Sit down. Empty your mind. Place your hands on the piano, and start to play something you haven't played before, or even thought of before.
This is what I did last November, to create a collection of treated piano improvisations, collectively entitled Rh- Impressions. Each piece is a first-take stream of consciousness, so I really am making it up as I go along (the frequent fumbles and fluffed notes bear witness to this!).
Treated piano improvisations? Each of the recordings has been doctored in some way. Some have been post-processed with electronic treatments, some have been doubled with sympathetic electronic sounds, and others have undergone acoustic treatments at recording time (e.g. unusual microphone placement, inside snare drums etc). Whilst the sound of each piece varies considerably, all were the result of a single solo piano performance, without any overdubs, editing or cheating. Hope you enjoy!
No-one could have believed that in the early years of the 1980s, that rhythm machines were being watched from the timeless worlds of Tokyo. Few men even considered the viability of a rhythm machine dedicated exclusively to the reproduction of grainy claves and timbales that swarm and multiply in a drop of quijada. And yet, across the gulf of the sea of Japan, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this market segment with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans up for a drum machine that produced latin sounds.
(This is the opening of my new novel. It goes on to describe how a capsule lands on Horsell Common. Slowly the lid screws off, and Miami Sound Machine emerge playing Guiros, with their deadly war cry “Docdocdocdocdoctor beat”).
It seems strange to me now, that we treated this drum machine much as any other…
I've been promising to post some new music for ages, but events (and for “events” read “small yet lovable child”) have conspired against me, and prevented me not only from recording anything new, but also from having the time to upload anything almost new. But I've finally managed to upload a tune called “Cemetery Grounds”, whose heritage dates back to about 1997, when I was working on what became Nobody Knows This Is Somewhere. At the time, I didn't get around to finishing it (I have a fair few songs like this!). I finally put together a chorus sometime in 2002/2003. And I eventually recorded it in late 2004 - the entire recording session lasted less than 60 minutes (from opening the studio door to the final mixdown), which is pretty quick for something with guitars, bass, vocals, backing vocals and drums. As I recall, I used a single microphone for everything, and, due to the challenge of recording the whole thing in under an hour, just left the mic in the middle of the room, paying no attention to positioning whatsoever. I didn't bother doing any retakes when I fluffed things up. And fluff things up is what I did a lot of. And I think this lack of attention to audio quality shows in the results. So, not one of my most sensitive moments…
.. but it isn't! http://www.thankyoutony.com/
What a class website!
Don't you hate it when people's web sites refer to other people's content without actually adding any of value of their own? I know I do - it just fills the web up with a mass of content free chains of endless indirection. Anyway, that said, this made me laugh.