AM Mix for Tide Magazine #0 by AM

Confessions, secrets and things left unsaid: music as a personal diary
Words Luc Vinogradoff

As AM, Aimée and Marie have been crafting soundscapes and musical identities for brands since 2015. For Tide, they have imagined a soundtrack inspired by the magazine itself, but that also goes beyond it. They talk with us about this musical diary, that adds layers of meaning and emotions to every page.

The exercise of interpreting themes or images and transforming them into musical sounds and textures is a treacherous one. The palettes are infinite and there is a risk of getting lost while building bridges from one particularly subjective medium to another. Or to simply not have that bridge recognized as a bridge by someone else, who had not imagined the same links and associations that you did. When it works, though, this sonic alchemism can create whole other layers of meanings and emotions.

Or, as the duo behind AM puts it, it can create “an echo in people’s minds and foster desires”. As music directors, they have been “crafting soundscapes” for brands and artists since 2015, with mixes, playlists and original music. For them, the approach of creating a musical coating for Tide is slightly different than for a fashion show, where it’s more like a 3D soundscape, making a soundtrack for a special occasion that takes place during a short period of time. These 14 tracks, they imagine, “will have a different physical and emotional impact for each listener, that we can’t really control”.

The inspiration came not only from the dual theme on which this issue is built, but also, they say, from its “creative direction and editorial choices: photos, graphic guidelines, topics of the articles and interviews”. What emerges is just about forty minutes of eerie sounds and soothing textures, woven by multiple voices that seem to be telling the same story from different points of view.
Aimée and Marie wanted to conjure a “musical diary” where the author has to “decide to write everything or leave some things unsaid, maybe by fear of being read”. “We made it very atmospheric with some curious tonalities and changing rhythms. We definitely wanted to make this tension felt in the mix, like something very mysterious and curious, also very feminine because we felt that femininity was really present in this issue”, they explain.

And so it feels almost inevitable that the spoken introduction would be by one of the most spectral, and yet present, feminine TV characters of all time: Laura Palmer. In Twin Peaks, she is the heroine on which the intrigue is built, but that we almost never see. By reading a few pages of her diary, she invites us into her world, just as the mix invites the reader to look more closely at this magazine, words and images echoing in their mind.

T R A C K L I S T

TIBSLC_feat_LIZZ / Laura Palmer
Edouard Cheritel / Movement 1
All Times Now Nothing / Smile?
Celestial Trax / Suspended Midair
Windy & Carl / Crossing Over
Jonnine / You're Wanting It to Go This Way
sevenism / light (we see)
uon / Bus
Andrea Taeggi aka Gondwana / Dinergy
Okay Vivian / Downer Journal / My Inside Out
Meitei / Kawanabe Kyosai
Wayne Phoenix / Place
Evitceles / Gray Instinct
David Shea / mirrors

Screenshot from Marine Giraudo's animation, photography Céline Bischoff