There's something so addictive about the act of creation that once you catch the bug, it's almost impossible to stop. Artists, Writers, and Composers can retire, but they can hardly ever stop painting, writing, and composing. While it was my intention to spend the balance of 1993 remixing old works to suit the SB-Live, you can't turn musical ideas off. You either work on them or you throw them away - something you might regret for many years to come. I still mourn the loss of "Audible Sensations" and "Big Bangs" back in '99. And so, this page, containing tunes composed when I meant to be doing something else.... # Name (Length) Size Download Links Comments       180 Endless Horizon (9:04) 93K Australia is a very flat country aside from a few isolated areas in the north and south and a long chain of relatively small (and old) mountains along the east coast. That means that when you get past those mountains and leave them behind, the horizon on all sides is virtually a flat line - and you can drive for hundreds of miles without an elevation change becoming visible on that horizon, never mind experiencing one. The horizon seems endless. I thought of a way to capture that endlessness musically. There's even an instrument blend in the tune that is vaguely suggestive of a didgeridoo low down in the mix, to further reinforce the "Australiana" feel of it. (In fact, while I have (I think) a didgeridoo soundfont, this tune doesn't use it, the sound is an audible illusion). I am very pleased with the piece! 181 Absent Roads (4:42) 91K "Absent Roads" is about the roads that we should walk but cannot find, the paths we want to take that are closed to us, and the roads we can find on a map but that vanish from underfoot when we set out on them. It was inspired by a conversation with a friend of mine concerning what made a pop song good. He insisted that the most important thing was a melodic hook, and I disagreed. To prove the point, I composed this piece - for most of the tune, the melody is a single chord sustained across 4 bars, followed by another one over the next 4 bars, followed by.... well, you get the idea. The bass riff is interesting, because it's actually spread across multiple instruments, each playing one piece of the riff. This becomes more noticeable at the end, when I mix up those parts and reassign them to different instruments, reintroducing them one at a time. My friend is still disputing the issue - he claims that even though all the different elements of the bass riff are playing the same note, it still qualifies as a "melodic hook". A hook, yes - but can it really be considered "melodic" when it's all the same note? 182 Smoke And Mirrors (5:11) 97K I had lots of trouble naming this piece. Fortunately, my good friends at MidiChat came to my aid - thanks to everyone who made suggestions! The name chosen actually came from free associating with one of the suggestions. The piece itself is not all that easy to describe, having lots of elements from different styles. Piano domination changes to guitar domination changes to synth domination changes to string domination.... 183 Synthetic Style (6:52) 46K This was a sunth-dominated piece from it's early beginnings. I really wanted a piece that had a bit of an "Ultravox" flavour, and initially that was the purpose of this tune. But along the way, lots of other elements crept into it, and it's not quite what it was originally meant to be any more. There are a number of subtexts in the peice - more of a variety of flavours than actual differences in structure - which slowly lead it away from it's synth-based theme before crashing back to the fundamental bedrock of that theme. When it does so, it comes as quite an abrupt shock, so far away have the sensibilities drifted. While not a favorite, this is still a work I can be proud of. 184 Three-Point-One- Four-One-Five-Nine- Two-Seven (6:30) 36K A number of different ideas collide and collude in this peice, which is superficially quite simple, but plays a number of tricks with timing. By deliberately keeping the main theme to two chords, each two bars long (the tune is in 2/4 time), it let me compose a long piano melody over the top which I could then double over itself to give an extremely complex melodic depth. I liked the results so much that I extended the second part of the tune to explore the results more fully. As a result, this is about a minute-and-a-half longer than originally intended. Of course, I then had to reprise the main theme for a bit, because the melody grabs the attention and won't let go, and the song became somewhat disconnected without that reprise - so that's another 10-15 seconds extra as well. I knew I had something good when I found that I could loop the 4 bars of the main theme endlessly and not grow tired of it! There are depths and subteleties and nuances and combinations of melodies in this piece that can take quite a long time to explore, even though on the surface, they are all quite simple. Make no mistake - everything after the drum solo at 2'13" is composed of what had gone before it, tweaked into different combinations and overlapped with itself. I chose the title - which is, of course, Pi to 7 decimal places - to reflect these hidden depths. One area where I did have problems with this piece was in the overall sound mix, which took almost five times as long as these things usually do. 185 Expressions On Canvas (5:20) 52K Molly Meldrum (refer to the "About Me" pages if you don't know who that is) once described what he does when he produces a record as 'painting with sound'. When I heard it, I thought this an absolutely splendid phrase, and made a note of it to use as a song title at some future point. The peice which eventually was given a variation on the phrase was one that had been floating around unfinished for quite some time. I had the core melody (played on the strings) and the secondary melody (guitar and high-pitched bass) but was having trouble integrating the two, never mind progressing the tune. Eventually, inspiration struck in terms of instrumentation variations and using a number of different drum patterns. Combining those ideas gave me the finished peice. This is notable for a lot of on-the-fly adjustments to the pan settings - some sections go from being centred to being on one channel only and balanced by a second channel moving to the opposite pan value. As a result, each section of the piece has it's own character in instrument placement. There was a substantially larger second movement section but much of it was simple repetition and detracted from the whole. What's left runs from 1:35 to 2:12.; it was originally almost 2 minutes long. The finished work is a clear example of the whole exceeding the sum of it's parts; while the individual pieces of the puzzle were OK, they didn't sound brilliant, at least while I was working on them. It was only when it was all put together that the true power of the peice was aparrant! 186 The Fall Of Rome (4:50) 61K This tune combined three different experiments. A somewhat melancholy chord progression mixes with an upbeat melody to create the impression of extreme tension, violence, and drama - I wasn't sure the dichotomy would work, it ran the risk of just being confused. But it did work, and worked well. Secondly, the drums do not follow a standard 4/4 progression - it's more 1½/4 + 2½/4, repeated perpetually to make up two "halves" of a bar. At a slower tempo, this would create problems, but this is fast enough - and sustained by the bass enough - that the rythm holds its structure, while adding considerably to the impressions created by the blend of melody and chord progression. Finally, if you listen carefully, you will discern what appear to be four distinct melody lines through different passages of the piece; in reality, these were composed as a single melody line four times as long, ensuring that they worked well together, and then split up to create the four "themes". As experiments go, this is a complete success! 187 The Eternal Optimist (5:54) 69K Very, very occasionally, a composer will start a piece that is so totally effortless to create that it almost seems to write itself. This was one of those occasions; the tune took only a couple of hours to complete. Inexhaustably optimistic, this has lots of subtle variations, many of them only really appreciated subcosnciously - but which would be quite obviously lacking if they were removed. This is also notable for a number of changes of instrument and of pan settings throughout the piece, which controbutes markedly to its musical depth. Despite the apparant simplicity, this is a tune that you can listen to repeatedly, discovering something new every time - if you pay attention! I'm reallty happy with it, and its a very bright note on which to end a turbulent year in my composing career.