SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
The electronic music artist formerly known as Totally Extinct Enormous Dinosaurs, Orlando Higginbottom, is now going by a new moniker, TEED. NPR recently caught up with TEED to talk about his new album called "Always With Me."
(SOUNDBITE OF TEED SONG, "PIECE OF ME")
TEED: I was thinking a lot about my teenage years when I was making this record. I think I was taking a bit of a step back, and I was thinking a lot about my summers as a teenager and the music I was loving when I was a teenager and how that made me feel to sort of reminisce about now. And so now I was sort of creating my own soundtrack for those memories at that time.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PIECE OF ME")
TEED: (Singing) I wish I knew the words. I'm frozen, but I'd tell you how much this hurts.
With this album, I really used, like, my computer and a microphone and one or two bits of hardware - one synthesizer, in particular, that I borrowed from a friend and, you know, a very simple studio, really going back to sort of, like, a bedroom studio setup from when I was a teenager again.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DESIRE")
TEED: (Singing) In the silence of your eyes, I see where I'm going to be soon, alone and away from you.
(Singing) "Desire," which is the first track of the album - I started this song sort of by accident. I started just singing with no backing track into my microphone and just singing melodies, piecing together sounds without really any kind of plan, and the song emerged quite quickly from there.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DESIRE")
TEED: (Singing) Ooh, I'm ready.
This was the song that, when it started to form, I felt like I had an album, that I could start to build everything else around it.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DESIRE")
TEED: (Singing) Ooh, I'm ready.
The title track is "Always With Me," and it's a instrumental that sort of doesn't really follow a very traditional electronic structure. It's kind of rhapsodic in a way.
(SOUNDBITE OF TEED'S "ALWAYS WITH ME")
TEED: I wanted it to feel a little bit like a memory as it goes through its changing form, but it still feels like one experience.
(SOUNDBITE OF TEED'S "ASCENT")
TEED: This song, "Ascent," is sort of reminiscent of the electronic music I was listening to when I was sort of 13 and 14, where it was all about how complicated the drum programming could be like early Squarepusher and Aphex Twin eras of electronic music that was very much about the future of sound. And yeah, it's turned out to be one of the favorite tracks on the album from listeners.
(SOUNDBITE OF TEED'S "ASCENT")
MCCAMMON: That was Orlando Higginbottom, who performs as the electronic musician TEED. His new album, "Always With Me," is out now. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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