The Jan Diaries — The Song Is Finished!

Red Bull Hrvatska · The Jan Diaries · 1 July 2020

Jan Kinčl knows two producers, Petar and Ilija, who finish a track in one to three days and never doubt the verdict. Everybody else, himself included, needs tricks — and this entry collects them. The enemy it names is not a lack of ideas but the drift of the producer’s own perception: the longer a song is worked on without a break, the further objectivity slides away from it.

What the piece covers

The damage arrives on two fronts. Musically, after several days of continuous listening the first emotional reading is gone and doubt sets in — the song may well be excellent, but the brain is saturated and needs distance before it can hear a first listen again. Technically, the ear adapts and tires, the brain starts defending itself against the incoming signal, and the frequency picture skews just enough to make any honest judgement about the balance of a mix impossible.

Against that, five working methods. Speed comes first: get the basic elements down inside a day or two, a rough arrangement over a rough mix, so there is no time to marry an idea and it can still be heard as an outsider would hear it. Then the club. About a third of what Kinčl plays out is his own material in unfinished form; sometimes it is a single four-bar loop copied out to six or seven minutes purely to find out whether the groove holds, then arranged on the fly with the tools on the DJ mixer. Heard loud, next to records by artists he loves, strengths and weaknesses polarise immediately — a track he was sure of turns out to have the wrong feel, and a throwaway sketch made in an hour turns out to be the one. Third, batching: two or three new songs mid-week, all of them tested the following weekend, notes kept, the cycle repeated for two months, then every correction made in a day or two. Fourth, the observer test. Fifth, the counter-intuitive one — feedback that the arrangement is a bit boring is usually good news, because a club track played loud should let people settle into hypnotic repetition rather than restage itself every thirty seconds, and small variations grow vivid on a large system.

The part that stayed

The observer test is the sharpest thing in the column: “Kad nekome puštam novu stvar u studiju i krenem ju objašnjavati, to mi je jasan signal da song sam po sebi nije dovoljno dobar” — if a track needs explaining, it is not communicating on its own. The closing story earns it. A demo Kinčl made four years earlier went through several permutations in his live sets with Regis, was declared finished at the start of the year and handed to a friend for a compilation on a well-known British label. The master came back six months later and nobody liked it. The release slipped to spring 2021, the pair went back into the studio in take-no-prisoners mode, and the fifth version was built almost from zero.