I haven’t done it, but I suspect if I went back and took a look at past blog posts I’d find a lot of “I set out to do this, but then this is how it actually went.” This, here, is another of those posts. This may just be my pet theme…
This time, I set myself a schedule to write six songs over the course of January: one every five days. I came up with the first two songs…
“It had that perfect commercial combination: startling originality and easy classification.” — Sarah Bakewell, referring to the first published version of Montaigne’s Essays in her book How To Live, or, A Life of Montaigne.
I’ve been thinking a lot about style and arrangement lately. In fact the closer I get to wrapping up the composition phase of this album, the more important it seems.
I’ve gone about this album in an unconventional way. First of all, it’s an album…
There is no one who, if he listens to himself, does not discover in himself a pattern all his own, a ruling pattern, which struggles against education.
– Michel de Montaigne, quoted in How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell (translation: Donald Frame)
Oli Arditi — one of my favorite music writers — chose Astral Law as one of his 12 albums of the year. Here’s what he had to say:
This is an album of experimental guitar sounds, often constructed around Beaudreau’s instrumental skills, but equally likely to foreground aleatory elements such as the sounds of accidental contact with the strings or body of the instrument, or environmental sounds such as passing traffic. Where the focus is on melody, various strategies are
…
For a few years prior to putting out Java St Bagatelles in 2006, every time I ran into my friend Ryan Goodman he would ask me how the album was coming. It was coming slow. As I’ve said elsewhere, I wasn’t even necessarily planning to make an album until, probably, 2005 — I was just practicing. And recording. It was a great feeling not to be rushed. I didn’t feel like there was anything that I had to…
Led Zeppelin IV was released on November 8, 1971 — 40 years ago today. How much do I love Led Zeppelin IV? Well, I referenced its cover in the design of my three albums.
And, of course, the working title of the album I’m currently writing is IV.
Yikes — another month! I worked all September on “Hermes,” which is finally done. Uh, done-ish. I should say that the demo for “Hermes” is mostly done. It’ll need to be mixed, but I think all the sounds are there — certainly the bones are in place.
I say “demo,” because once I have an album’s worth of material — a bit more, really, because I want to be able to choose only the best stuff — I’ll approach…
Last time I mentioned that I was going through my collection of “ideas,” looking for the start of the next piece for my fourth album. I have a nice stockpile of them at this point, and was homing in on a few, but instead I started working with a little riff that came up one morning when I was warming up.
It was like putting months into wooing a woman only to abandon her because some new pretty thing passes…
I know, I’ve been scarce around here lately. Here’s why.
There’s been a lot of exciting stuff to do at Masterdisk recently, and I’ve been spending more time doing it — full-time, basically. Then there are freelance projects that need wrapping up, and regular music work in the mornings (without spectacular consistency, unfortunately). As my grandfather used to say, “there’s a limit”! So, I’ve dropped way down on blogging and social media activity. At this point, it has been…
In my series of posts about recording (from a musician’s perspective) I’ve covered old-school “live in a room” recording, the convention of recording musicians separately, and one-man-band recordings. I’d like to add to that list something new: the remote recording session.
As regular readers will know, I’m composing the music for my fourth album. And I’ve written a number of posts touching on the difficulty I’ve had with the fourth of these new compositions, “Eris.” When I last…
