Quantic - Dancing While Falling

Quantic - aka multi-instrumentalist, DJ, composer and producer Will Holland is an artist who sees each of his records as an ever-going process of trying to perfect the design. Now 20 years into his career, Dancing While Falling, is the British-born New York-based artist's most live-sounding, euphoric and, in his own words, grown-up release to date. Quantic's initial idea for his new album was to experiment sonically. However, after a while, he changed direction and realized that the record needed to also relate to the human condition - not just his "singular pandemic wormhole". As an artist whose reputation has been forged on how he engages with local scenes and cultures around the world, the story behind Quantic's Dancing While Falling is typically collaborative. Recording drums, bass and guitar at his own Brooklyn studio, Selva, he started off with sketches and arranged the strings and horns. He then invited different musicians into the studio so they could play the scores, which added different textures to the songs. It's also more concise and stripped down compared to his recent offerings, including 2014's Magnetica, a mixtape-style montage of all the different musical experiences he had while living in Colombia, and his most recent album, 2019's Atlantic Oscillations, which comparatively chronicled the journey of how he weaved the sound of his new home of New York into his own sonic world. For the latter, he also slowly gravitated away from making sample-based beats on a laptop and instead ventured into a more symphonic set-up in terms of instrumentation. Similarly with Dancing While Falling, Quantic wanted to use old school techniques to make something modern, with the aim of creating a record that showed the identities and charisma of the players.