wants to know what you're thinking.
As is often the case, this piece started off with that very first bell sound and I started building to it. Similarly to the Output plugins mentioned yesterday, the Cycles library from Slate + Ash has become a dark-horse favorite for me – a pleasant surprise because my initial reaction to it was more in the disappointed realm. In part, it’s because the library is computationally intense. There’s a lot of granular manipulation going on, … Continue reading
Sitting down to write, I don’t think I was intending on a return to the deep space music / dark ambient genre, but here we are. I tried a slightly different approach this time, going with a slower tempo and then using a super sparse drum pattern, but running it through several effects. The opening note and kick drum sound remind me a lot of a song I wrote back in the 80s, but it’s … Continue reading
Since I clearly have not had enough minimalist ambientish tracks this month, here’s another. Actually, this track sounds very much like it could have come directly from my 2017 Song-A-Day participation. That’s not a bad thing – I had been planning to create a “space music” album out of several tracks from that year before losing the original projects to that hard drive crash in 2018. This would have fit in perfectly with pieces like … Continue reading
Yesterday I wrote about randomization and chance as compositional tools, and they show up again today, but in a very different way. And with a very different result. I was in a different mood today. Darker. Sadder. As gravid and grey as the sky. As has become usual, I had no ideas as I sat down to write. While I should now be used to this as a common starting point, it’s never comfortable, though … Continue reading
Pastiche. Nearly every time I’ve heard that word used in conversation or read it in an article, it’s used at least partially as a pejorative. It’s a French word, which came from the Italian pasticcio, which came from the Latin pasta. Which means “paste.” (Which makes the Italian pasta interesting, because the dough for pasta is essentially paste – just wheat flour and water – before being shaped and cooked). But in this sense, it’s … Continue reading