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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This little ambient drone is dedicated to the beautiful Nickie Fisher, my love, my best friend and soulmate. We celebrate five years together tomorrow. Without her, there would be no music or imagery for me to share. It’s that simple. She constantly leads me out of the wilderness.

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Wilderness.mp3
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I’m struggling to be creative again. A work project that is pushing me way out of my usual sphere of expertise, the imminent arrival of darker, colder, wetter months and a hundredweight of thoughts are not helping.

This piece is not reflective of my usual work, but is an attempt to put down a aural example of just how my mind is working right now. I’m OK, but I really miss my more prolific bursts of sonic output. Where did it all come from and where did it all go?

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A Hundredweight Of Thoughts.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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This simple piece was made during late yesterday evening and finished in the small hours of this morning.

On a personal level, I have been trying to reach the light at the end of what has felt like a never ending tunnel of darkness, hence the lack of output for many months. Thankfully, the thoughts and sounds in my head are getting brighter and more uplifting as the days move on.

September, usually a month I dread for a few reasons, has unusually been a month of reawakening.

Using Ableton Live and a few home-made Absynth patches, this is how it all sounds to me.

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Reawaken.mp3
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This piece is my initial attempt to play with decaying and distortion effects to create a delicate dirty brittle and melancholic sound. I’ve taken a small loop of a monophonic brass instrument recording and created several loops with slightly different start and end points. I’ve then layered them adding decay and distortion of varying amounts to each single layer and groups of layers. It’s a shift away from my lusher soundscapes.

It almost sounds like it’s from analogue tape. Tape is a medium I’d like to experiment with. I think this would be a richer piece for it.

It’s something that suits my mood right now.

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Brittle.mp3
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I think the spoken words in this piece, from a BBC documentary, a quotation from the artist Mark Rothko, sums up how I feel about life and the importance to me of the creative process. I’d be lost without it.

Sorry, it’s been a while. I’ll try not to leave it so long next time.

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Golden Age.mp3
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Sorry it’s been so long since I posted something new. I have been sidetracked by a combination of work and homelife issues. I have been struggling to make anything, other than my contributions to the Disquiet Junto project.

Here’s a piece made in the early hours of the last two nights. It evolved through playing with the randomisation function of Absynth to created a rich layer of sounds all playing the same, simple riff. A few other samples have been included to give it a little momentum and richness.

It goes by the name of Yclept. ;)

I hope you like it?

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Yclept.mp3
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I have finally succumbed and purchased my first iPad and have immediately set about installing a few of the apps recommended on the various blogs and forums I look to for advice.

I have recently been part of the brilliantly conceived Disquiet Junto project by Marc Weidenbaum and have come to enjoy the idea of constraint as part of the creative process. What may seem as a step back in terms of raw computing power, sophisticated DAW apps and plug-ins, could actually help forge my sound and point it into a fresh direction. Pieces may be solely created on the iPad or I may use it as starting point and transfer ideas to my main PC for completion. Who knows? Time will tell, although at least an EP of iPad only stuff is my minimal aim.

I don’t, as yet, have a midi/audio interface, but one is planned when finances allow for it. The list of apps I have initially installed is as folllows… Animoog, Sound Prism Pro, NLog Pro, Sunrizer, csGrain, Mega Curtis, Space and Node Beat. I’ve yet to decided on something to pull these together, such as Nano Studio, but I will update this list soon.

It may take a little time for things to come to fruition but hopefully it will be worth the wait.