Skeleten

Skeleten is the latest project of seasoned producer, DJ, and instrumentalist, Russell Fitzgibbon. More focused on evoking emotion than style, Skeleten blends his foundations in electronic music with laid-back vocal delivery and immersive instrumentation.

Through his latest release, “Walking on Your Name”, Skeleten walks listeners through the feeling of losing yourself in the atmosphere created by those around you. “The kind of feeling that I was experimenting with was something about being so wrapped up in a moment or a group of people and kind of generating this shared atmosphere. It’s so unexplainable, but it makes time kind of slip away. I know it sounds really vague, but I’m trying to reflect that kind of sense of oneness and wholeness.”

Far from a playback of the studio recording, Skeleten presents his live band to put an organic spin on his latest track – true to the original, but with its own flavour. “It’s important to me to have the live aspect not just be a pure replication of the recording,” he says.

In this week’s Mood on the Roof, Skeleten’s live rendition of his latest single, “Walking on Your Name”, will leave you in a new-age daze.

Before there was Skeleten, there was Fishing – a dance-floor focused DJ/producer duo, built alongside bandmate Doug Wright. This breakthrough project is where Skeleten found himself enveloped in Sydney’s creative community. Russell says that Skeleten begun as an outlet to experiment vocally.

“I’ve been doing a duo called Fishing, which is with my friend, Doug doing more kind of dance floor based electronic music. And I think the Skeleten stuff kind of came about when it was just an outlet for songs that I was singing on. Things that I wanted to experiment with, beyond that kind of dance realm,” he says.

In a brand new project, there are no expectations. Skeleten says he leaned into that; and we think what emerged is meditative and personal, for listener and artist alike.

“It was literally just kind of a meditative process where I’d just be in the studio and really let go of any idea of a purpose or what I was writing for and just literally do what felt really good in the moment. Try and really sink into one moment, making a song. I found it really helped me be free and make stuff that I actually liked,” says Skeleten.

When it comes to writing music, Skeleten told Mood on the Roof that in the early days, he’d often set out to express a particular feeling. But eventually, he learnt that capturing his emotions in that moment produced more genuine results.

“When I was first starting to write music, I always thought of it in terms of, “what’s the meaning of this song? What am I writing about?” And as I got older and I experimented more and I made more music, I started to really change my approach to be a lot more focused on just not trying to talk about a feeling or not trying to talk about an emotion or a story, but just feel something in the moment and reflect that in some way. The lyrics and the meaning behind the song feels like it’s generated from that. It’s not something that I set out and try and write about. Just try and sink into a feeling and write what comes out and really follow the vibe in the moment,” says Skeleten.