Ambient songwriter • producer • arranger • multi-instrumentalist
Do you have any idea what it is that makes a melody strong and durable?
I don’t know about ‘strength’ of melody…I guess what interests me more are melodies that creep up on you, either through repetition or ‘muddy’ mixing. The ones that slyly gnaw into your brain and didn’t appear entirely evident on first listen. When I was younger I was obsessed with bands like Town and Country or Hovercraft who, on first inspection, appeared to be indulging in a form of improvisation, but after a few plays it was evident that they were taking an improvised structure and repeating it – I guess therefore validating it as a ‘tune’ – in fact that was one of their great quotes at the time that stuck with me: “anything becomes a tune if you repeat it long enough”. That mindset and approach was key to finding out about composers like Glass, Reich, Feldman…and eventually people I would idolise like Part – although his music is imbued with more humanity, maybe.
What’s your writing routine like? How much do you keep and how much do you throw away?
Well, as an instrumentalist I can purely focus on melody…normally this involves me recording something, anything, and then playing around with it on a computer screen until it pleases the ears. I wish the answer were more spectacular than that!
I’ve definitely become less dismissive of failed experiments as I grow older…material is not so much shorn off as tucked away on hard drive, and acts like a well – drained when the time is right and recycled for the occasion. The beauty of working under a few aliases and in different contexts is that you never know when the material will bleed over between projects and end up on a different piece than the one it was originally intended for.
What’s the mixing trick you wish you knew when you were starting out?
Where to start! I spent a good three/four years running in circles before the first record was released (Wintersongs, 1999) and so much more could’ve been finished if I’d just learned a few key techniques.
I think, as a music lover, I wanted to do it all; jam band, lo-fi confessional type stuff, heavy distorted guitars, electronica beats, music concrete…and I’d end up with this horrible, unsatisfying hodge-podge comprising of elements of all these different styles. S**t stew. It’s definitely a young persons thing that you ease your way out of with age, and become more concise about your strengths and what you want to achieve.
Mixing-wise, I wish I’d learned earlier to simply walk away from a piece of music every 45 minutes or so, irrespective of how well it’s going. Never underestimate the power of coming back to a piece with fresh ears. Also, if you’re a Pro Tools user like myself, turn off that damn monitor occasionally. Or at least look away. The process can become like musical Tetris, shoving pointless coloured blocks around a screen…it becomes so easy to look at wave files, and preempt the peaks and the troughs in a very visual way…I’m pretty much convinced this is a main contributor in most modern music sounding s**tty in relation to that produced in the 60s/70s or what have you. Those guys were mixing purely with their ears and the records sound all the better for it.
Can you explain the process you went through to create your featured song?
This might be a bit too thorough, but here goes.
The piece I chose is from ‘Music for Smalls Lighthouse’, a conceptual record about a real lighthouse tragedy circa 1800/1801. I recorded the bulk of it 6 years ago. I wanted something with an overwhelming atmosphere – almost cartoon-like – the kind of sounds you get in a waxworks museum. In the original draft of the story accompanying the CD, a message arrives in the village from the lighthouse keepers. The piece starts off on the shore with the sea, wind and crow sounds taken from field recordings I made in the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset. The listener travels along the track into town and hears a village band start up in a nearby church or hall…this is actually some trad accordion recorded at a local folk festival in 2004, chopped up, pitched down and duplicated about a dozen or so times and layered back upon itself to sound like a band. The church bell rings and the waves come back to the foreground giving way to a gentle piano loop.
This is very relevant to the question above about recycling material, as this was going to be a piece on an EP that was never finished. I was intending to make a very different record with nothing but my old valve radio and a microphone – taking whatever piano pieces I could find on late night medium wave european radio stations and chopping them up into something new. The spontaneity of the pieces and the unexpected results really excited me, but this and maybe 3 more tracks were the only survivors of yet another unfinished project.
So travel forward another year or so – This piano piece in particular slotted in fine with this piece. You can still hear the radio static (not very 1801, huh?) – I think it’s actually three or four different chopped piano tracks in this one, little piece of music. Eventually, the loop gradually thins out, becomes more meditative…at this point it’s just Nick Palmer (Directorsound) and myself playing single piano notes over the sampled melodies. Gradually it just fades out to radio static…and there we have it! Hope that wasn’t too much information…
Listen to the featured song!
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