The Goo 1
OCT '25 Zeppelin. I was really obsessed with drum
ming, and John Bonham in Led Zeppelin was my idol, and always has been. Eventually I ended up getting a drum set, and my pals played guitar and bass, so naturally, we started our own little band. And I played drums and percussion in an orchestra, but it got to the point where I wanted to start making my own music. I went back and started playing piano again and writing songs, and started producing music, and I had a few projects that didn’t really go anywhere, and I always felt like I was trying to sound like someone else. KB: So why music for babies? And why rave music for babies? GS: When my sister said that she was gonna have a little baba, it was my first nephew, and I was really excited. And I thought, okay, what can I do for my sister and my brother-in-law to help? And I thought, I can babysit, which is always number one, but number two, the only thing I know about is music. I’m gonna find cool music that isn’t from coconuts and melons and infant fish singing about their extended family, because no parent wants to hear that on loop. There’s rock music, there’s jazz, there’s classical, but in the electronic music sphere, I couldn’t find anything that introduces kids into electronic music, except like the Barney theme with the donk on it, which I also don’t want to listen to on a loop. So I just thought, I’m classically trained on piano. I know how lullabies are structured. I collect toy instruments and synthesizers, so why don’t I just try and make it myself? KB: What makes this music good for children of that age? GS: Lullabies have been used for hundreds of years, and there must have been a reason that the technique works so well to soothe the baby. The rocking motion in the bass imitates the rocking of a baby in a mother’s arms or in the cradle, or the experience they have moving in the womb, and then the high pitched melody imitates the mother singing to the baby. When you first hear the melody, your brain will think, oh, this is something new. But then there are only very slight changes as it repeats. So the brain can relax more. KB: So the rocking motion, did you include that in the music? GS: For the lullabies, you just make everything really, really slow, and that rocking from side to side is extremely slow. But I thought, okay, what if I really speed that up? And through my research and chatting with [Trinity College Dublin psychology professor] Claire [Howlin], she was saying that the femur of a child is really small. So if they’re dancing and they’re bouncing, they come up a lot quicker than we do so the music needs to be quicker. The rhythm is still the same in the rave-y versions of the tracks and the sleepy versions of the tracks, just one is extremely fast and has percussion, whereas the sleepy version is very slow, and there’s no percussion at all. KB: Since you have nieces and nephews, were you like testing this music with them to see how they responded as well? GS: The rave-y tracks, I was really interested in to see if that actually works, and the very first single that I released from the album back in May was toy pianonono for raving. And I got so many videos from my friends of their little kids, who were all between six months and three years of age, so it’s really good test demo, bouncing along. And afterwards, my little nephew on my fiancé’s side said, ‘More, more.’ 15 That’s the best reaction. KB: You said it’s kind of like two long songs, the pianonono, and one is the kalimaramba. How do those two differ? Like, how did you differ your approach to those two instruments? GS: The toy piano one is quite traditional in terms of lullaby technique. I wrote it on piano using the techniques that have been used for hundreds of years by the likes of Brahms and Schubert. The kalimba is a bit more interesting, because it’s not an instrument that people might know too well. It is quite soothing, but it’s a bit of a deeper sound. So that was for older ears. When I thought of this idea, toy kalimba is the perfect thing, but the key in that is more minor based, it’s more pentatonic, it’s a bit more moodier. KB: Do you plan to make any more baby rave music? GS: I don’t know if I’ll make any more baby rave music. But actually, I just went down a rabbit hole last week of music for cows. Music For Babies To Rave And Sleep To is out now on Practise Records and is available to purchase through Graham’s bandcamp page: www.grahamsmyth. bandcamp.com