While the Missus was out at a swanky press junket at the Tower of London, looking at the Crown Jewels (insert joke about my privates here), I found myself noodling at the various instruments in my “studio”. Whenever I listen to ambient music like the recent Fripp soundscapes CD, I often blow the dust off my looping device and decide to capture a feeling in the same vein.
The idea was simple last night. Set up a short loop of around 30 seconds and just noodle with a piano patch. The initial results were completely wrong, too busy and just awful. There was no spirit in the recording. There can be a number of aims when producing ambient music and in this instance I was interesting in building up single notes to produce patterns, random tunes. I wasn’t interested in musicality as such (because I never am and I don’t profess to actually know anything about music itself) but more interested in creating something simple out of a handful of notes. This next piece is the result of that. It’s working title is “Pianoscape 2” but it could easily be titled something evocative as “Still Crane Lake” or “The Widow’s Memories”.


An example of a pianoscape

I recorded a number of these short pieces last night, jumping from instrument to instrument. I have a really interesting acoustic guitar piece that came out of it, but I need to fine tune it and record it again because I was getting tired and my fingers started to misbehave. I think that if I can produce enough “pure” ideas for this, I might even have a quick CD out of this. But I just love the idea of using loops in this abstract way. It is almost like subconscious music making and when I play back am started by the results.
In the post: Phil Manzanera – 50 Minutes Later. I have a quick listen to this and it begins well before a succession of slow, dreamy songs make you feel like your wading through treacle…in a good way. A proper review soon.
Just arrived: the shredder. Oh yeah, baby! I am gonna have some fun shredding today. I am going to see if I can shred a T-shirt with this thing. Oh yeah…

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