Away Waiting; Leo Seligo’s Latest Album Is a Hypnagogic Masterpiece

by Ben Rosielle

Illustration by Rishi

“What does the TIMARA department even do?” is a question you hear thrown around a lot at Oberlin. At a college characterized by relentless quirkiness, TIMARA stands out for somehow being even quirkier. “Technology in Music and Related Arts,” is about as vague as a description can possibly be, and as someone who has dipped their feet into the department, I can’t really say that the scope of TIMARA can be well understood by someone unacquainted with the minutia of academic electronic music.

To help one understand what the department is really all about, it’s worth looking at the art produced by TIMARA majors. Recent graduate Leo Seligo’s sophomore album Away Waiting is a snapshot of what a TIMARA degree can produce: a delicately assembled collage of field recordings, cheesy retro synthesizers and gorgeous ambient pads.

Away Waiting’s kaleidoscopic array of overlapping samples and sections is easy enough to digest, but nearly impossible to comprehend. The album has the feel of an early 2000s JRPG soundtrack that got chewed up and then vomited out into someone’s Bitwig session. Synth melodies stutter and glitch as if sampled from a skipping CD. Plasticky, artificial MIDI guitar, bass and key parts are contrasted with looping classical guitar samples and jazz drum fills, synthesizing the real and surreal in order to create a fantastical soundscape. Away Waiting is cluttered with a smorgasbord of different sampled instruments and synthesizer presets, but the jumble of sounds feels deliberate. 

Opener “green lawn montage” is a literal montage of birdsongs, lush pads, and droning synth figures that decelerates into a granulated, slow-motion ending. “Birdvillage” plays out like a multipart lucid dream with disconcertingly disconnected parts, shifting between tranquility, tension and atonality with abruptness. In “Four Foot Tall,” post-apocalyptic splashes of MIDI upright bass, wailing guitar, deconstructed synth samples and stuttering vocal chops play out against a lush, cavernous backdrop of swirling ambience, as if a cyborgian jazz fusion group had been trapped inside an abandoned warehouse and circuit-bent until their playing became so loose and abstracted that it lost all group cohesion, creating a seemingly senseless scattering of samples and riffs.

The busy and brilliantly textured chaos that pervades Away Waiting was clearly the result of a lot of effort on Seligo’s part. The mutated but often cozy feel of the album gives one the impression that Seligo wants the listener to know that this is all an elaborate construction on their part. Baffled and wanting to learn more, I sat down with Seligo to gain some insight into the creative process that made such a dizzying album.

B: How did you start making music?

L: My parents had a keyboard. I actually think they might have had a Yamaha DX7 or something, but they got rid of it and got a more normal piano keyboard. Early on I would’ve been messing around on keyboards. I remember making a lot of music in Garageband before I was 10, which I was actually just thinking about for this album because I was using all these old sample CD loops, and it’s kind of the same as just using Garageband loops. I played piano in high school jazz band, and I had a smaller jazz ensemble with friends. Eventually I got back into doing stuff on the computer.

B: What were your influences for the album? While I was listening to it I was thinking about Oneohtrix Point Never and Jane Remover’s Frailty, but there’s obviously a heavy amount of classical and jazz influence as well.

L: Oneohtrix Point Never is a big one. What he and James Ferraro were doing in the early 2010s was probably the biggest influence on Away Waiting. I was listening to them a lot before and while I was making it. The Evergrace and Drakengard game soundtracks are almost like plunderphonics, where everything is sampled. They don’t feel like they should be game soundtracks, which is what I like about them. The thing with Evergrace is that I believe all the sounds in it come from sample CDs. It’s almost like just jumbling up a preset pack, which was the original inspiration for Away Waiting, where I wanted to see how much I could do with just default sounds.

B: How long had you been working on Away Waiting, and what was the overarching process of creating it like?

L: I started it last August. For a lot of the tracks on the album I would make a song, find one section of it that I liked, and then make a new song where that’s the final section. There were a lot of times where I would take a bit out of a song and then make something new out of it. I finished most of it in May for my senior recital. That version was almost the same as this one, it just had one different track. I tried to finish it over the summer and then figure out how I was going to release it.

B: You talked about making a track and then cutting it up and putting it in another track, so I’m curious about your process for generating, elaborating and developing ideas in your music. Your music has a very loose structure and things blend into each other a lot, and I’m wondering how you managed to develop that style.

L: It’s different each time, but there’ll always be some sort of format of a song that feels right for the sounds. One example I can think of is that the transition between the third and fourth track is structured like a relaxing video game music compilation on YouTube where they’ve recycled all this music from a game and then have sound effects from the game over the whole thing, so the transition is literally just water noises. Some it isn’t even musical inspiration, it’s like the way a video game could be formatted, but for others I was really trying to make it have a more song-y structure. I feel like I didn’t get to do that very much, and by the end of working on it, I was tired of having everything be really linear, but I’m happy that it worked. For my next project I want to do something more repetitive, because a lot of these songs are just a thing and then another thing and then another thing, but I tried my best to tie them together. 

B: With the sample libraries you were using, how did you develop your sound? Why that sound particularly?

L: It’s a recycled early 2000s sound, but I try to find things that go against it so it feels balanced. If I have cheesy sci-fi techno video game sounds, I try to balance them out with guitar. 

B: With all those contrasting sounds, it’s sometimes hard for me to tell what’s programmed versus performed, or acoustic versus electronic. Do you think about that dynamic at all?

L: The only live guitar is this electric guitar my friend David Skaggs did at the end of “Birdvillage”, but the rest of it is all stuff that I wrote out in MIDI or stuff that’s being sampled. Even if I’m doing stuff in MIDI or sampling, at the other end you might not be able to tell what’s what. I think it’s kind of fun when it’s really confusing. There’s stuff I wanted to sound like MIDI, and then there’s stuff that I want to sound like it’s just an audio file being played. I like sampling because I feel like it makes less of it all mine.

B: Any music recommendations for the readers of the Grape?

L: Bryce Hayashi and the Evergrace I and II soundtracks.