Connor Campbell resurrects Feisty Flamingo to share a new collection of moody low-fi beats.
Matt Carter
After a year of inactivity as Feisty Flamingo, Saint John musician Connor Campbell has resurrected the project he launched in 2018 to share a new collection of short instrumentals. Something or Other is made up largely of tracks composed last year following the release of the appropriately titled, Low-fi House Jams, which arrived in March of 2020.
“At one point or another I lost interest in the Feisty Flamingo project and began to work on other releases for some of my other solo and group projects,” said Campbell. “I still found beat making fun but I was doing it at a much slower pace.”
After recently revisiting his archive of unreleased material, Campbell was able to pair some of what he wrote last year with some more recent compositions that together form this latest release.
“I was looking at the old song files and decided that there were quite a few I really enjoyed, as well as some I made recently that would also fit in. It’s a completely different project than what it started as, but I thought it would just be fun to release it all,” he said.
“I have more tracks in the works. That being said, my tastes are constantly changing so it’s hard to know exactly what I’ll do next, specifically with Feisty Flamingo. I just like to jump around a bit with the type of music I put out. Lately I’ve been working on some tracks with more of a trip hop edge and a few with a future funk vibe so I’ll see what happens with them.”
Each of the tracks on Something or Other could easily fall into the category of Chill Beats or Chillout or some other genre title meant to depict some level of relaxation. While each of these eight tracks certainly fit the bill, Campbell’s decision to remove just about every high range frequency from the overall mix of these tracks creates a certain level of sensory deprivation which in turn adds a level of mystery and anticipation to the album’s progression.
Some of Campbell’s other projects include the ambient hip hop project Bliss Beats, the drone-based experimental project Omnis, and improvisational psychedelic band Deepspacefuzzmachine, each embodying some degree of low-fi character through their instrumentation or production.
“Back when I was in high school I knew people that were really into music as well as beat making,” said Campbell. “I enjoyed music but never really thought about going out of my way to make it. At that point, song writing seemed scary and incomprehensible. Beat making started out as a simple way to write songs without knowing a whole lot about theory. One thing led to another and I downloaded the trial version of Fruity Loops Studio and started working on sampling and writing my own songs. Eventually I started making more music that couldn’t really fit under the Feisty Flamingo name and I started new projects.
“Honestly, to me making music is just about capturing a certain feeling. I tend to work on multiple albums or projects at once. I only really release them when I feel completely happy with them. The beats I make are really more for me than anyone else and because of that there’s a certain freedom of just being able to create whatever I want, but it is always really nice to hear how other people feel about them.”
