I find it incredibly difficult to talk about my own music, unless I am talking about the technicalities of it all. I’ve been creating various forms of ambient music since I first took ownership of a synthesiser with the Roland GR-1, back in 1994. In those days, it wasn’t so much looping, more using long swathes and washes of sound overlapping each other, so there was a lot of movement happening on the fretboard, even though it sounded very much like very little was actually happening.
In fact, playing very little as you tend to do with ambient music, is quite a discipline. In fact, it is probably all discipline and the best bits happen when you don’t play. In this collection, as with many of the pieces I’ve been improvising recently, I’m not using a looper pedal. Instead, I used a tape delay plugin called Valhalla Delay in Logic Pro X to create long loops of guitar, which I react to and build up upon. In fact, there are no synthesisers on these pieces, just guitar, bass, chimes and an electric piano sound that I like using from Korg.
I felt that these pieces were a little more expansive and cosmic than previous pieces and hence the titles that were chosen. I broke up the generation loopiness of it all, by centring the collection with a little improvisation performed using a random handpan rhythm generator and a fretless bass that you can hear in the middle of it all.
Overall, this is meant to help you close your eyes and drift off either into the cosmos or into the pillowy bosom of comforting sleep…
Enjoy!