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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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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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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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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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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Someone I follow on Twitter because her tweets are often random and delightful… @burntbroccoli, posted an Audioboo, a recording of her reading a snippet of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky. I thought it was enchanting and wanted to embellish it a little.

This is the result. I love her voice on this. Hope you do also.

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Beware The Jabberwock.mp3
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