JUNE-STRUMENTALS

Instrumental versions of celebrated albums dropping all month!

We're very proud to bring to you Junestrumentals, a month-long initiative of releasing previously unavailable instrumental versions of recent albums from our catalog.

As part of this campaign, we will be releasing the instrumentals from Atmosphere’s The Day Before Halloween, Whenever, and WORD?, along with Sa-Roc’s The Sharecropper's Daughter: Deluxe and Felt’s Felt 4 U. The albums are scheduled to hit digital and streaming platforms every Friday throughout the month of June.

The instrumentals for Atmosphere's Whenever and The Day Before Halloween are streaming now on all platforms and available for purchase (Digital Only).

STREAM/PURCHASE - WHENEVER

STREAM/PURCHASE - THE DAY BEFORE HALLOWEEN

Access All Areas with Ant.

Photo by Shelly Mosman

We're kicking off Junestrumentals with two releases, the instrumentals for Whenever and The Day Before Halloween. Both from Atmosphere and fully produced by Ant.

Initially released in 2019 and 2020 respectively, these distinctly dissimilar albums shared a hidden bond. We sat down with the man himself to touch on these topics and more.

RSE: Atmosphere released Whenever and The Day Before Halloween back to back in 2019 and 2020. Although there wasn’t much time between them, the two albums sound quite different from each other. What inspired the direction for Whenever?

ANT: Around 2018 Atmosphere was asked to do some original music for a TV series. We thought it was an interesting challenge and started messing around and creating some songs. The show ended up falling through, but we got a good start on what became the Whenever album. We’re always working on something, but having a new challenge was fun and ended up fast tracking that album.

RSE: We’ve heard whispers about a little-known link that loosely tied Whenever and The Day Before Halloween together. Can you tell us about that?

ANT: Besides doing original songs, I’d also made these short pieces of bumper music to be used in between scenes of that TV show. For the hell of it, Slug messed around one day and wrote a song to one of those bumpers. I never intended that music to have lyrics, but I loved what he did with it, so when the show fell through we did a few more with that vibe. That sparked what would become our next album, The Day Before Halloween..

Photo by Blue G Productions

"... I never intended that music to have lyrics, but I loved what he (Slug) did with it, so when the show fell through we did a few more with that vibe. That sparked what would become our next album, The Day Before Halloween..."

RSE: Your production on both projects was remarkable, but you took a particularly interesting approach to The Day Before Halloween. What inspired the direction you took for that project?

ANT: The TV series was supposed to be a sci-fi/thriller type, so the bumper music I’d been making was in the theme of the old 80's horror and sci-fi films I grew up on. We wanted to inspire a feeling of George Orwell’s 1984, paired with a simplistic 80's horror/synth sound.

RSE: In the album credits for The Day Before Halloween, there’s no mention of any other musicians playing instruments. Did you handle everything for that project?

ANT: Because it was utilizing those simpler kinds of sounds, it was easy for me to use my vintage synthesizers to capture those dark melodies on my own, versus working with additional musicians like I have for Whenever and other projects. However, I did call upon Plain Ole Bill to throw in some special effects--his specialty.

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