Coloured in Chrome Part 1 - A Conversation with Brock Wilson

On his latest release, Brock Wilson begins in the ocean and moves through the trees — walking the listener down a dream of the sea-to-sky highway, beneath the arbutus trees, to his hometown of Vancouver, BC.

“That’s a constant for this series — it lives in that dreamworld,” said Wilson.

The Canadian artist debuted the first two tracks of his four-song series, Colored in Chrome, last week. “Eternity Swim” and “Arbutus” were released on February 24th and 25th, respectively. The former, the series’ instrumental opener, represents an earlier form for the 22-year-old musician. He used to work most heavily in synths, believing vocals weren’t necessary for the cohesion of a song. But his process grew, and his opinion changed.

“I like to make a song left-to-right. When I’m working like that, I don’t want to stop for three hours and try to design a synth, I just want to load in a preset and keep it moving,” he said. “I want to make a song — not just focus on the nitty-gritty shit.”

That desire for wholeness comes through on “Eternity Swim” — it feels more like a flowing, fluid composition than a string of beats individually constructed. The song is a spacey opening for what Wilson describes as a more traditional sound through the rest of the release.

Originally, the series had five songs. There was a bridge track between the ethereal mood of “Eternity Swim” and the more structured “Arbutus.” Wilson pulled the bridge, and was quick to say he didn’t regret doing so.

“It’s gotten easier for me. When I started producing it was really hard for me to let go of something if it wasn’t working out. But now it’s like, I can’t fix it forever,” he said.

So the shift between the two songs feels a bit abrupt. While “Eternity Swim” lives in a dream, “Arbutus” lives in memory. The song’s lulls and returns — led by vocals fading in and out of focus — lend the same hallucinatory tenor as “Eternity Swim” but give it firmer roots in reality. “Arbutus” is a blunt expression of nostalgia — its title derived from trees native to the western states as well as the name of the street near Wilson’s childhood home.

“That song is a trip down memory lane,” he said.

Dreams and memories feel like a theme as Wilson talks about the inspiration for the series. He describes late nights in high school, struggling to fall asleep for hours and plugging in his headphones. The way he absorbed the sound passively as he dozed off fascinated him.

“The way you perceive it is much looser, it’s uninhibited. You don’t really have any opinions, you just kind of watch it go by,” said Wilson.

His other inspiration comes from travel — a source that’s run dry in the last year of pandemic solitude. Following the stark shift in day-to-day (Wilson worked at a concert venue before March 2020), he picked up oil painting and mushroom foraging to pass the time and work his creative muscles.

“I like spending time alone so it didn’t really affect me at all. I got kind of lucky I think,” laughed Wilson, adding that he recognizes that although his situation is tolerable, many have faired much worse during the pandemic. 

But the time alone and unemployed also gave the young producer an opportunity to dig through his hard drive and hone his focus on putting his music out to a bigger audience. He sees this release, and 2021, as the start of something bigger for him.

“That’s what this next year’s all about — just driving out the music. It’s not doing any good just sitting on my laptop,” he said.
You can listen to “Eternity Swim” and “Arbutus” on Spotify now. Look for the second half of Wilson’s series in early spring 2021.

Written by Cooper Green @green.cooper