman, anime characters etc) and they were really good.

After some time, my parents and I looked through his iPad (he did all his drawings on there) and I found the beginnings of a comic book idea. He’d done about ten frames, about a futuristic city and these robot humanoid creatures. It was a really interesting concept but he never finished it.

The sketch on the album artwork is from one of the slides and it resonated with me. It also suited the music which has a sort of futuristic feel to it. Maybe the album is the soundtrack to the comic book, or maybe they just work well together, either way, it feels like a nice tribute to him!

I also started experimenting with stop-motion sketches on my phone at the time, vaguely inspired by the album art. I draw these on my commutes and now have hundreds of these little animated drawings. This all came together during the writing process, and I decided this would be the visual language for the album.

What sorts of music were you listening to while writing Echo Point Drive, any artists or instrumentation techniques that particularly influenced the sounds you put together? 

My brother also had this huge playlist on Spotify called ‘lets chill bud’. It’s got like 90 hours of music or something on it. Lots of old soul, jazz, afrobeat, indie music and stuff. So I’ve been listening to that a lot, as it’s got loads of sentimental music in there that we used to listen to growing up. We also named our new dog Buddy after the playlist. Less of an influence on my music but it was the soundtrack to my life around the writing process of the album. There are some artists who definitely inspired the album as well like Loraine James, Vegyn, Floating Points, Huerco S, Duval Timothy, Kali Malone, Barker.

Funnily enough, A big inspiration for the music is the Zelda games. My partner plays them all the time, and there’s this character called Fi whose voice inspired some of the vocal processing on the album. Her voice sounds reversed and autotuned, check out this video to see what I mean: Skyward Sword – Fi. The score on Tears of the Kingdom is also incredible and that was a big inspiration.

How did you get away/take breaks from writing the album, fill us in on the moments when you’d step away from the studio. What experiences outside the studio informed the way this record sounds? 

I started running properly two years ago – My label partner Tom signed up for the Hackney Half Marathon and he said I should give it a go. I got a bit obsessed and have run two marathons since. It’s been life-changing for me, getting outside, getting regular exercise, and challenging myself. That’s where I get solo time to think and get inspired.

I feel like there’s close attention paid to space on this record, as in the air between notes. Is this something you considered closely in writing it? 

Going back to the Zelda – Tears of the Kingdom score here as a big influence. It’s quite sparse, but all the instruments are upfront in the mix. There’s lots of silence in between chords and phrases. I used to watch my partner Magda play it and fell in love with the music. The key protagonist Link would be flying onto a new island in the sky, and the score would just be a single piano chord or arpeggio, and it works so well.

There’s a levity to this record, like a heavenly feeling of being lifted. Any thoughts or ideas on where this comes from? 

That’s an interesting perspective on it, not something I was intentionally going after. A huge influence on me recently is the producer Barker, who I would say has that same feeling in his music. Using drums and bass sparingly and having the chord patterns often not completely resolve creates this weightless feeling, which I tried to replicate a bit. Also, a big influence for me is this Kali Malone album. Particularly this track. Every chord change is given so much emotional weight because she holds these notes for so long. And it never really resolves itself. That was one of my most listened-to albums last year, I went to see her live in London on my own, as I couldn’t convince any friends to listen to two hours of drone organ in a church.

Give us some insight into the timeline of the album. Was it written in spurts or over a prolonged period of deep focus? 

I can’t really remember. The writing phase was sporadic. I get ideas down then don’t touch them for months. This probably happened for a year before Tom and I got in the studio and started to whittle down the tracklist and complete each song, which then took several months. I’ve had less and less time to make music the last few years (although I’ve just gone freelance and hoping this will change!), and it seems that whilst I’ve made less music in general, probably 50% of the stuff I make is usable in some form, whereas previously it’d be closer to 10%.

“Show Me” is my personal favourite, can you shed some light on how this track came together and what it means to you? 

That was a fun track to make. It started with that resonant drone sound you hear, which is a bassline, run through Izotope Trash 2, which has this convolution section in it. You can add another sample and it sort of blends the two sounds, creating that rich texture. I remember being inspired by the drums in this Thom Yorke track, and how they are so crisp and upfront in the mix. The arps and melodies came later I think. This was a particularly hard one to mix, and I didn’t really like the track much until it was finished. One of those situations where you have to trust your friends’ judgement over your own on whether the music is good.

Is there a certain song on here that resonates harder than others and if so why? 

Jabłko holds a lot of meaning. My partner is Polish and her favourite word is Jabłko, which means apple. I’ve been trying to learn Polish with Duolingo but it’s not going very well. The music is also a bit of a throwback to the lo-fi hip-hop beats I used to make when I was a teenager. I love the mood in that track, it feels a bit melancholic but also hopeful.

Upon listening, my mind wanders to an astronaut landing on a foreign planet and being over-awed by what he or she is seeing for the first time. I’m wondering what pictures this album paints in your mind. 

I love that. Weirdly enough when I was like 15 I made a stop-motion animation film about an astronaut on a planet, and he’s confronted by this giant seahorse in space. It’s the same style of animation that I’m making now. I think about that a lot when I’m making music, but I can’t find it anywhere, I think it was lost on an old hard drive.With this album, I think of the comic book and what it could have been had my brother finished it. Arc One in particular feels very much in that world.

What’s the nicest compliment you’ve received about the album as a whole or a track in particular from your closest friends? 

A friend of mine said that Arc One sounded like a robot turning sentient and struggling to communicate, or something along those lines, which I loved.

With your maiden album out in the world, what’s next for Louf? 

I’m updating my live set with all my album material, I’ve got my launch party in London on the 5th of July and going to be playing the new live set there. Got some potential dates in the diary for shows later in the year as well.

I’m working with a vocalist on a few songs. I’m getting more inspired to create the next project now that the album is complete. Other than that, not sure, but I want to make another album at some point!