This is another track I found in my September 2007 output folder. So I opened it and cleaned it up a little bit. Kind of tech-house funk, a genre I stumble into now and then. Anyway, it was an interesting one, don’t even know what poem my wife is speaking to the microphone. It all reminds me of a cat’s life.

Some of the keyboard playing is influenced by Herbie Hancock style funk soloing, or something like that. I don’t even remember why I named the track with that strange title. Oh well. Time flies.

Right-Click to Download Postal Theory of the Woodland Cave

This one is from a couple of months’ ago when I went through a psychedelic rock phase. Still not sure if I will continue with similar music but I have a couple of tracks on the hard disk. In case I get more done it will be released under the Flowers Underneath Fruit name, either album or the band name.

Basically we have up to three guitars with E-Bows wailing. And at the end the typical beatnik poetry reading by a pitch-down voice, including the the last part being heavily flanged. Hey, that’s how you make psychedelic music (and note, no whatsoever drugs used!)

Right-click to Download Wailing Guitars

This was part of a project some years ago to make Sufi music. I’m not a Muslim, but I got fascinated about Sufist music, the whirling ceremonies of the Derwishes, Rumi’s poetry and so forth. You could read more about it at this page.

I still don’t know what to do with this four part Selam series, Sufist music has four selams, each with a specific theme that I tried to compose down.

There were some funny misunderstandings, too. I assumed that derwish music was fast, it’s not, so all four pieces are 150bpm, the third one is 75bpm  which is kind of 150bpm.

Each Selam is also long, over twelve minutes each, hence this download is a bigger one.

The compositions have hundreds and hundreds of individual small audio snippets; it’s quite fascinating to look at the project and think who I had the patience to puzzle together all those hundreds of audio pieces into something that is working.

Anyway, one day I figure out how to publish the other three selams.

Next, something psychedelic that happened last autumn.

Right-click to download Selam, Part Two

This is a sample of a forthcoming set of music for a spin-class series to be published via iTunes et rest. The background story is that a friend of mine is a spin-class and aerobics instructor and she wanted me to write 15+ songs for a series of spin-class exercises. She will provide the workout instruction on top of it.

The instructions for me was to write music all the way from slow stuff up to really fast tracks. She never specified what kind of music, which is fun.

This is track 11 of 15. Now afterward listening to it, it’s clear I was inspired by old Art of Noise material including a Debussy-style passages around the 2:15 point. Which makes sense as the Art of Noise musicians made a Debussy homage album. I also wanted it to sound like pushing up a hill.

Next, Rumi-inspired music that I never released as I still don’t know what to do with it.

Right-click to download Workout Z11.

I think I did this song after watching a contemporary British SF movie about traveling to the sun to kick-start it. Or some old ideas from listening to Fripp/King Crimson bubbled up. Anyway, it’s always fun doing E-Bow work on a guitar.

It’s also one of my projects concerning merging guitar music with contemporary electronic music.

Right-Click to Download Star Horizon Native.

This started as an attempt to made very free-form music, similar to Miles Davis. So there’s very little editing involved, mostly seeing where this took and what happened next.

There is some influences from an eighties band, too, the title might give clues.

Right-click to Download Made In Japan.

Me having fun with Orb-like ambient music.

Right-click to Download Synthetica

Big thanks to Adrian Belew that has totally messed my mind about how guitar should be played, in a good way actually.

Technical details: Line 6 PodFarm at its fullest concerning strange effect chain settings.

Most likely I need to go in and redo the drum section (loop just now) and some of the bass lines, but the idea of this kind of dreamy guitar sound popped into my head just before I was going to get to bed, and here again I sit in the studio late at night.

The guitars have a lot of processing, flangers, choruses, Logic’s Tape Delay and everything goes through a general Space Designer patch to give it even more depth.

We have so many choices nowadays to make the sound spacey!

UltraSleep Sample Download audio file (Ultrasleep_Sample.mp3)

In addition I used Logic’s Space Designer with an aux bus where I routed the drums, the electrical piano and the guitar (not the bass) to make it sound like a live recording.

I don’t know if this will be a permanent fixture of my compositions, but it was fun just trying to do an improvisational session; first drums, then electric piano, then bass and the guitar part at the end. All done with single-takes, this is a live recording, after all!

If nothing else it will end up on my internet radio playlist, stay tuned when that’s around.

PS: This also shows that I have an overdose of Zappa in my mind just now.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.