I’m trying to finish up a 55 minute piece called ‘Rebirth’ that was ordered by my cousin for her child birth. That by itself was an interesting assignment. Anyway, with ambient music, there’s still a need for tension, long passages of reverb-saturated strings and so forth might make it all, let’s say, too sleepy.

So what I came up with was to introduce every 16 or eight bars an accentuation, something unexpected that happens. Mostly it’s a loop from my collection of athmosperic sounds I’ve collected along the way, but I only use a short bar, sometimes with a strong reverb, so it’s like an athmospheric cymbal that breaks up the song to some degree. Sometimes this is at the end of an eight-bar set, or in the beginning, this to avoid anything expected.

I need to mix it down and do critical listening, it might make the set too busy, so there’s always a place for middle ground. Anyway, it’s an interesting trick in case you are building ambient music, but it all sounds too much like a drone.

Tonight I went in and updated my main web site, kentsandvik.com. The page layout is now much better, and you could find all the public material available as downloads (MP3 files). There’s also an RSS link to any music that will show up at the site.

Welcome to my blog. It took a while for me to start one, always had doubts about using a blog for private use. Anyway, I had a conviction that a blog site could be a good thing — I could post information and updates that others might want to read or benefit from. So it’s now up and running.

Expect all kinds of entries from a wide variety of topics, this as in my private life I tend to work in many domains. Follow the categories and pick the entries you want to read. There will be postings about my studio work, equipment used, music theory, about composition issues and ideas. And in my during daytime I’m a software engineer, after all. There will be postings about art in general. And other postings, too.

–Kent