The old “What am I up to?”
Seeing that this part of the website will become defunct once I achieve the redesign, I will post the contents here for sake of keeping the archive. It is slightly out of date, given a few new developments with Unity Gain and my own composing.
So here it is:
What am I working on now?
Since about the start of 2004, while I was finishing off the second Dream Diagrams project, I was working on a set of small demos in a fairly aimless fashion. Sometime I start with a grand plan, but not this time – I was barely surviving the stress of starting work as a casual high school teacher, and a lot of my spare time was taken up with 2Bob Radio in Taree, where I was living.
One outstanding project that gave me initial focus was a ‘wedding present’ song for some friends of mine I had promised to write. That began to get bigger and bigger, demanding me to master acoustic drum programming in particular. The demo ending up being 15 minutes long and currently is stalled (which may or may not end up in a project I’ve not yet begun called Equilibrium), but on the flip side I got into writing darker electronic songs to counter the big positive epic wedding piece.
After finishing 2 Smargaid, getting heavily involved with Graze’s Arc ‘sound field’ project at the radio station, and doing a few remixes for James DXU – I was left with the feeling that I should continue with the dark electronic songs and give the a vocalised pop feel. This would mean catchy non-repetitive melodies and tight interesting arrangements. I tried it all out on a demo so of you know called First Impressions Always Count (the song has since been reworking quite a bit). I knew I need to improve my singing ability, knowing that the record would have pretty much no one on it but myself. Naomi Leago kindly gave me some great vocal coaching during the middle of 2004 and I Iearned a lot about breathing, inner walls, training, and receptivity (I later learnt off Simon about how to ‘lock the lower harmonic’). I’m still working on it.
Living at home with my parents and teaching at high schools was wearing thin and in spring I packed up and moved back Armidale to look for work. At the end of the year I scored a great job with the University of New England being basically an Audio Engineer. 2005 was looking good, though proving a slow year: a slow evolution of getting used to working for a big bureaucracy; a slow evolution of learning I was a lot more alone in Armidale than I though I was; slow in getting [tqr] back on track after inactivity; slow in realising that I had a lot of work to do in improving my studio set-up to make the quality of music I was aiming for. After working intensely in audio for a while now my hearing has been elevated to a whole new level.
2005 aslo wore on slowly because I was working so much, and there were the usual side projects. I knew I had to keep a few people out there happy by quickly making the Futurology album, which I hope will lay rest to any fears that I’m not capable of making ‘serious art’. However, with the accumulating bunch of other ‘dark pop’ demos at the end of 2005 my immediate forays into serious art would have to wait.
I knew by this point I really wanted to make a comprehensive pop album with my own ‘style’ and mood all over it. But unlike some of my earlier work I didn’t want to slap together a whole heap of unfinished fragments and hide the lack of effort under an arty cloak (for example the two Dream Diagrams projects, the Pornography album and to some extent the unfinished Requiem project). This time it has to be perfect, start to stop. But I realised a problem – how do I make dark moody music so smooth, deep and textured appeal to just about anyone? Truth is, I’m still working on that idea, but one initial hurdle jumped was to shorten my structures a great deal, work really hard on making unique melody throughout the whole song, mix the sound beautifully (which has caused me to shake an old habit of over-boosting the extreme high frequencies), and finally present a group of songs that move through a resolving drama. I’m going to need to push myself as a composer more than ever before.
So as of 2006 things currently stand as thus: I’ve bitten the bullet and drawn my focus from about 30 demos down to about 15 core songs, all that have lyrics written already. The album will be called The Eye of The Paradox, and short of giving more away I’ll say I’m taking a big gamble and making the most emotionally self-indulgent album since my Puddles record.
Currently about 70% of the backing tracks have been written in Renoise. A fair amount of ‘mono line’ vocal melodies have been written, sometimes to the words, sometimes directly to the existing music. I’m going to get close friends, including Simon Floth to criticise these vocal melodies in order to sharpen them up as much as possible. I may also get Simon to help me record them using better microphones than I have here at home. I will write here when I have some more news to share – but I think at this rate work on the record will continue deeply right on into spring 2006. After completing I hope to try my luck at getting this stuff played on radio, maybe even sold online.
Those of you who who have following me for a while now know that I’ve been promising two other major project for quite some time.
The first is 2001′s ill-fated Requiem For Subordination double album. Without going into too much here changing platforms from FT2 to FruityLoops to Renoise from 2001 to 2003 really took a lot of adjusting and the writing for Requiem is really hotchpotch as a result. Despite some days occasionally doing some mixing on Renoise-converts of the demos, I’ve got very little interest in finishing anything on that massive opus right now.
The other is, of course, the much talked about Malnoia project, which was initially started with Martin Kidd around 2000-2001. I *did* do quite a bit of work on those 12 songs during the summer of 2005-06 towards converting them to Renoise mixes, but since have lost interest because my composition style has moved on quite a bit. My head is quite in the ‘Paradox’ space at present. Once that idea is out of me I may continue finish Malnoia, but if I do the songs will be ripped up quite a bit and made more musical than aggressive industrial originals.
Other than this I’ve been involved with miscellaneous jams around Armidale, mostly with Iain Mackay (local film producer and drummer) and ‘the man full of ideas’ Luke H (bass, laptop noodling), though I can say nothing substantial has or is coming from this (Although these guys were instrumental in setting up the ARC gig last year, so maybe that will happen again). I’ve also spent some random weekends with Ryan Sanders (sometimes with Simon too) making Silo/Cure-esq demos, but are mostly in Ryan’s hands to finish or not. Simon has spoken of doing a collaborative project with us three which I’ll write about here if something eventuates.
Finally, of the great joys of late last year and this year has been playing drum-kit for Jarrad Cousin’s piano playing! Jarrad and I have gotten to the point of jamming very intuitively and we’ve about 5-6 untitled ‘songs’ we’re exploring solely in performance. We’ve been playing in the acoustically-beautiful Mary White College dining hall, and now we’re starting to get some digital recordings of the sessions. I will post up some mp3s in the coming months. Sadly, Mr. Cousin will be going back to his native habitat in Perth in winter, so we hope to get some good recordings before then, and hopefully inspire him to continue with song composition over on the west coast. Other than that, you can anticipate a song off Paradox called Crawling Up That Hill that has been co-written by Jarrad and myself, thanks largely to Jarrad’s explorations on the piano.
For now you can either check out my old albums or download my mp3s and, of course, let me know what you think.
