New Track: Islay

This is, along with “Progress”, one of my two favorite songs from the RPM Challenge. The tenth and final song from the challenge is a moody, atmospheric slice of minimal techno, and wrapped up a fun and exhausting month of songwriting, and now wraps a fun and exhausting two months of producing and mixing. When … [Read more…]

New Track: Wine Into Blood

Here’s another song that breaks from my usual bleeps and bloops. I challenged myself to try and write a song using orchestral sounds, and in an unexpected turn wrote and arranged an entire composition in one sitting. I ended up with something that sounds like the soundtrack to a b-movie that involves dungeons and/or dragons. … [Read more…]

New Track: War Games

This song is a bit different, as I tried to reach and challenge myself a bit. With this one, I started writing on the guitar – which I haven’t really done in earnest in decades (I think I was still in Face Value the last time I really tried) – and ended up with some … [Read more…]

New Track: Hypergravity

It’s atmospheric and minimal, but not quite ambient. I started with a drum kit made from recordings at the European Space Agency’s European Space Research and Technology Centre, which is where both the song title and mood came from. I layered in some Apollo 13 flight recordings for extra science! Main B Bus Undervolt I’d … [Read more…]

New Track: Disco Biscuits

This is another one of the songs from the RPM Challenge that I’m filing under “I said I’d release everything, so here it is”. It was a fun experiment to dabble in a genre I don’t usually write in, and a major key disco house song was certainly a departure from the mostly moody, minor … [Read more…]

New Track: Progress

This is one of my favorites from the RPM Challenge. There were two songs that really stood out for me, and this is one of them. I started with the two hardware synths I bought last year (but hadn’t actually used in a project yet) as my arbitrary constraint, and the result was a squelchy, … [Read more…]

Spelunking the Archives

I touched on this a little bit in a previous post, but this is going to be a huge undertaking, so it’s deserving of an entire post of it’s own. At some point later this year, once the busy summer months have elapsed, I want to undertake a project I’m calling “Spelunking the Archives”. There … [Read more…]

What’s Next Musically

This whole RPM Challenge thing has really re-ignited my musical creativity. I just released my first new song in over 9 years, after feeling like I might be permanently retired from song writing. I’ve gone from being done with making music to actually planning out my creative endeavors, as I really want to try and … [Read more…]

New Track: Wishing for Rain

This song is very textural and atmospheric. It was a cold, gray, and snowy weekend morning when I wrote this, which yielded slow, somewhat ambient evolutions. Pieced together over a steaming cup of coffee, it’s not “Music for Airports” or anything, but it’s pretty chill. Music for Coffee Cups Finding time to work on the … [Read more…]

New Track: Far From Home

Not sure what to say about this one, it was a bit out of left field. Way more downtempo than I usually do, and brings in a bit of R&B flavor to things? I also arranged it in more of a verse/chorus structure, which was a bit different from my usual build-and-drop techno structure. This … [Read more…]

New Track: Stimulus Response Pattern

The second of ten songs written as part of the RPM Challenge, I more or less stuck to the familiar again on this one. There’s a few more melodic elements than I typically have used working their way in, and most of it was performed rather than step sequenced, so there’s still a bit of … [Read more…]

New Track: Perversion for Profit

The first of the songs I wrote as part of the RPM Challenge is finally done! It’s pretty typical of the stuff I used to write all the time. I stretched and experimented a bit on how I wrote, but the result was pretty similar: boots-and-cats techno, basically. The title comes from the 60’s propaganda … [Read more…]

The RPM Challenge

In an effort to continue to re-ignite my musical creativity, I undertook a project this year called the RPM Challenge. The goal of the challenge is to write either 10 songs or 35 minutes worth of music in the month of February. I went into the whole thing skeptical I would come anywhere close to … [Read more…]

Back to the Himalayas

This year marks the fifth anniversary of my trip to Nepal, the Himalayas, and Everest Base Camp. It seemed like a marker worth celebrating, and I couldn’t think of a better way to do so than by going back! And going back with Jon, Chris, and Monika again no less! But this will be no … [Read more…]

Losing the Muse

I sat down again last night to try and work on some new music. Once again, the result was the same: I felt like I just don’t “have it” anymore. Whatever “it” is. Not only was nothing much usable coming out of it, I wasn’t enjoying doing it either. Which is very unusual for me, … [Read more…]