I forgot to mention about the plucky little Blue Tits who had been nesting in our bird box, the one that had remained uninhabited for five years. Well, the birds had literally flown the coup and abandoned their nest. Not sure what happened, but I think the local cats might have had something to do with this. I think they flew a week ago as I had not seen any bird activity in a while. Well today, when I let Alex the Wonderdog out the garden for his morning constitutional, I noticed that the bird box was on the floor. On the floor! Someone or more appropriately, something, had knocked it off the side of the shed. Again, this bird box had been secured to the shed wall for five years without ever being knocked down or dislodged by a strong gust of wind. Methinks those pesky cats (or even foxes) might have something to do with this. Oh well, I plan to buy a new bird box and locate it high up on the side of the house because I thought it was really great watching those birds flying in and out of the box. Simple pleasures, eh?
Today, The Missus left early for her flight to Frankfurt, leaving me alone and miserable on this wet and woeful Bank Holiday Monday. She’s away for a while and I am going to have to my best to cheer myself up. So I am ploughing myself into music making in an attempt to stave of the blues.

The plan for the next big thing from me is to do another 4-CD boxset. I know it is pretentious and grandiose but there is a good reason behind this. CDBABY, the site I use to get my music “out there”, charges about £45 per CD to get it on their books and on all the electronic retailers. My logic is why pay that for one CD when I can get 4 CDs worth of material out in one pop? Clever miserly Darren…

So I am doing a 4-CD set. The first CD is done – it’s called “A Pocketful of Stars” and has 15 or so instrumental tracks spanning an hour. The next CD doesn’t have a name yet, but is the unofficial follow-up to “Textures” and is about 80% complete (I think). The third CD is going to be a CD of vocal songs by me – so I am going through my archives and re-recording old songs and doing some new stuff to accommodate this. These recent “songs” I’ve been playing are for that and I have about 20 minutes of material ready to roll. Not sure how much more is needed, we’ll see how it goes. The final CD will probably be an album of ambient soundscapery stuff – all performed live. I am really digging the “Slow Music” CD and it is proving very inspirational. Not that I intend to copy this – but I’d like to attempt something live and long and spacey. Not sure if I can pull it off though.

Anyway, here’s another rough mix from that third CD – it’s called “I Don’t Know How to Stop” and is basically about addictive personalities or personal addictions or whatever:


Direct download: CLICK HERE

It features Darren in full “Rock Vocal” mode and although I only recorded the vox about 15 minutes ago, I might try and redo them later in the day when my tubes have opened properly. Mind you, I wanted the voice to get more frantic as it went along (in desperation) and I think this take captures that.

THIS FOLLOWING BIT IS REDUNDANT BUT KEPT FOR HISTORIC REFERENCE

On a related note 7 Digital, an online music vendor, has opened up a new site for desperate wannabe musicians like me to flog their tunes. I’ve got a couple of juicy tit-bits up for sale if you are interested. You can find out more by visited: http://www.indiestore.com/lock

For a couple of quid, you can download high quality copies of:
1) Textures [CONDENSED] – a quite superb reduced version of my Textures crammed into 28 minutes of loveliness with all the bad bits cut out
2) Soundscapes 99-03 – an entire CDs worth of noodling on the guitar from me adopting the soundscape model. All of it recording live and spliced toghether, it is a great summation of my ambient experiments (more about that tomorrow)
3) 2006 EP – this an edit from the second CD of that box-set I was talking about earlier. You might have already heard bits of this, but now you can download an listen to the first 15 minutes of that CD. It’s all good stuff and for a pound, you can’t go wrong.
Well that’s my sales spiel out of the way. I doubt anyone will buy any tracks because I give so much of this crap away for free. 🙂

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