Form

There was this weird bit-rate filter machine thing in Buzz that was so temperamental that I only used it for this one track. It kept crashing but I loved the sound so much. The sound in question is the slow and steady filter on the main drum beat from the start. It sounds rough and degraded but I love the texture of it. This was a purely electronic piece that I tried to take the time to get a good melodic component, some wobbly and detuned synths seemed to do the trick.

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Here In The Dry Ice

Here In The Dry Ice has one of my favourite note sequences to play and while I like the track, it seems as though I didn’t care enough about the note sequence to simply take my time with the piece. The production is pretty ham-fisted and I’ve tinkered with different, more methodical versions since completing this track so stay tuned.

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Sjeren

For some reason I love playing repetitive guitar lines in 5/8 time. This track has got a bit of cheeky piano and vocals as well as some staple strumming and plucking, the chord sequence was kept deliberately simple to allow the synth-like vocals to go a little bit crazy. Well, as crazy as I can get with just humming or “aaah”-ing.

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Red Sky At Night, Shepherds F***ing Rave

Well there’s a cheerful little title! I think I was so excited with how this one turned out two years ago that I MADE A SWEAR. Anyway. I like the track, the drum production is pretty all right and the bass around the middle section is a particular highlight for me. Melodically it’s a bit cheap but when I was tinkering around with around twenty slightly different synth samples that I’d made I ended up concentrating more on the glitchy approach to composing the synth line rather than making it melodically interesting.

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Goam-Them

The rhythm for this track was pretty much an accident. I was tinkering around with non-standard rhythms using a lot of guesswork and random note placements and the main pattern you can hear just seemed to fit. It’s by no means perfect but it to me it makes sense in context of its accompaniment. I like the mood of this one but it is a bit too long and it gets a bit confused towards the end where I tried to reinforce the 4/4 back beat by adding extra percussion.

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Rollcage

This is one of my first guitar-based drone pieces and still it’s one of my all time favourites. The guitar parts themselves are loops were taken from a shorter, cleaner version of the song that featured drums, percussion and rough vocals (this version will be posted in a week or so).

It’s a long piece but to me it never felt that much of a chore to listen through, see for yourself.

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Lie Down, It’s 1998

I wrote this piece before I moved to London and rather interestingly decided that it would be the last electronic piece I would ever write before I moved on to guitars. Well, that didn’t last too long in the end. I’m glad I made the decision before I wrote this track because it ended up being a lot of fun, despite the cheeky cheesiness of the 303 bit at the end. It’s got all my favourite techniques, slightly off-kilter bass sequence, delayed synth plinks and a smattering of funk.

060326 – Lie Down, It’s 1998

Vive 3rd Testimony

What a stupid name for a track. I really hate naming tracks, honestly. Anyway this piece is more of a tribute to Neu! and all things krautrock. The bass is perhaps a little stodgy, otherwise it’s perfectly serviceable if you turn it up a little. Go on, it’s OK.

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Litany

Litany is a piece constructed of a monophonic synth line with some weird funky noises in the background, or something like that. It’s sort of interesting if you like any of the things I’ve tagged this post with, if you’re not into them then this track probably isn’t for you. I really can’t think of anything else to say about this piece, it’s boring me just thinking about it.

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Leo Ryan

There are plenty of websites out there dedicated to the exchange of viewpoints on religion and this certainly isn’t one of them. I’ve had a pretty strong opinion on religion and what it can do both in terms of the greater good and also its capacity for the not so good. Quite why I decided to write a slightly more politics and religion inspired piece I don’t know, I’ve never particularly been in to the idea of politicizing music that I write but I can certainly appreciate the impact it can have when artists do it it well.

What interests me are the human stories around particular events in history, one person’s account that contributes to the greater picture and overall understanding. Leo Ryan was a US congressman who died after intervening in the affairs of the Peoples Temple, after which the full scale of the damage that cults can do was made apparent by the Jonestown massacre. Ryan is the only congressman who has died in the line of duty and I urge anyone to read about the guy. The Jonestown massacre is appalling in itself but there’s something about the event from Ryan’s involvement that makes it all the more chilling.

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