Another piece made from rummaging through old unused snippets of unwanted recordings. I found a minute or two of my playing an old £99 guitar to make some drones. I find guitars pretty much alien to me, like a foreign land, that I love, yet don’t quite understand.

I recycled it into this little track.

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Sojourn.mp3
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Another little piece using a new melody, some stretched old pad sounds, backed by a sample from Kakistocracy and some street sounds from Long Acre in London.

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long_acre.mp3
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Sorry for the gap since I last shared anything but a combination of work/home life, coupled with a sudden inability to come up with anything new, has laid me low and kept me quiet.

In an attempt to kick start something I took my Zoom H4n to Soho Gardens and recorded the sounds of a sunny spring lunchtime as I wandered around. When I later tried to create a sonic mood to layer over the snippets I’d grabbed, nothing would work. So in a bit of a cheat, as per my last track, I looked back at an old piece and sampled a few little loops from it (Flotsam again!) to create a lazy, meandering feel to the overall piece.

I hope you like it?

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Lunchtime in Soho.mp3
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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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Whilst rummaging through old hard drives, cd and dvd disks, I stumbled across something that was probably my first ‘proper’ attempt to create a piece of meaningful music by myself. It’s from 2003, not long after I had lost my Mother and was living in Spain feeling that my life at the time was playing itself out, without me having any sense of control.

Hearing it for the first time in years, it’s thrown me straight back to the moment I made it. I know I used an early version of Reason, with a few samples and, oddly for me, my dodgy vocal via a dodgy mic.

I won’t treat it as a finished work… it’s very muffled and missing something… so not bothering with a 96kbps version, but thought I would share it because its heart was (and still is) in the right place.

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Separation.mp3

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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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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