Interview with Silent Collision on Creating “Air Vent Lullabies" and Turning Everyday Sounds into Music

"Air Vent Lullabies" began on a hallway floor in the middle of the night, listening to the hum of something most of us stopped noticing years ago. silent collision took that air vent, the actual recording of it, and let it breathe through "Air Vent Lullabies." Unadorned. Doing what it's always done. Being steady enough to hold your thoughts without demanding them. It’s like a modern, readily available background waterfall that you can use to meditate and draw something clear and new out of yourself

The rest of the record is built the same way, sampling his own earlier compositions and reshaping them into something quieter and more inward. Not nostalgia. More like hearing your own voice through a wall. 

What goes unsaid? What echoes in the places we inhabit? What can seemingly background noise help us figure out about ourselves, creatively and personally? This and more is what silent collisions offers in this 6-track thesis. We wanted to ask him about the hallway, the hum, and what happens when you finally tune back in; check it out:

"Empty Hallway, 4:14am" is basically just the vent, framed. What do you see as compelling in something most people would dismiss as unnotably mundane?

It just feels good, and I haven't heard anything like it myself. Not saying a track like this doesn't exist, but simply that it just sounds fascinating to me and different. I feel inspired anytime something makes me ask questions, and on this song, you really have no choice but to focus on the drum patterns, and the drums are fucking sick on this tune, in my opinion. The little bouncy triplet hat/tom thing tickles my brain in a way I really enjoy. I make all my drums with analog synths, primarily the DFAM and Labyrinth, and all the weird sounds I make get buried in the mix usually, so a song like this, where the quirkiness of the drums could be the star, just felt cool to me.

I love the idea of "eating your own leftovers." When you dig back into an old song for a sample, are you usually looking for something specific, or is it more about stumbling on a fragment that suddenly feels right in a new way?

There is absolutely zero forethought going into sampling my own tracks. Usually, it comes because nothing is coming from my writing, but I still feel an urge to create something inside of me, so I just start throwing files in a project and fucking with it until something feels nice. It is almost like a feeling inside me that needs to find a way out, and so I just fuck with sounds until the feeling comes out.

"Darkness Within Darkness" is the only track built from scratch here. Did working so much with old material make creating that one feel different?

I wrote this track several months before all the others, originally air vent lullabies was a 5 track EP but after listening back I felt like I needed to sprinkle in a track with no drums so that I could have more of a floaty feeling at the end of the EP and I had this one in a folder I call "the shelf" which is where I stash all my songs I write that don't currently have a home on any project and this track just felt like such a lovely conclusion to the experience of the EP so off the shelf and into air vent lullabies it went!

Many of these pieces feel tied to a specific time of night. How important is the idea of time and environment to how this record should be experienced? Have you worked with such ambient white noise before?

Yeah, I mean, for me, this record feels best when your brain is fried from the day. I feel like anytime after the sun has set is an optimal time to listen, although with "Darkness Within Darkness," I think that song slaps during a sunrise too, but ultimately, sunrise and sunset are both similar states for me when my brain is kind of halfway online, and that is where I feel like these compositions shine. As far as working with noise, I work with noise all the time, but this record is one where I decided to really make it more of a focal point of the pieces. I love noise; noise is sick.

With titles as descriptive as “Exhale, Inhale,” how important is the backstory to the listening experience? Could the music resonate even without that framework?

I feel like the only backstory that should be needed is the song titles. Exhale, Inhale really has this breathing sensation with the way the synths are swooning and the air vent breathing, etc. If the music can resonate without the framework isn't a question for me but a question for the listener. If it does, then fuck yeah; if it doesn't, all good. I have plenty more in the pipeline that you may like down the road. I can't really say, though, because I can't live in a world without the framework, because I am creating the framework, so yeah, it's up to whoever is listening if it is making them feel a way they want to feel or not. Ideally, I feel like music should be able to be experienced with no knowledge of the inspiration or process, and then when you find out the process, it should deepen your understanding and make your experience better. But ideally, you don't need it to enjoy the compositions.

You've sampled some unreleased stuff planned for 2026. Does this EP now feel like a peek at the future or a goodbye to the past?

Honestly, this EP more so feels like a moment in the present. I don't have any songs like the 5 that the EP leads with; this is it. This is a one-and-done concept for me, of many concepts I have in store. Every record is a different concept; styles of creation overlap for sure. This isn't going to be the only EP I release with weird experimental drums, but it is certainly the only EP I will ever release with an air vent as the main instrument. It was just a fun experience to build around a sound that is so foundational to all of our lives. I also haven't sampled myself since creating this EP over a year ago, but I am sure I will eventually. I've just been writing all new stuff this past year, and that has felt really good.

Do you catch yourself listening to household sounds differently? Perhaps finding weird beats in the cityscape’s background noise?

I have always heard things many people don't hear. I was diagnosed with autism just over a year ago, and that has helped explain a lot for me. It explains why I am able to listen to and dissect music down to each component and why I have to wear headphones in a restaurant because I can hear 4 conversations all going on around me at once, with plates clanking and forks scraping. This is going to sound crazy as fuck, but a few days ag,o I was listening to a 10-hour YouTube video with the right ear playing a narration of the Bible in Mandarin and the left ear playing Mozart. At first, it's pure chaos, but once you get around 9-10 minutes in, you start to catch these rhythms from the mandarin that are making, like, a crazy percussion loop. I also don't speak Mandarin, so the voice just sounds to me like it has no context and no meaning, but you get these little windows where the Mandarin and Mozart are just fucking hitting. Anyway, yeah, I'm sure most people would not come away with the same experience from that, haha. Music is all around us at all times. I know it's a cliché saying, but people say it all the time because it's true. Nature is my biggest influence in all my music, and in my opinion, nature is the greatest artist in the world; it doesn't get better than a fucking tree. Trees are fucking sick.

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