An integral part of Radio NZ‘s music team, and previously employed at 95bFM, Tony Stamp has long been surrounded by music as a professional consumer. With ‘Losho Down’, he has now released a second album of his own, showcasing eclectic samples and influences, accumulated through years of research and global travel under the moniker TL Stamp. His a low-key brand of downtempo electronica has a lot of depth, more than easily evident to the untrained eye, so NZM asked Tony to run us through one of his songs

Let’s start with the name I guess. There’s a bunch of noises in here, kind of clustered around the drums, that are the sound of me, in an Airbnb in Queens, NYC, sort of throwing things onto the floor and recording the result. So for a long time, I called it Floor Queen, but honestly that felt weird. It didn’t fit, anyway. And I thought the vibe of the track was more leafy and woody. So The Forest Floor it was.

The main thing that I was going for on this collection of songs was speed. Or lack thereof. I wanted every song to be… really… slowwwww. I wanted every snare hit to have this big weight of expectation. I also drenched everything in crackle and hiss, because those sounds are so comforting to me, like a blanket of noise.

I was listening to a lot of LA Beat music, which is maybe obvious, but also post-rock like Mogwai. It was a tempo thing, but I also wanted to capture that sense of grandeur. Or maybe a sense of mystery on this one. I’m pretty sure after the drums the first thing I wrote was the melody that enters at around 20 seconds. It’s a glockenspiel and some type of stringed instrument I sampled. It was the sound of one pluck I got from somewhere (probably youtube), then mapped into the sampler in Logic Pro and programmed note by note, glissando and all.

There’s also some strummed guitar-type thing from a record I bought in the Czech Republic. I’ve been lucky enough to do quite a bit of travel over the past five years or so, and for a while I was blind-buying vinyl, bringing it home to NZ and listening to it for the first time, and sampling what I could.

Percussion-wise that’s all me hitting various things in my apartment back in NZ. Luckily the place was pretty soundproof. Most of these songs came together between midnight and 6am, when any sort of distractions would disappear. While making them I was very relaxed, and my hope is that anyone listening will feel relaxed too, and maybe tune out their stresses for a moment.