11 – Nuns Deny Satan Using Powerful Cowbells
July 6, 2009
Here be music to banish demons. Always carry this on your iPod in case the horned one comes to sell you life insurance.
10 – Really Gloomy Sunday
July 6, 2009
The infamous “suicide song” from 1936 with added gloom… this was on the very first version of “The Last Summer” which was live for about 24 hours only… it’s another slowed down 78, performed by Paul Whiteman and Johnny Hauser.
9 – Mad for the Pogo
June 19, 2009
This was an early demo for a TV company, for a kids TV show about exploring creativity, I ended up doing some incidental music for season 1 and all the music for season 2… I don’t believe I’m breaking any copyright here as this demo wasn’t used (if you work for the company involved and want me to remove it, apologies and no problem!).
8 – Working Title: Not Dido
June 19, 2009
This was originally produced to be a collaboration with Nicki Jaine, I think about 4 or 5 years ago, alas Nicki never got time to do her part… so it’s essentially a backing track written by me. If anyone wants to put words to this and sing on it, please be my guest!
Nicki’s stuff is great, if you don’t know her, her site is here.
7 – Diamonds, Dancers and Cancer
June 19, 2009
Here’s an example of some of my commercial work (2 more to follow)… this was produced for a combined contemporary dance performance and diamond show in aid of the Hong Kong Cancer Foundation… I think I could have done more to tighten up the start… it eventually builds into a kind of James Bond/Alfred Hitchcock bossa nova.
Just a bit of fun… I was playing around with how Jóhann Jóhannsson uses little splashes of a melodic motif bound together with big tracts of connective tissue, and I had the idea of linking it with one of my favourite Dr. Who epsiodes where the Sontarans travel back in time to made DaVinci paint multiple copies of the Mona Lisa in order to make themselves rich in the future. The explanation probably over-hypes the result by some order of magnitude.
An example of my early addiction to abstract slowness… a recording of birdsong at 4am when I was still living with my Mum from 1983, layered into 16 layers and slowed down by a factor of 64 (I think) using an old reel-to reel tape recorder. In retrospect, for a long long time after this I 2nd guessed what I thought people wanted to hear, and now I’m back in a similar place (for now). The cruelty was not my family BTW, just most of the rest of the village. One day I may write a book.
Just a simple idea, I found eerie synergies between an English folk song about the Netherlands and an Indonesian folk song … decided to put them together, building the western part using layers of canon, and playing the eastern part backwards… Batavia is the old name for Jakarta.
3 – Olga Samaroff’s Grief, Greta Garbo as Thief
May 7, 2009
More manipulation of old 78 records, this one from 1922 is Grieg’s Nocturne played by Olga Samaroff, shortly after her husband left her for Greta Garbo… I found poignancy in the back story.
2 – Pygmy Polyphonics (Protracted)
May 7, 2009
No-one knows at what stage the various Pygmy cultures developed polyphony… I like to think that it was sometime before it developed in the West, although I have no evidence to support that! It’s incredibly complex stuff, without the rigid structures imposed upon it by Renaissance composers or the 20th century minimalists. I wanted to slow it down just so I could really appreciate what was going on, so I did.
