Wille – Shoreline Orbs Album is out now.
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Debut LP by Danish electronic artist William ‘Wille’ Winding. Confidently juggling his influences – from Acid House to 80’s Italo and 2010’s Norwegian Space Disco – the newcomer unveils a universe of luscious synth hooks, UFO mystery and starry-eyed sci-fi wonder.
Below is a Q&A with the artist about his first full-length release.
Describe your sound for us? Wille: Bubbly, bouncy, spacey, ravey. I wanted to capture a certain childlike wonder in the sound, something that’s naively beatiful, innocent even. Melodies and lush progressions take the front seat on this project, I need a good hook and I can’t help it. There’s a bit of Italian House flavour on this record, inspired by labels like Irma and Rebirth. Also I’ve been inspired by classic Space Disco and Italo Disco of the 80s, and the subsequent Norwegian Space Disco wave of the 2010s, Prins Thomas, Todd Terje, Blackbelt Andersen, etc. mixed in with some modern Balearic elements, sprinkled with some yacht rock, bit of Acid House, you’ve got a stew cooking.
There’s a prevalent space vibe about the album. Tell us about the concept behind it? Wille: Space is the place! I’ve always been into sci-fi literature and futurism. I think we are living through what can only be described as “interesting times”. Everything is happening at once it seems, the advent of AI converging with quantum computing, it seems like there’s a breakthrough in technology every week at this point. And then there’s the UFO’s/UAPs of course, which have taken up a significant amount of my headspace since 2020. I always scoffed at the idea of UFOs, as I think many have, and was, to put it mildly, shocked to learn through the leaked pentagon videos and infamous New York Times article of 2017 that there IS in fact “things” flying around that not only are unidentified but move in ways that defy our current understanding of physics and propulsion. That should really have most people’s eyebrows flying to the back of their heads, but it feels like society is still only catching up to the notion.
Some of the discourse around these objects has me thinking that scientific materialism can only get us so far. These are some of the thoughts and feelings I channeled into this album. “The one unforgivable sin to the western mind, is when something that should be in the spirit world transgresses into the physical world.” – John Mack, Head of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard, 1977-2004.
Tell us about the technical side of your album. How did you produce it? Wille: On the software side, it’s Ableton all the way. What can be said about this software that hasn’t been said a million times, it’s simply the best. I love everything about it, the scalability, the 1980s accounting software aesthetic, but most of all it doesn’t pretend anything it isn’t; it’s so unabashedly digital, and you can really get lost in the workflow, moving in lockstep, getting lost in sound design in a way i haven’t experienced with anything else. The synths are just great, if you went and put something like Wavetable into a hardware synth, that would probably be a lot of people’s favorite piece of gear, and they would talk at length about how “warm it sounds” hehe.
For hardware there are two synths that are featured on every single track: Juno 106 and the Elektron Analog Keys. The Juno for classic pads, stabs and keys. The Elektron for leads, arpeggio’s, percussion and sound design. I love the Elektron. It was my first hardware synth, and it’s a beautiful beast. It can do sweet, aggressive, analog, digital, anything you like. It can get REALLY weird, and the workflow is great once you break through that Elektron wall.