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…
Technology is a wonderful thing, especially music technology. It has enabled me to indulge my hobby for over thirty years; from my first tentative steps on my Vestax MR-44 four-track recorder onto my initial dalliance with digital multi-track recording in the late 90s to where I am today. Recently, advances in AI technology has allowed us home recordists to go back to our old recordings and try to drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century. You can’t polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter.
So over recent years, like a dog going back to its own vomit, I keep circling these old tracks and keep using all the technological trickery available to me to try and make them sound a bit more how I wanted them to sound in my head.
They sound bad due to a couple of issues:
I couldn’t sing/play/write songs. I’m in an unusual position in that I have recorded right along my musical development, so you can watch in real time how I have progressed (or regressed) over the years and these early steps are just that: early steps, full of naivety and youthful bravado.
I had limited recording skills at my disposal. By that time I was avidly reading Sound on Sound magazine but it takes time to learn from your mistakes and these early recordings were mistakes. Recording sounds “too hot” or “too cold” and bouncing down bad takes or mixes. Bouncing down is where you mix two or three tracks together into a single mono submix in order to build up your song on a recorder that only has four single mono tracks to record on. Doing this muddies things up. But AI stem separation can now pulls those muddled muddy bits apart.
I had limited recording equipment. While my main investment was a Vestax MR-44 four-track recorder that looked like it would be more at home on a Russian submarine or nuclear power station, the rest of my gear wasn’t so premium. For example, my microphone was a £20 one I’d purchased from Tandy and really wasn’t up to standard at all.
But as I went on, my recording techniques and my playing ability improved and you can almost hear that in the recordings. So for those of you who are into gear, these recordings were made using the aforementioned Vestax MR-44, an Alesis HR-16B drum machine, a Zoom 9000 guitar processor and a variety of guitars and basses that I owned at the time.
Electric God
This is one of the first things I committed to four track back on the 11 November 1992. It’s a simple premise that our entire existence in reliant on electricity from the power stations that fuel our homes to the electrochemical currents that spark in between our ears and take our senses all around our bodies. Our god isn’t a big bearded invisible man in the sky, it’s the electricity that fuels the cosmos and without it, we would be nothing.
I can still remember programming the lolloping drum rhythm and recording the song on a Saturday afternoon. In those, as I was busy with university, I used to record exclusively on a Saturday and this takes me back. I still like this one to the this. I often think about re-recording it, but I don’t think I could ever recreate that youthful dopiness of it all.
Birdsong
This was my first attempt at an instrumental. At that time, I was interested in pushing myself in all different directions and so this is my attempt at that. Instrumental songs are hard to pull off because there are no vocals or words to catch the listeners attention and so I thought I’d try and create a guitar solo that would emulate the swooping bird songs I could hear in my grand parents garden as the wildlife there sung from the mighty cherry tree that sat there. I even recorded the birds with the intention of mixing them into the song, but I ran out of track space.
Much later on, I recreated this track for a collection called “Fragments” under the title “The Birds Sing to Me”.
Apathy
This is meant to be totally contradictory. So you have a high-energy punk song, because I do like a good simple-minded thrash – who doesn’t? But you back that song with lyrics that are the complete opposite: in this case, it’s about someone who is totally apathetic to everything around him to the point of not being able to finish the lyrics of the actual song. It’s meant to be funny and stupid and I think it succeeds really well.
The original mix was very harsh but thanks to AI stem separation, I think I managed to soften it all a bit and sweetened the pill. It’s still a hard listen though due to its overly-abrasive nature. That £20 microphone does me no favours here.
Last Train to Leytonstone
At that time, I was travelling nearly ever week day from my home in Leyton all the way to Ealing Broadway in order to study my degree there. This journey would take up 90 minutes there and back (during rush hour too) and it seriously started to affect me. This is song in its edited form is a reflection of those days and how I used to enjoy riding the tube but those years made the experience unbearable to me, even to this point today. The drum track is meant to elicit the sound of a train on the track. The song amuses me and reminds me of a very different time in my life.
Timelapse
The recording of this one was fairly clean, though I wish I’d spent more money on that microphone. The song was about the time I was hit by a taxi and I had one of those “life passing before your eyes moments” as I hurtled through the air. The song is short and sweet and I think it works. When it came to remixing it, it was fairly clean to being with so it sounds pretty much like it did but without all the muddiness.
Devils Claw
I remember just messing around with stereo delay with my guitar and my bass and everything! So I just was jamming and reacting to all the repetitions of the chords bouncing around the place. I didn’t realise it at the time, but it sounded it a bit like U2. To top things off, I had no lyrics for it, so I plugged the microphone into the guitar pedal and growled into the thing, again reacting to the distorted delay that was added to my voice. Completely lunacy that goes on a little too long, but the swelling guitar notes that plays a melody line is a sound that began here for me.
The Clock Keeps Ticking
This was a result of me putting an old Casio keyboard into the Zoom guitar pedal and just creating all this weird swooping keyboard noises. I then just reacted to those noises with my guitar. The best part of this was the lyric which was taken from a poem I’d written at the time and sung in one take over the instrumental – I just did it in one go. I remember pacing it out and then just going for it – it was a very exhilarating way of recording! Again, even though it’s not the greatest musical creation in the world, I have a lot of fondness for this song because it’s what I heard in my head at the time. It just felt like mine. It was poetry and music together, which is what I wanted.
Nothing to Do
Written during an abysmal time after my time at university in 1994. My grandfather had died and I had to move out of my grandparents’ home and back in with my mother. I was finding it difficult to secure work, despite applying for countless jobs in my field, and I was living an almost twilight existence. This was a comment on unemployment and how you feel completely lost and adrift in the pointlessness of it all.
The Road
This was recorded on 1st June 1995, while I was working my first job. At that time, the M11 link road was being carved through Leyton & Leytonstone and many old Victorian terraces were being seized and demolished by the powers-that-be. I saw it as a wholesale destruction of our area and for what? For more cars… Thanks to AI separation, this song now sounds a closer to what I had in my head and you can certainly hear that I was becoming a lot more sophisticated in my attempts.
Over the Horizon
Another short instrumental piece recorded in March 1993, which featured an old mandolin that had been in the family for many years until my dear mother decided she wanted to sell it for pennies at auction. That act of familial vandalism still bristles me to this day. But yes, it’s a short, sweet piece played on a mandolin and backed by a couple of 12-string guitars.
Not sure how to count all the bits and bobs I’ve done over the past thirty-or-so years, but this might be either my 46th or 43rd release depending how you count “God Pay Debts Without Money” which is four albums in one package. Anyway, this is another collection of mostly bright and breezy guitar instrumentals with one singy song in the form of “Aisle of Plenty”.
With this collection, I fed some of the original tracks into an AI service and prodded it enough time until it spat out something I thought was akin to my style of music. I then sat down and removed all the AI stuff and reworked it in my own image, employing the algorithm to act in almost a producer role, guiding where some of the songs would go in terms of arrangement. I think this was very successful in places as the original versions of those songs a million miles from each other.
So this is another 40 minutes of guitar-based fun that I hope you enjoy!
Out of Thin Air [2026]
If you want a physical copy of this album you can head over to my ElasticStage page to order one: https://elasticstage.com/lock
You lose count of all the music you record. Well, at least I do because making music is my hobby and over the past thirty or so years I’ve been mucking around making all manner of noises and “putting them out there”. I say that I’m unique in this creative process as I’ve often shown every faltering step from my early days in 1992 getting to grips with a 4-track recorder and learning how actually record a song, through to my transition to digital recording on PC back in 1998 to my expansion of that process through the 21st century. It’s all there for you to explore or ignore.
I have many folders of music in my archive, many bits and bobs that are just waiting to be assembled and so it came pass that on a whim I decided to put out this collection “May Cause Irritation”. I’m not sure what held me back these past few years. Maybe it was the total indifference of my potential audience that took away my appetite. I don’t know. In the past, I collected 40 or so minutes of music and just released it – no matter what. But in the intervening years, I’ve become a little more selective, perhaps?
This collection was assembled over four years from tracks recorded between September 2021 to June 2025 It’s my usual mish-mash of guitar-led instrumental music with a few more esoteric bits thrown in, as I realised that my more experimental (or odd) side had been neglected in some of my other later releases – so I was trying to re-capture some of that feel from the late 90s to early-00s when we through it all at the wall to see what ended up sticking.
Credits
Darren Lock:guitars, basses, keyboards, percussion & drum programming + sleeve photography & design Alan Harwood:Executive Producer Recorded between 30 September 2021 & 14 June 2025
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