My mp3 music blog. I post ideas for new songs and ask for your comments. Each post has a little description, or a story attached to it. Visit my main website at www.zenpho.co.uk
Each post has a little story attached to it that relates to the music. I've posted some tracks without stories if you just want to listen to some music; use the player at the bottom of the page. Wheeee~~~!
Somewhere, in a desolate landscape; drilling machines crunch and twist the earth upward into spirals. The sky overhead dripping unburnt black treacle oil-rain. (image source: http://www.psywarrior.com/OpnIraqiFreedom.html)
Music commentary: Created with a Casio SK5, and Tascam 4-track machine. Strange chord changes indeed. "Strange days indeed" ;o)
National Grid Reference: ST610764 Coordinates 51°29′07″N 2°33′46″W
Ah, the tower...
"Suppose that all worlds, all universes, met at a single nexus, a single pylon, a Tower. And within it, a stairway, perhaps rising to the Godhead itself. Would you dare climb to the top, gunslinger? Could it be that somewhere above all of endless reality, there exists a room?..."
You are a young child again and you are moving house. Seperated from your friends at school, travelling in the back of your parents a car - on the motorway, the scenery goes by outside: buildings, telegraph poles, power lines, fences, bridges. From your low viewpoint you can only see the tops of these objects whizzing by against a rich blue sky.
Occasionally the car goes over bumps, jolting you out of your seat momentarily. As the car swerves and passes down a dusty track, the scenery changes from sub-urban to deep woodland, you see the tops of trees teaming with wildlife, the birds flying overhead.
As the woodland gets more dense, a feeling of calm washes over you until the woodland breaks into a clearing and the feeling of calm is replaced by dread; sparked by the presence of a giant ominous building.
letters
[+/-] EXPAND/HIDE SONG INFO
Someone keeps stealing my letters! - Collaborative online fridge "poetry" where lots of people around the world collaborate to make words...
cutting-morefm
[+/-] EXPAND/HIDE SONG INFO You are in an outdoor swimming pool, lying on your back, floating. You are staring up at the sun going behind the clouds, everything is peaceful.
Suddenly a plane passes overhead - raining down all sorts of tiny confetti-like bits of multicoloured plastic that start falling into the water around you making tiny splashes.
Without warning, the bits of plastic start inflating impossibly quickly and turning into giant spiky geometric forms that start violently spinning and changing colour and shape, their vertices folding in on themselves creating M.C.Echer-like impossible illusions of shape and space... And there's hundreds of them! Thousands!
You burst into panic, wondering what the hell is going on; the shapes are starting to interlock with oneanother and are starting to turn into some sort of unimaginable machine...
---- Technical comments: Yamaha OPL percussion that is layered and panned across the stereo field and cut up in all sorts of strange and wonderful ways produces a the chewing, spikey percussion.
The melody was played on a Yamaha FM toy keyboard through a princeton guitar amp and some effects pedals. It was recorded one night after a long hard slog writing a Music Business report. I had to play very quietly, because Dave was trying to sleep next door! Ah, uni life!
Why is this called spinning plates? - you tell me (add comments below! Your neck is strapped to a stretcher, and you can onlylook up at the miles upon miles of linolium, breezeblock and florecent-tube-lit corridors, deep underground in a government medical facility.
The alarms go off, the corridors empty of people as you unstrap yourself and franticly hobble down the corridors, trying to remember which one of the identical alleyways lead to the exit.
Why is this called spinning plates? - you tell me (add comments below!)
videogame rubbish + cut up queen
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"I pray that the positive change in south africa continues, and that the government officials are doing their best -b-b-b-b-b-b-best i'm sure." - said the Queen of England.
God bless ya 'liz.
Cut up queen -->
Video game rubbish -->
Is this about a videotape, a board game and a bucket of rubbish? or is it a discussion about the frankly (Frank-y?) pedestrian rubbish that videogames are becoming?
Ha! "pedestrian". Love that word.
Yay! Donnie Darko sample!
Musical commentary: Messy stuttering madness. Lots of buffer stutter plugins played live on street-pedaling-gerkin mongers. Fishmonger monger monger. I'm utterly serious.
Tribute to Van Morrisons beside you.... ambient electronica style. Probably a bit too overzealous on one note.
I dont sing in this, but I like the lyrics.
"Little jimmy’s gone way out of the back streets Out of the window, into the falling rain, And he’s right on time, right on time...
...Across the crystal pavements Way across the country where the hillside mountains glide The dynamo of your smile caressed the Barefoot virgin child...
...You’re satisfied I guess, you’re way up and the sky comes down Kaleidoscope."
Rainfall. Gradually the sun shines through the clouds illuminating the rain, twinlking. Insects experience the drops as huge groundshaking powerslams crashing into the leaves of the plants they're sheltering under.
Calm; I watch. But just as suddenly as the rain came
PAFF! ~ARAINBOW~
soaring high - to meet the birds crowing and squawking in the rain.
Thunder echoes as they pull the body out of the house and down the steps, strapped to a stretcher and in a body bag. The plastic wheels scraping and its metal frame banging harsh and jarring my ears.
My father asks me a question, but I do not hear him properly. My mind is on other things, drifting away to thoughts of her.
Recorded entirely on analogue tape with my Tascam 4-Track; The opening melody of this track is played on a Roland MT-32 soundmodule.
I have visions of a totaly palendromic closing drum pattern, with two rhythms interlocking in reverse time. There is a lot of work to be done, but for now things stand up as it is here.
Don't you hate it when you see something (or someone) really beautiful in a fleeting moment; passing on a bus perhaps, or on a TV in a shop window... and you know you'll never have time in your life to research what programme it was to track it down, or that the chances of being in the same place again are so slim.
Drawing things from memory can help, but my memory is so bad. I cannot capture the things I saw.
If only I could learn to draw, I would be able to sketch these beautiful things, and have a permenant record of them, to keep in a dark drawer with all my secrets, to keep and cuddle at night.
Pure funk-in a box. Distorto 8-bit beats, funky house filters, driving swung rhythms, spikey loops of electric piano (from Ben Williams) and dark guitar (from Phill Gibbs), heavily munged and grunged. You'll love it.
I found a website www.mgt.smsu.edu/nicaragua/ containing an audio diary of a guy who went to Nicaragua to build houses for a war-torn village, sort of like a redevelopment plan.
The story was fascinating, the compelling words on the website inspired me to create a track called "Tear down walls" (with reference to the tearing down of cultural barriers) - I thought why not use the speech from the audio diary?
Right at the point where he says "22 conversion decisions" - 22 multitracked voices from www.accesstallent.com blended together to make a buzzing swarming cloud of vocal noises are thrown into the mix...
Wow, this tune just sticks in your head. Stick with it, its relentless. I assure you that after a while you'll be bouncing too.
This track was mixed entirely live with lots of Cubase mouse mixing, a live solo played on a Yamaha PSS-320 toy keyboard all mixing down to two stereo tracks on my Tascam 4 track. Its impressive how I managed to keep up with it all!
Also this version includes a small (silly) time-signature-adjusted extract from mario-kart too.
---- Musical commentary: Stuttering insane samples from a TV show called "history hunt" in the UK, not that you'd ever recognise it since they've been cut up in a way that makes you bounce out of your chair... Its in 3/4 too which is a change from the monotony of throwaway pop rhythms!
You know not all of the music of today is like this...
Fast paced, as if scrambling to get away from something - building all the time in intensity to a point where everything breaks down and becomes decidedly chill out.
Includes samples of Don Ellis speaking about "The music of today, and the future".
Musical commentary: Chemical brothers-esque buildups, squelchy filtering, fast and slow breakbeats, smooth electric piano licks, relaxed yet spikey trumpet solos, those famous "violins"... a contrasting track.
When you're asleep, dreaming about chewing and crunching your bass guitar with your teeth. Your shoes, the ones that you _think_ you've left by the front door by the phone, the ones that you left there ready to go to work in the morning: inanimate, unmoving, pinned by gravity to the floorboards, those ones? Well guess, what they're actually...
RACING! - and it sounds like this.
---- Musical commentary: Extremely (but deliciously) distorted basslines and electronic percussion. Hell, everything is distorted here. Everything is swung like a bastard too, very house-music. Extremely dirty and funky stuff this!
You're walking alone in the forest, you've been out a bit too long and its getting dark. The light is fading, growing dusky, a grey light. Thick forrest, the smell of pinetrees.
Distant sound of a helicopter, then a swarm of bees, aeroplanes, the millitary!
And suddenly a trapdoor opens, swallowing you into the earth. As you hurtle down the tunnel with a bump, you find yourself in a large open space, the acoustic changing to cave-like proportions.
a warehouse. busy machinery, cranes, neon, they're building somthing... under the forest. its big, it fills the cave. Scaffolding, trucks, and many hundreds of workers... Scurrying like ants, or rats, or bees.
Then out, on a train journey. The city, bleak skyscrapers, the insane guitarist on the hill plays on, a thousand miles of empty train track, stretching on...
I was in the kitchen having coffee, when suddenly - out of the cupboards:
Girls. Bright girls. Hundreds of them... shiny, glowing, very bright. I can hardly see my hands infront of my face there's so many of them - its quite blinding actually.
----
Musical commentary: Stuttering, rhythm "chewing" filters, squelchy, super distorted electric piano basslines, super clean fm synth melodies, and the _GIRLS_, they're so BRIGHT!
This is very film-soundtrack music, not over the top anthemic, more moody ambiences with a tune, so you can hum along. (And I encourage you to do so, humming tunes is a dying art!)
Musical commentary: Haunting, mysterious, and yet strangely comforting ambience fills this track - an opening melody rambles on at the start against a drone which is slowly shifting pitch.
Imagine a church, abandoned for years - yet filled with candles throwing 400 shadows of anything in the path of their light on the walls... percussion delays swarm and multiply in the gloom toward the end of this track, like a flurry of bats wings obscuring your view.
