Information About The New Album
At present untitled, I have begun work on a new album. The two tracks
available here were begun in the Autumn of 2000 and recorded during the
Christmas holiday. I have since recorded three more tracks including a
very long song called "A Thousand Miles Away". This song fuses the heavy
rock sound with a string quartet. I suppose it's like a cross between The
Beatles (Elanor Rigby), Pink Floyd (In The Flesh) and Metalica (Nothing
Else Matters). If I stick to my plan, "A Thousand Miles Away" will be the
title of the album.
Downloads from the new album
There are currently two tracks for download in Windows Media Player (*.wma)
format. I have encoded these files at low quality to ensure faster download
times. To hear the music, you will need a recent version of Windows Media
Player available from:
www.microsoft.com.
They should automatically play as you download them. If you experience
any difficulty downloading these files, right click on the link and select
"save target as" or "save link as" then choose a folder on your hard drive
to save them to. If you need more help, look on my download
tips page.
Track 1: I Love You In Red (3:47)
This is a slow but heavy song. Its dark mood inspired, in part, by the
cult TV series "Angel". Other influences include Radiohead's excellent
"Creep" and my own track from Convolution: "Kashmir Revisited" If you haven't
listened to this yet, go to my links page. The
CD version of this song is a lot longer (6:44). I've left out a couple
of verses and a long keyboard solo.
Download
Track 2: No Sweeter Sound (3:41)
This lively, up-beat song was inspired by The Flaming Lips album "The Soft
Bulletin". Strings, flute and harp create romantic sweeping gestures reminiscent
of those 70's disco and soul anthems. These combine well with the rock
instrumentation to set the mood of the song. The CD version of this song
is a bit longer (4:30). I've left out a verse and an instrumental section.
Download
If you are downloading these tracks, please email me and tell me what you
think.
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Background to the new album
After completing the album "Convolution" in the summer of 2000, I was getting
some new musical ideas which I wanted to record. In the autumn I upgraded
my sequencer program (emagic Logic Gold) to the newest version (4) and
did a complete re-install of the Windows operating system. I did this to
clear out all the clutter left behind from the many programs I had installed
and subsequently uninstalled (not allways successfully). Prior to this
I had installed a second hard disk drive and a controller card to provide
better read and write speeds. I wanted to make sure my computer and operating
system was in the best possible condition for my next project. With these
new features, I was able to make use of new effects and processes
to make the new tracks even better.
Recently, I've also discovered a totally new music program. As a teacher
I had been researching some suitable software that children with limited
musical ability could use to create pop music on the computer at the school
where I work. I downloaded a demo of Acid from Sonic
Foundry and, for the week that I was able to use it without restrictions,
created two excellent Big Beat tunes using nothing more than sample loops
which came free on the cover disks of Computer
Music magazines. It really was a case of something for nothing. In
the past, I have always felt myself to be above using "instant music" programs.
But this program offers quite a high degree of creative flexibility over
the way the samples are used. I am not sure yet wether or not to include
them on this new album. I will see how they fit into it when I have completed
more tracks.
Keep checking back at this new page for more updates on the new album.
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