This is the first thing I’ve felt happy enough with to release to the world in a very long time. Over the past couple of years, I’ve spent most of my creative time building systems that never get used – this is a collection of some of the streams that made it out the other side. It comes at a turning point in my life: professionally I’ve come to the end of a job that has taught me an unbelievable number of things about musicking and has forever changed my approach; personally, this album is released in the wake of the birth of my son, an event that reconfigured my perspective on many things, including what I create musically. The album is at the same time incredibly promising for me – I feel that I’m gaining technical chops that are allowing me to achieve things I never thought I would be able to do; and also, starkly devoid of meaning – I no longer feel in touch with the things I wished to express in this album, or the way in which I express them. I have released this album in order to move on, and I’m brimming with ideas for the future. Still shaded by inescapable questions of accessibility and making things that others may appreciate, I don’t think that I’ve tapped into anything that’s deeply important for me, at least not consciously.

That’s not to say that I don’t fully stand by these pieces of music and what they are. I’m proud to share them with the world and whoever may have the wonderful kindness to listen to them. A lot of work went into making and arranging these pieces over a span of a couple of years. I’ve been lucky enough to spend this time in the company of some of the most talented musicians in the world – I’ve learned so much, but this also makes making music very hard indeed. Thankfully I’ve come to a point where I’m beginning to understand that I will always be better than my yesterday’s self, that work is never really finished when you make music, and that the most important thing is to do *something*.

For those who would be interested, I’ve written a short text for each track explaining something about how it came into existence. Those looking for any real poetic interpretation will be disappointed. It’s not that there isn’t one, nor do I feel that it’s completely up to the listener to create themselves; I just haven’t written it down. Thanks to Tolga Garipler, one of the most fascinating people I know, and who features on a few of the tracks physically with his guitar, and in spirit in their arrangement. He has always listened. Thanks to all of the wonderful people I’ve spent the last few years with who all participated in my quiet creative practice in their own way without even knowing it.

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1.
Pretty much all the samples on this opening track are from a few tracks on a Clicks and Cuts compilation. There are snippets of much of what will be heard in the rest of the album: glitchy rhythms using a sequencer built on Olivier Pasquet’s jtol library; a sequenced spectral freeze which smears different things at different times; some extreme phase distortion which is a sound I love. As with many tracks on the album, I semi-lived-coded a semi-automated, semi-performed system in Max for about an hour, recorded a few takes and then arranged and did post-processing in Logic. This is a workflow I only really fell into recently but find very stimulating. The piece is fairly Noto, Xerrox-inspired; I also wanted it to be ‘beat-y’ enough to not scare people off, but weird enough to get people interested.

2.
This is probably the oldest track on the album, it sat on my computer for a very long time unfinished and without anything to go with it. It was made using an old 2D corpus explorer-based sequencer I made on top of the FluCoMa tools and arranged in Logic. I remember making these first tests and rejoicing, thinking I’d finally made some tools that allowed me to make the music I wanted to make (and sound a bit like Autechre). I soon got a bit disenchanted by them but was happy enough with the energy in this piece. The guitar is an improvised solo by Tolga and was recorded after everything else – it becomes the driving force of the piece and shows that something like that is needed with those tools to make things at least slightly interesting to listen to. The result is a series of neurotic moments that are intended to flow not-so-smoothly into each other.

3.
This piece is built around the guitar chords, and two layers of a granulator patch: one where each grain is a different note on the guitar; another where the source is a recording of my voice. This is another old piece that I had to build back up again once I’d lost the original project. The piano in the middle section uses Nils Frahm’s Una Corda plugin – this is now my go-to plugin for piano (and along with the Kick 2 it is the only plugin I’ve ever bought). The melody replaces a vocal part that was in the original version – in the end I did not want to express anything literally, but the meaning of the words is still engrained within the granular content that starts from the second part for which it is the source. The real challenge in this piece was arranging and the timing of events which developed over several versions.

4.
Like the first track, this came from a semi-live-coded system that I created in an afternoon session to accompany Tolga’s guitar. The final version ended-up as a heavily edited version of this session. Returning back to the configuration of track one, there is a glitchy sequencer and a spectral freeze which periodically smears parts of the percussion. There is also an ‘infinite delay’ patch which is used heavily and was ripped straight from a patch by Leafcutter John. The piece proposes three interpretations of the original session: the first very bare-bones and raw; the second extremely deteriorated and crumbling; the third is the closest to the original but heard from a distance.

5.
Perhaps one of my favourite tracks on the album. This is the first time I’ve made a piece for a solo instrument, recorded in one take, no post-processing. Ok, I may have boosted some of the distortion in the final section and EQ’ed just a tad to make things pop where they should, but nothing more than that. It’s an electric bass solo that uses a spectral freeze to prolong the signal. I used a few analogue effect pedals: a reverb and Big Muff distortion. I’d say that the result is a Lovecraftian, Santaolalla-inspired piece that explores many of the aspects that I love about the bass.

6.
This is the third piece to come from a semi-live-coded session. As with the others, the percussion is driven by a glitchy sequencer, and various elements are being fed into the spectral freeze. The Una Corda piano is being driven by an old patch I found and dusted off for melodic and harmonic content generation. Other elements are transformations of a radio and a contact mic being excited by various objects. I felt that the piece had quite a particular sense of space, and I tried to push this further in the post-processing. This could possibly be my interpretation of a Gnossienne or Gymnopédie; or my interpretation of listening to one in the rafters of a room on a sunny afternoon.

7.
I found this track extremely difficult to arrange. To this day I’m still uncertain about it and I think it will remain a mystery. It held back the release of the whole album for quite some time. It is the final piece that emerged from a semi-live-coded session and returns to a similar configuration. With the arrangement and post-processing, I wanted to try and call back to the first track in order to explore its ideas further, and close off the album nicely (before branching off into the postlude). It ended up being a lot denser than the first track, and having a positively humid, dripping atmosphere. Despite having spent the most time in the DAW, it still seems the most drafty and raw, but there is a nervous energy that I quite like.

8.
I suppose that this would be the most ‘technically-involved’ piece. The base is a piano solo that I made a long time ago with a procedural piano patch that was driving a Una Corda that lived in my computer for a very long time. I didn’t feel it had enough character to release on its own, so I decided to do something augmented with it. Using some Python scripts I wrote for using the FluCoMa tools, creating Reaper projects, and incorporating scikit-learn, I first made a host of different tracks in the image of this piano solo with a bunch of material ripped from my YouTube feed. I ended up with about 60 tracks made of various configurations of slicings and descriptor matchings of the original track remade through different concatenative synthesises. Then I made a playback patch that differentiated different types of events, gave events envelopes according to descriptor data, controlled the level of playback of different streams with descriptor data mapped through a neural network… I ended up with far too much material for my 2012 MacBook to handle and ended up only using about a 10th of it. I do feel however that it leaves the album in a good place.