Fission Street

"Fission Street” is the title of my new collection of pieces finally complete & committed to CD. It is pleasing to have managed to get this far with the compositions, given that all of the original tracks were inadvertently deleted by me half way through the project, the resulting 16 pieces rose phoenix like from the ashes of that disaster & can now be put away on the shelf. I love the process of putting away my studio notes & deleting the mixes when they have reached the end of their life span. As these are all instrumental works there will be no master tapes as such available, my rule with this kind of music is that once completed the only thing remaining should be the master CD & mp3 versions of the finished tracks, all samples, alternative mixes & unused tracks are deleted. Which is as it should be, decks cleared for the next idea.

Which will be???

Well there is another thing I love, searching around for inspiration, soaking up influences, exploring all those quiet little avenues off main street. You find the most interesting stores down there.
Currently I do have an unfinished vocal album to complete. Mainly it involves me setting up the vocal microphone wailing in to it for a few hours, until said wails constitute some kind of performance I can accept Then mixing the wails, but don't hold your breath I have been recording this since 2005.

I have become interested in architecture of late & the idea did occur to write about buildings. It has been done before but I wanted to personalise it & have been considering the possibilities of writing about buildings I have grown used to in my life, that I personally like or mean something more than "architectural icon". In other words.... buildings that I see or have seen everyday as I have grown. This could be good if I avoid nostalgia, you can't change the past, you shape the future by what you do today.

I have also been playing around with the idea of writing some " house " music, no… not the duff duff duff electronica that came from the USA in the eighties, but literally music composed by sampling sounds found in the different rooms of my home. That presents a challenge as kitchens & bathrooms offer more sonic possibilities than hallways & living rooms.

What becomes clear reading back over this is that once I decide what I will do I need to set some constraints on the work, in effect I need to build a frame before I create the picture, once the frame is built I then need to restrict the palette to a simple number of colours.

While I write this I am suffering from a really nasty virus that laid me low all weekend, aching limbs, headaches & now a really vile consumptive cough, woe is me ! You really have not suffered until you have had "man flu".

Listening to:

Bill Nelson
The Au Pairs
TV on the radio
Mirah
Branch Managers