Review
Genre and Mood
Pitto’s Walking By The Sea is the song on which the Dutch producer steps up to the microphone himself, an electronic pop track from an album that runs, in the Green label’s words, “from filtered house to fragile electronic pop”. The label heard heartfelt music in it; a Polish review heard indie pop with a kick and a great store of positive energy.
Song Summary
Most of the voices on Objects In A Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, Pitto’s debut artist album, released by Green on 16 May 2011, belong to guests: Lilian Hak, Alice Rose, Leonie Muller and Annie Mackin among them. Pitto sings on a couple of tracks himself, and the label’s notes end on this one: “When Pitto sings on Walking By The Sea, you realize that heartfelt music is the only music that really matters.” The original mix runs 5:15, the seventh of thirteen tracks.
Musical Breakdown
The sources describe the track’s character, not its structure or times, so this breakdown is short.
The Voice
Pitto’s own voice, the label’s closing argument for the whole album.
The Kick
Reviewing the album for muno.pl, Paweł Wójcicki found its second half more danceable yet still far from tracks that get everyone moving, with one exception: Walking By The Sea, recorded with an indie-pop kick (“z indie popowym wykopem”).
The Energy
The same review heard enormous reserves of positive energy in it, the feeling this page files as uplifting.
Concepts in Focus
An alternate version is a second finished recording of a song by the same artist. The official video that Pitto posted on his channel in June 2012 does not use the album track but a Video Mix, “Composed and remixed by Pitto”, with “Additional bass played by Daniel Rose”. Play it after the original mix and listen for what changed. A recording of the same title, credited to Geurt Kersjes as composer and lyricist, also appears on Breaking Up The Static, released by Sonar Kollektiv in 2016.
The music video was directed by Sarah Domogala with Tomas Kaan as co-director, and its director of photography, Daniel Bouquet, shot it “completely handcranked on an Arri 2 35mm camera”, with financing from the Dutch video-clip fund. Hand-cranking, the technique of the silent-film era, puts the speed of the film in the operator’s hand.
Artistic Context
Pitto is Geurt Kersjes, a Dutch producer who later created Studio Stekker, a collaborative production space alongside Utrecht’s Stekker festival. He spent two years composing the album, muno.pl reports, and the review heard dreamy electro-pop and house with deep depth, and was reminded of Oliver Koletzki and of Zwicker’s Songs Of Lucid Dreamers, heard here in Zwicker – Oddity (feat. Olivera Stanimirov). Green is the label of Joris Voorn and Edwin Oosterwal, and Pitto returned to it in 2014 with Pitto, Woodie S – Shadows.
Impact and Reception
Wójcicki found the album scattered across genres, but pleasantly relaxing, a rare melancholic record within club music, and he singled out this track. It is here for that moment when a producer of guest singers sings himself. Play it on a walk by the water.
