Dropping words like a dropped mince pie… Experiences, technique, experiments, solutions for writers-block, production, psychology and creativity.
Wish I could centre-justify this text… it’s so uncomfortable.

It’s been a while… “Control” was 2015 I think - the one with Lucy’s hands trying to control the sun on the cover. In the meantime I loved composing and sound design for 3 documentaries for Wellcome Trust, and a pure score for the awesome espionage short, ‘The Drycleaner’ (Chris Carr,2019). Lovelace (Rebecca Whitbread) has also been recording throughout 2019 and as I write, somewhere in London, our lady is tracking vocals for the mix.

2020 and I’m very much looking forward to writing 2 new albums:
”Robotronic” - The robots are back, and I promise fun, cheesy riffs, vocoders and of course plenty of detailed sound design.

“Winter Cities” - The folk is back, and with my love for drums and traditional instruments on ambient and sound design, it’s going to tonally big with vocals and strings more up front than the last two. I’ve been sitting in forests, recording the weather and pissing off bees during virus-times, too and intend to give ya’ll a good long track of of Bristols recent rolling thunder.

For the romantic in you, here’s a clip of ‘Gold’ featuring the usual glockenspiel, dulcimer, and 2 of my snare drums, Denise (made her myself!) and a bigger brother, Jeff.

Noone should ever go full-electronica, but I almost did in this indulgent cacophony of percussion, sound design, vocoders, speech synthesis.
A homage to Musique Concrete, and the electronic pop of the 70's and early 80's, with a blatantly cheesy vocoder line and riff that I hope gets Jeff Wayne and Jean Michelle Jarre turning in their… studios.  

Geek-Notes:
Samples of an icy fridge make up the "frozen" chord at the start with varying states of resonator and filter from KYMA.  Thanks to neighbour, Shippy for lending me his Rototoms and tom for that 80's percussion sound and one of my favourite arts and tech companies, Plogue for making it easier to emulate 1980’s speech synthesis - that was super fun! Weirdly, my love for Plogue cannot be expressed in speech-synthesised words.

Another antidote to writers block
Sometimes The Muse doesn’t show up, and in those times I do a cover (or play Far Cry). In this case I spent my writers-block by designing up some crunchy sounds, whipping out the old drum machine samples, learning how to use 8DIO’s Requiem properly, and dusted off the Odyssey and another analog synth, and so after a few hours in Brad Fidel land here’s my take on the Terminator Theme but in my go-to time sig. Because Skynet is so naughty.

Why you make this block so BIG, squarespace? Tell ya who should be big is the girl behind that massive audio block, lets call her Rebecca.

I think this lady, http://www.iamlovelace.com is probably the most exciting and challenging that I’ve ever arranged with and played for. I flipping love it.

Backbeat…? Backbeat my golden butt! Rhythm? The clarinet and vocals has that under control… so I get to tell story through drum - the way Africa intended.
Floor tom on beat 1? YAS. Geek that thing into the floor.. Sometimes there was no consistent meter, just follow Rebecca down the path…

Woke up thinking about the session for this song and how the engineer refused to take cymbals and drums together… but we easily turned that into a plus. Not unusually, he may not have really ‘got’ Rebecca… which is actually a high compliment. He tried, but she’s just too wonderful for the norms, and after working with well over 160 artists (I counted em about a decade ago), I’ve only been able to truly say that a handful (3) times.

Now we live in different cities I really miss being on stage as much with this aggressively creative performer but make sure to keep an eye out if you’re in London and pop over to that website whydontcha. New stuff in the works.

We’re not really leaving, but they definitely were. Unfortunately this film was not commissioned but this soundtrack was a wonderful opportunity to create something a little apocalyptic with some quiter melodic moments on Dulcimer and Duduk. Writing meaningful and simple melodies on a theme has always been a worthwhile challenge for me, and one I’m going to dive into on my next album.

I absolutely adore the 1984 Lynch Dune, I don’t know why but I just love the decrepit, sweaty and surreal atmosphere of this epic (apart from Token Minority™; breaking no sweat as the only black person* left in the far future!) and the detailed political and cultural history of each race… Wormhole travel, resource wars, future Islam, a planet of evolved AI’s, a race of female bio-engineers, a talking testicle in a bathtub with a vagina for a mouth (you’ll know it when you see it), human computers hooked on drugs, Sting in drip-proof undies. Toto nailed the score, Agent Cooper rode a huge worm “the likes of which even God had never seen (not sure which future god, but clearly never seen worms), Patrick Stuart proved that the Yorkshire accent is still strong in the year 10,191, and that Rachel girl from Blade Runner showed us her baby blues… all from a book written in the 60’s.

The intro affected me hugely and set off a little obsession with dark and low noises, bright high’s then a voice (something earthy and familiar) right in the middle. The very beginning still whips up a pimple; it’s that tape-saturated low-end white noise that it’s just on the verge of distortion and resonance, strings glissando into 5ths, echoing The Deep Note, and that very subtle harp before the themes emerge… it’s just gorgeous and most likely informed my love for beautifully crafted ambient.

Hmm, the Dune quote, “Traveling without Moving”… Reminder: need ask Nick (Jamiroquai - a dam gorgeous bass player to gig with) if that’s where they got the idea for the Jamiroquai album title.

So anyway, I got writers block one evening, and so created my version of Brian Eno’s “Prophecy Theme”.

My challenge was to use as much deep programming of the Prophet 8 (appropriate) to recreate that beautiful Eno patch, and use the Moog for the sound design. There’s a bit of choir from 8dio but it’s tempo free and… I like it. A bit too clean perhaps (both of these synths tend to be) but i’m good with it.

*not a part of the story but see if you can spot him

“Dam it squarespace, you blew that block up, dam youuuu dam you all to herrrrrlll…”

Compositions inspired by abandoned cities. I received another brilliant film treatment from Lewis (Cephalopod Writer/Director) and decided to write something for him to really set the mood for the film he’s working on.

I do love creating ambience, but ambience is nothing without composition: story, theme, layers and something vaguely familiar to ground us. Otherwise what you’ve got is yoga-studio-music: GMpad43 and a vague drum loop.

Plenty of time went into these little sketches and I hope to compose more as the script grows, like the red weed… But looking back over a few I realised my old textures and themes creeping in (So I guess creeping and growing is the theme in this post?). Gets a bit indulgent at the end but hey, editing is 80% of the process not matter how unromantic that may seem.

My notes: Craco sails us quickly through a landscape of dead, sharp and twisted metal structures finally giving way to an open and peaceful place where, bathed in twilight nature has reclaimed. There’s little signs of life here and the Cello brings grounds us reminding us of something earthly… but it’s just a little off, haunting, and distant.

“Is that thing meant to break off inside that other thing?” (Matt Kershen, Probably Science)