Naviar Series 006



The new Naviar Records compilation includes a slinky house track I wrote in 3/4 time signature. Download it here.

Here's a beaut review of the album and it singles out my track for a mention. Nice!

Disquiet Junto 0181 Instrumental Dream



The Junto this week takes the idea of realising within music the dream of an instrument. It's quite a sweet idea, I think.

My favourite instrument is my Warwick bass but I've been neglecting it recently. The idea was to record a track in which the bass leads the other instruments. At first I was going to play a B minor seventh thing I've been playing on the guitar but it seemed wrong to use a riff from another instrument.

I was feeling a bit discouraged when suddenly I had this idea of a string melody looped over a breakbeat, like something from a solo Wu Tang album. So I quickly sat down and figured it out on the bass. Then I had the idea of some chords that could accompany it and imagined them played by an orchestra.

Do bass guitars dream of leading an orchestra? Mine did, so I used Ableton Live's convert-to-MIDI function to drive the Suite of orchestral samples to get a lush result.

Trein leaves the station



On a recent visit to Sydney I collected the final part for my remix of KlanKman's Trein. Platform 23 was where I waited for the train to go to the Airport.

Disquiet Junto 0180 Matryoshka Music



The Disquiet Junto this week was based on the idea of Russian dolls. Y'know the ones? Each nestled inside the other.

I had a few ideas. At one point I thought about looping Kate Bush and playing it back through different sized reverbs. At another point I was jamming on the guitar and drums to a Peaches riff and singing creepy lyrics: "I can't wait to crack you open. I can't wait to see you're small inside."

I thought about recording the sound of dolls, as I'm sure there's a set in the toy box but I didn't want to deal with the toy box. I'm worried there might be food in there but I'd prefer not to know. And, dunno, it seemed too literal to record actual Matryoshka dolls.

Then I started MIDI-ing stuff. At first it sounded a bit robotic but the idea was to move upwards through keys. Then I went back to the guitar and recorded MIDI with it. What sounded like a dinky riff on the guitar ended up sounding even dinkier through an organ preset, but I thought it worked better for it.

Naviar haiku 074 Sing



The Naviar haiku this week was an opportunity to further my experiments with the abandoned silo used in a recent Disquiet Junto project.

Although it spoke of aeolian harps, this built on my experiments with 'the wires' in using singing and whistling. These can be seen in this video of my performance at the Unsound festival outside Wagga Wagga in 2004.

You can hear that I've added some instrumentation using Live's audio-to-MIDI function to trigger samples from their Suite.

[video forthcoming]

Disquiet Junto 0179 Tech(nique) Talk



The Disquiet Junto this week asks participants to share a recent technique 'figured out' in the production of music.

This isn't the most recent technique I've used in making music, that would probably be Live's audio-to-MIDI conversion that I think Ethan Hein has already discussed.

It's been about six months since I saw this technique on Tim Prebble's blog Music of Sound, in the excellent Detritus section.



The idea is to generate a piece by looping a series of ascending notes in E minor. I used this idea in my track Seabreeze.



For the piece recorded on glockenspiel this week, I've changed the formula to something closer to 4E2. I see something as I was loosely interpreting the tempo when recording and then manipulated one part further.