This piece is essentially a working of Flotsam from a couple of years ago. This piece recycles the original to bring them both to a fitting conclusion. It’s a long slow moving, sometimes dreamy, sometimes not so drone with some little bursts soft analogue distortion that I really like. I hope you do too?

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Jetsam.mp3
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The third in a little chance inspired pieces. This one was rather simple. I recently bought the Ableton Live 9 Suite upgrade and wanted to test the new (and rather brilliant) audio to midi feature. I decided to use on of my own tracks as the sole sound source. To choose which it would be I decided to roll three dice and times the result to choose an article number from my blog. I rolled a 3, a 6 and a 4. So, track 72 – Milk Spilt, was used.

Why the title? I completed this as dawn broke and the sky really was a milky white in nature!

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Milk.mp3
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This is the second in a series of pieces where I use random methods to influence the completed work.

For this piece, I simply repeated the previous method, starting with six new source loops, except that this time I cut down the total number of loops from sixty to thirty six (mainly because my poor little laptop was struggling).

The title comes from the dream which I just woke from this morning after drifting off when listening to the final version on a loop before sleep. I was diving, but couldn’t seem to get back to the surface and was helped by a whale. I think the recent story about Cetaceans helping to save the life of one of their own must have influenced this.

If you like drone, I hope you’ll like this.

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Fathoming .mp3
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This is the first in a series of pieces where I use dice and other random methods to influence the completed work. It’s a drone version of Mozart’s Musikalisches Würfelspiel, I guess.

For this piece, I created sixty drones, based on variations of six initial ones. To get the sixty I used dice to determine the detuning, repitching and loop start points of each of the six until I had ten of each. I then used the dice to decide which of the sixty pieces would be layered on top of each other, as well as determining the global effect types and levels. I ran this through six times to get six candidates for the final piece. A final roll determined which I would post. The title of the piece stems from seeing the wonderful play Constellations in London which has had a profound effect on my reading material of late. My tiny brain is now trying acquire ‘some’ understanding of the quantum possibilites in life.

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Constellations.mp3
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The last in my little series of space sample pieces. This one includes Vostock 3 & 4 as well as a couple of other gems nestled amongst a gently rolling melody. Like most of my output it’s a lights out, headphones on piece.

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Vostock.mp3
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Another little piece playing around with a few more of the lovely space samples from http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/sounds/sounds.htm. This has snippets and loops from the ISS, from Soyuz and a Maroc Morse Code satellite broadcast. The melody was a live improvisation using Animoog on the iPad recorded directly into Ableton Live.

I hope you enjoy it?

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ISS & Other Satellites.mp3
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My next little piece using the wonderful samples at http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/sounds/sounds.htm includes recordings from the Vjezna HF Transmitter talking to Soyuz and a more modern transmission between the ISS and TsUP. The melody was made using a sample from China 1 broadcasting the tune “The East is Red”, which I have looped and heavily effected.

It’s quite hypnotic and calming… try listening to it on a loop before sleep? You’ll soon be floating in your dreams.

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Vjezna.mp3
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This piece is born out of my second session playing with the lovely bunch of space samples from http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/sounds/sounds.htm.

It uses a couple of tones from an old Chinese satellite along with a drone made using csGrain on the iPad.

It has a mysteriously haunting feel to it that I remember from my late night shortwave radio explorations.

I hope you like it?

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China 2.mp3
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Whilst looking for a little sonic inspiration, I came across a lovely batch of fantastic recordings at http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/sounds/sounds.htm. I use a couple of the space recording samples to flesh out this simple little motif that throws me back to the repetitive melodies that I would regularly discover somewhere odd along the shortwave frequencies as a child.

This is the result of my first hour with these samples to hand… expect more, hopefully more developed ideas to follow!

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Soyuz.mp3
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Unable to sleep last night at about 1am I loaded Reaktor into Ableton Live and set upon the task of creating a sound to sooth me to slumber. I opted to create a handful of layers of slighty detuned and filtered drones, allowing them to feed into the region of my brain that was riding a light opiate wave from my painkillers. This 13 minute drone had me dreaming by 3am. :)

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Opiate.mp3
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