Derek Vincent Smith, does that name ring a bell? It didn’t for me, but I’m glad I ran into the full-length album “Passing By Behind Your Eyes” that Derek has produced under the moniker Pretty Lights in 2009.
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When I tried to describe the album to a friend last week, I couldn’t come up with anything else than ‘emotionally beautiful’. Now that I’ve had some time to let it sink in I’d say it sounds like Ugress meets Glitch Mob with the moodyness of Aphilas.
“Passing By Behind Your Eyes” is a very consistant album and it represents all aspects of modern music production: synthwork, sampling, drum programming and extensive composition. In stead of taking the more minimalistic approach, as a lot of hip producers do nowadays, Pretty Lights takes the complete opposite route and delivers a very layered and cinematic sound while still keeping a raw and fast-paced dancefloor edge. Don’t expect no 2-minute looped beats either, every track has a strong build-up and varied composition.
Throughout the album the workflow seems pretty straight-forward. There are groovy tight drums with a layer of nice and moody samples, which forms the froundwork for the melodic synths that are placed on top. Since the sampling isn’t the main focus but an equally important part as the rest of the composition, even the most purist sample-heads can’t front on the usage of a couple of well-known tracks (I just love how he flipped “Stretch – Why Did You Do It” on the 8th track “Let Em Know It’s Time To Go”).
Next to offering a load of releases online for free Pretty Lights also play live in a 2-man combination. Check out the video below (which is of the track with the Stretch sample)
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