When mehro was invited to the iconic Capitol Records building in Hollywood to mix a new song in Spatial Audio with in-house engineer Nick Rives, he didn’t hesitate. “I believe the potential for sound is incredible,” the LA singer-songwriter tells Apple Music. “When I listen to music, oftentimes I'm taken to a place in my mind. Somewhere that I've never been, somewhere that I hope to go, somewhere in my memory. What Spatial Audio does is all-encompassing. My goal as a songwriter is to make music that way for the listener.”
The first song in his newly unveiled Alchemy series, “coastline” marks mehro’s first foray into Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos. All honeyed guitars and skyward vocals, with the help of the immersive audio format, it offers a listening experience that he likens to taking in a panorama from the front seat of a speeding car on an open road. “It felt like we were going somewhere,” he says of the first time Rives played it for him in Capitol Studios. “Like the windshield is sort of angled—not just a flat screen. You could look to the left, you could look to the right, it’s all around you.”
Moving forward, mehro says he’d like to work in Spatial as long as it suits the music in a similarly organic way. To his mind, there’s a clear difference between the intimacy of Elliott Smith and the psychedelic scope of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. “Is it asking to be something almost like a secret, or is it asking to be more like that moment where you're looking up at the sky and you're having that beautiful moment?” he says. “It just depends on what story I'm trying to tell, what I'm trying to evoke.”
One song of his that he knows he’d like to remix in Spatial Audio is “sky on fire,” from his 2021 LP of the same name. “Sonically, as an experience, it's very unique on that record,” he says. “I think that lends itself well to Spatial Audio, because of the depth and the width and its cinematic feel. It’s great to know what’s possible with sound and what we can do with it.”