It helped to fix the studio. I just uploaded a first take on some new stuff I’m working on to myspace, see my myspace account for Celestial Cookies - Lunar Conspiracy Remix.

This is an attempt to make a 30+ minute podcast with new music as well as break out parts and get them released as tracks and so forth.

The inspiration is psychedelic electro music with no drugs involved, just a crazy mind.

It seems using a blank canvas such as making a podcast with whatever bubbles up in the mind a good approach in my music writing. The stuff I like I will release, the rest will be released via the podcast. It resembles a little bit what FSOL and The Orb has done over the years. Plus it’s just plain fun to compose in Logic and Ableton Live and see what happens.

Maybe some of you know that I’m somewhat active on the Ableton Live DJ forum. Check out the forums in case you are interested in Ableton Live for DJ purposes, a lot of issues and new tricks are discussed there every day, and this forum is actually quite clean and fun, no big religious debates.

Anyway, one idea we came up with recently was to take tracks from the Tracks section where various producers are listing links to their new productions, and make this to a showcase mix. Here’s the link to the first showcase mix, ALDJ Mix Showcase 001. Actually mix showcase 002 is already in the works.

Now, if you want to contribute material, check out the forum postings about the 002 showcase mix, here’s one of the threads.

It was fun, but also a challenge, to mix this one, as the music is eclectic from slow chill up to drum and bass, in the same mix, or, from 118 BPM to 175. Also, there are many different kinds of styles. But that was also the fun part, to see what could be done with such widespread material. Anyway, check it out, for me it’s fun listening to a wide domain of electronic music. It was the first time I mixed drum & bass as well, and it’s not easy, I learned the hard way.

The other thing that happened was that I got another interesting idea about working with new electronic music artists and net labels, more about those plans shortly!

Go this this link and there’s more info about the track listing as well as the download link.

Some additional notes. I really personally think that New Musik’s 24 Hours from Culture Part II is one of the first minimalist tracks, it has an 808 drum loop, as well as very simple melodies and atypical chord progressions. I remember listening to that track ages ago and thinking: hmm, good idea, but it would never fly for a whole album. Little did I know that minimalist music is so big today. So I started the mix with this track. New Musik is anyway one of my big influences since the early days of my music creation phase.

Otherwise, the idea with the Pretty Gritty Strange Mix Collection is to try to achieve a balance of 1/3 pretty music, 1/3 gritty music, and 1/3 strange music. As in mathematics, it’s hard to get this balanced. This mix also has one of my own tracks at the end — many producers do mixes to promote their own material, so hey.

I also added in podcast links now for easy subscribing to all the mixes I will export, I actually have a couple of others lined up, like one with minimalist music. Some might wonder, hey where’s all the free music you usually uploaded. This is what happened. But rest assured, something cool will show up soon.

I tend to move between mix and track production modes — back and forth. Both are fun!

In the never-ending quest to saturate the universe with songs, 52 Minutes Close to Chaos is released. This was the earlier mentioned wacky-synth project.

Check the web page that has the MP3 file for download, background about the project, the songs, technical information and so on. Let me know what you think, feedback always appreciated.

What has this picture of steam to do with the release? I don’t know, maybe releasing musical steam helps now and then. I took that picture while visiting the AES tradeshow recently, and while taking it, a couple behind my back said: who would like to take a picture of that? So that’s why I published it, so the action had a purpose.

It helped having a week off from work. That and reading many strange SF books recently. Oh, and also having fun with my latest SW synth purchase, Zebra (more about that later).

All this work was done in less than three hours today. Here’s a list of the last songs that I composed, arranged and produced for this 52 minute thingie: Electronic Dolphins Reboot, Devonian Funk, Data Dump City, Exmento and Eternal Friday.

I will actually take Exmento and make it to a 12″ track later. Most of that was done with Zebra and its fun arp patches.

Next I need to dump down it all as a long track and do critical listening, fix anything odd, do a final mix with Logic (really like the Logic Exciter nowadays), and then export it all. Don’t know how long it takes, maybe end this week, or a little bit more.