A month ago, a Toronto-based artist, producer, and DJ Paul Chin announced his forthcoming project to be released in March. Today, on March 20th, we’re finally able to check out the Full Spectrum.
Full Spectrum, mixed and mastered by Toronto’s Freeza Chin, is a 20-minute story about influences and inspirations that made Paul the artist he is. The title itself was created because of the range of experiences that led to the album being created.
We caught up with Chin to get an idea of what the album means to him.
“This project feels like the result of the artist I’ve been my whole life and all the influences and inspirations I’ve had in life and they are all in here at the same time,” says Paul. Layered in anime scores, dancehall, orchestral soul, hip-hop and electronica, this project represents the wide range of musical expression Paul’s now able to engage in. The album consists of six tracks, four of which are collaborations.
Take It Or Leave It, the first single in the album, features CBC Searchlight winner, Desirée Dawson. Paul and Desiree met at a writing camp, when they, alongside Natasha Fisher, realized they weren’t seen as the ‘promising’ pop songwriters. That’s when they said ‘Screw it; let’s forget about what’s trendy and just make a song that’s HONEST”.
“I think that Full Spectrum is exploratory. It’s experimental a little bit, but it’s also very familiar because it draws from so many points of reference and Im very excited to share it with everyone,” says Paul. Paul’s previous project, Dancing Drums, was released in 2015, after which Paul had a period which he refers to as an ‘independent study’. “I spent the last three years prior to that, just really exploring and practicing and learning new styles of music,” says Paul. “It turned out that everything that I make now feels very comfortable and feels very like coherent within, even now I start producing things from a wider variety of inspiration and reference points.”
During this time, Paul experienced a number of life-changing events, starting with his first vinyl release on the label, and to being forced to leave the country for nine months (immigration status) until returning to get married. This period made Paul able to collaborate with people he never had the time to work before. That’s how his friends, Shad and Rebekah Hawker, as well as collaborators from the Discovery Song Camp, got on the tape. But what’s really unusual about this album — is the recording process. When asked about this, Paul tells Sidedoor he didn’t really realize he was working on the album. “I worked on it over the course of maybe two years and didn’t realize that I was working on it,” he says. “Because in my mind I was just working on a bunch of individual or disparate kinds of things, as almost like a practice.”
Paul Chin is a Polaris Music Prize-nominated producer that has started from classical training, passing years of bedroom production, years of beat-making, and almost a half-decade of musical exploration and collaboration. Now, almost five years after his last 2015 project, Dancing Drums, Paul is back to the market again.
Right now Paul is producing an album for a Toronto band, Tiger Balme, and is already thinking about the next project. “I’m going to start thinking about compiling the next album or at least starting to put together the concepts and the ideas that I want to explore next,” he says. “And yeah, I’d like to hit the road some more.”
Check out “Full Spectrum” out now!