5th November 2011

I’ve got label stuff sorted for The Blackbirds’ Revenge, which is good – coming soon to a cassette label near you (or probably not, unless you live in Finland). I was thinking about how different it will seem compared to my previous albums, but in many ways it shouldn’t come as too much of surprise. It depends how you perceive my previous music. Part of the shunning of Aeolian Landform, the 2010 releases and other stuff from my catalogue was due to it not seeming personal. While my first three albums might not seem personal, they weren’t massive widescreen soundtracks either. Purlieu was based very much on the Leicestershire countryside I was so familiar with; Vacuum Road Songs started with my fascination with city life and ended with my experience of it; Safernoc explored my interest and fascination with ghost stories, myths and legends. Otherwise, Since Every Hour is Too Late adopted a track-by-track emotional approach, and Leaf Pass was more gentle, rural and even acoustic in sound, with the presence of an actual song – ‘Anticipated Lies’ (admittedly muffled and placed in the background). The Blackbirds’ Revenge – and my music to come – will continue in the spirit of all of these albums, but particularly the elements of the last two albums that I highlighted there. The music will remain as personal (and inspired by my life and surroundings) as ever – maybe just in a slightly more obvious way.

It’s rather typical that as I’m rounding things up for Second Thought – just two months to go – the name is getting more attention than ever before. I’ve had several positive reviews for Safernoc, Since Every Hour is Too Late and Leaf Pass lately, and the Nearby Forest mix is now available to download from The New Worck. And another appearance on an FSOL Electric Brain Storm mix. After a long period of self-doubt, the last few months have seen such genuine interest and passion for my music that it’s really settled my mind.

In slightly less positive news, college didn’t work out too well, for a number of reasons that I shan’t go into here. So music is slightly higher on the agenda again, but I’m still on the playing guitar and coming up with little ideas front rather than taking it much further – once I get some more recording equipment and The Blackbirds’ Revenge is out, I can maybe make some progress. Next year probably.

29th September 2011

This week I started back at college, studying horticulture. The workload is… ‘significant’, shall we say? Certainly unlike anything I’ve done before, what with my course at Leeds Met being an absolute joke that required no work at all. With this in mind, realistically I’m going to have to knock music on the head for the next nine months really as I won’t have much time. I am going to still play guitar in my spare time, but generally as a way to relax really, and I don’t plan on doing too much writing or recording over this time. I’m also calling it a day with Jerky Oats – that stopped being fun ages ago, and I don’t have the time to really do anything with that at the moment.

In order to get everything clear before delving deep into the world of Botanical Latin, I’ve spent a couple of weeks going over and rearranging all of the music I’ve written this year in order to have a release schedule sorted in my head – one that’s not going to have me thinking and worrying about it at every available moment. Sturmazdale has been sent back to the drawing board, but may turn up again in the future in a very different format. With that out of the way, this is, tentatively, what will be happening between now and when I get back to recording:

The Blackbirds’ Revenge – most importantly, this is the first ‘proper’ album. When breaking down all of the releases, as mentioned in previous blogs, I managed to fit together an album of all the potential tracks I had. It’s mostly acoustic instrumentation, both electronically treated and in its natural state, and is formed from four long pieces (8-25 minutes) and two shorter tracks, one of which features lyrics. There’s no overall concept or story here, and it doesn’t all flow together as a soundscape, there are GAPS between the tracks (gasp!). It’s very much a new approach and draws a line between Second Thought and Ross Baker. I’ve kicked down a lot of barriers that prevoiusly restrained me to come up with a much better album than I would have if I’d kept up the ‘flowing conceptual soundscape’ approach that I’d run into the ground. Whichever way you look at it, I’ve enjoyed writing, recording and compiling this album more than anything since Safernoc/Canal Seven/Leaf Pass in late 2009 – so I’m taking it as a very good sign. The final thing is very good too, if I do say so myself! Otherwise, there are a couple of short records that should appear too:

A Room – the twelve-tone serial record that I’ve spoken about before, which runs to about half an hour – as it is effectively a modern classical work, the length is fitting. It’s arranged for piano, field recordings and orchestral samples. I’ve spoken much about it before. This effectively marks the end of my obsession with academic/formal composition. Might be out early in the year.

Revolution – a twenty minute collage of my early musique concrete/experimental tape work recorded throughout my teens. I’m hoping to have this released on tape.

That’s about it for 2012. I’m not putting together anything else between now and the end of the course. Jerky Oats has four releases left – Austin Cassell, Jesse Conner, Gregg Jackson and Memphis – so a nice balance of two song-based records and two electronic works. Bullfinch will start up properly next summer once I have the time and money. I’ve just completed work on the design for the Ross Baker website (the second one actually, the first seemed to fit my pretense of being a contemporary composer, but wasn’t very honest).

All my talk of ‘breaks’ in the past has never lasted for more than a few weeks, even if not directly creating music I’ve been doing artwork, arranging releases and schedules and so on. I do have some demos to send out soon, but other than that this really is the end of a huge long music-obsessed period which started almost two years ago – upon my arrival back in Hinckley in November 2009. It does feel nice to be taking a break now, as it’ll give me chance to get back to music being something I do as a form of relaxing, rather than the main part of my life, and when I return to properly writing and recording next year, hopefully I’ll have a whole better attitude towards it than I have for the last couple of years.

I’ll still keep everybody updated when anything exciting happens, of course. 🙂

21st September 2011

I am continuing to break my WIP releases down to form the most consistently high quality collection possible. Themes and concepts are becoming more vague, but I’m enjoying listening to this selection of tracks more each time I work on it. It may be best to ignore past ideas of putting tracks into different boxes, as that seems to end up with me spreading myself too thin – by putting all of the pieces in one box, I can guarantee to get the best quality album out there. It’s also nice not being tied to a definite concept – I’m beginning to appreciate that freedom I felt when I was recording Safernoc. Both that and Leaf Pass are very varied in style and mood, are two of my best records, and came together without excessive over-conceptualising. That’s important to remember.

19th September 2011

In an interesting turn of events, The Tree and Where Do We Go When the Roads Have All Cracked? seem to have merged into what is becoming my first acoustic-based album, I think. It is nearing completion but I keep making tweaks and changes, which is all good.

I have put together a nice collection of my favourite pieces from the 2010/2011 era to replace the rather poor ‘Estuary’ collection which I realised I don’t like very much! This new one contains some remixes and reworkings, and a couple of actual tracks. It’s more melodic than Estuary was and definitely escapes from the mire that bogged much of the era down, I basically started it as a way of collecting my favourite tracks from that point together to listen to without flitting between records, but decided I’d share it so other people can enjoy the tracks too, as comes next year most of my unsatisfactory material won’t be linked from my website. It can be downloaded for free (or money if you care to donate!) from my Bandcamp page. It is called Autumn. 🙂

16th September 2011

What is an amazing piece of music? In an amazing piece of music, I feel every chord. It is not just a collection of simultaneously played notes, but a feeling, an emotion or an image. A chord sequence that can continually pound me with this feeling, heightening the experience with each successive chord; that exists in a fantastic piece of music. Notes have an inevitability, a knowledge that at some point they’ll reach a peak and cascade down with a force of beauty so powerful that it genuinely overtakes me; staggers me; sometimes actually leaves me gasping for breath. A fantastic piece of music takes me somewhere else. The best music makes certain that I forget I exist in this world: not just a brief diversion, but a genuine belief that I am somewhere else. Somewhere better. Each sound and texture is as real and visual and vibrant as the grains of sand in a desert, or the concrete of a wall, or the successions of ripples that form waves that form the sea. No exaggeration, no metaphor: musical textures that are just as real as these.

This is the music I would like to make too.

11th September 2011

Finally, I have a guitar! I enjoyed playing for a few hours yesterday. I want to get a book and some tabs and learn some more, I haven’t improved my technique in the last ten years at all, really. I came up with a few little ideas but nothing of much importance. But that’s fine.

I’ve nearly completed all of the ideas I’ve been working on lately. The ‘ghostly’ themed collection – which will probably be called The Tree – and Where Do We Go When the Roads Have All Cracked? need more assessment but may be done; A Room needs better piano sounds which I’ll sort out later; and I’m still searching for a title for the electro-acoustic collection. Once all of these loose ends are tied up, it’ll probably be the last music I record for a while, as I’m going to focus on my guitar playing and such. It’s not like I don’t have enough material to see me through a considerable time anyway! So as I have a lot of music to get out to labels and eventually – hopefully – release and promote, it’s a good idea to put my musical ideas towards performance and composition again. It’s like being a kid again. Up until ten years ago, the only music I made was using ‘real’ instruments anyway – funnily enough that’s about the point my guitar playing stopped progressing!

8th September 2011

Been tidying up some ideas today. Often the last track completed from an album can seem rushed to me – perhaps running out of inspiration or patience. Luckily I have time on my hands to go back over stuff once I’ve given it some space. In this case, I’ve rearranged one piece from A Room, using the same tone rows but making it considerably more sparse and abstract sounding. Sounds less cheesy now (yes, I somehow managed to make a piece of cheesy twelve tone music).

I’ve begun considering ideas for the artwork for A Room – Sturmazdale’s artwork was done around the time of the album with a couple of suitable photographs – but it doesn’t seem to be something easily do-able at the moment. Perhaps I should start work on photography for Where Do We Go When The Roads Have All Cracked?, as it was a bridge near my current flat that inspired me to start work on it.

7th September 2011

I was reading back over my music journal, right back to 2004 when it started, and I noticed a huge, dramatic difference: back then, I was posting mainly positive things about my music, recording progress, and thoughts about music I’d like to make, maybe; in the last year, I’ve done a lot of complaining about my own music, my approach to writing and so on. I’d like this to change, I’d like to be more positive about what I’m doing and the music I’m making. In fact, I’d like not to have things to find fault with. I want to be pleased with what I’ve made. I want to appreciate my own music for what it is, not what it should be or shouldn’t be. I think the Ross Baker name should give me some freedom, not only because it is, in itself, vague and non-descript – there’s no artist name to live up to, I shan’t have the trouble with the whole ‘Second Thought sound’ thing, but also because it takes me back to my pre-Second Thought days when I recorded tapes just as Ross Baker. Sometimes I’d do tapes which were designed to evoke a particular atmosphere or mood, sometimes I’d just make tapes of music I’d written.

I suppose my point is, I’ll be taking a different approach from next year. Whatever I record is fair game. I could end up with another Second Thought style soundscape album – Sturmazdale is much like that – or a shorter, more abstract mood piece like the twelve-tone serial collection and cityscape albums I’m working on (I’m expecting both to be around the 40 minute mark), or a collection of individual ideas which won’t paint a scene, but just act as pieces of music in their own right. I must remember that this is all fine (it won’t be a 2010 style ‘release any old crap’ situation, however, as I’m going to make sure I execute a lot more quality control than I have of late)! Similarly, I’m removing the idea of ‘no go’ areas and unbreakable rules. I can’t see myself returning to using VST instruments any time, but I’ve warmed to the idea of owning a hardware synth. It might not be ‘acoustic’, but who cares as long as it sounds good? I do want to get more instruments and do more musical performance, possibly even recording to tape, but I don’t want to give myself some bizarre sense of guilt for using a computer. I don’t want to feel like I’m doing things wrongly by writing music for a reason or in a manner that isn’t in some grand plan. I never used to do that until the last couple of years, and it’s very unhealthy. It stops music making me happy, and that’s the main reason I write in the first place. And this blog, there needs to be more about the music and less about my neuroses, because they’re unnecessary. In short: whatever music I make, for whatever reason, if it’s good, it’s good. I have ideas of what I want to do, but that doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to do other things too.

I’m glad that’s out of the way. Now I can continue the blog in a manner befitting my newfound positive, music-based perspective.

Leaf Pass has now become my most-downloaded record and almost certainly my most listened-to. Thank you to everybody who’s downloaded it! It may have become my second favourite of all my records, behind Purlieu, so I’m really happy that it’s proving so popular. Fingers crossed it’ll remain that way.

The cityscape album I think will be taking the uncharacteristically long title of ‘Where Do We Go When The Roads Have All Cracked?’, which I think sums up the feeling of ruin and loss I’m hoping to portray in it (oh the happiness and joy, as ever). I think it’s going to be mostly live and electronically treated melodica and piano with a tapestry of field recordings. My girlfriend describes the melodica as sounding like a character or narrator witnessing the scene, which is a nice way of hearing the album and one I think really fits the mood. I’m incredibly happy with how it’s coming along, anyway.

I bought a couple of (very) cheap wooden Indian style flutes in Canterbury on my birthday. It’s proving difficult to get a nice sound out of them, but I will continue to try! I’m sure I can use them at some point. I’m hoping to get a new acoustic guitar soon, and I want to collect my microphones and FX pedals from Hinckley as well as they’ll prove useful when playing instruments I think.

The twelve-tone serial composition collection has been given a title and a label! It will be called A Room and will be the first release on my Bullfinch Records label next year at some point. I’ll leave you to imagine how the title and music relate to each other for the moment.

4th September 2011

Some people might be mistaken in thinking that being one of those people who is constantly recording is a good thing. It’s not! Well, it has its down sides, at least. For a while I’ve been worrying that I’m actually working on too much music, but then I remember even around the time of Purlieu I was recording that, and almost an album’s worth of material that didn’t make it onto the album, and a couple of 2T Records, and a So Far So Good album, and some nonsense as Rory and the Smendles, and still at college and persuing a social life. So perhaps it’s not so odd that, given the fact I have nothing to do at the moment, I’m coming up with a lot of new music. It’s all being put into different boxes on different themes. I’ve decided to revisit the original ideas behind Vacuum Road Songs (long before it turned into the maddening journey through a city story it was planned to be a more grim sounding soundtrack to a rather scary part of a city – think Burial’s first album in mood), a ghost story themed album inspired by a car trip near Hinckley, the electro-acoustic experiments I’ve spoken of before, the old tape collage, and a box for general stuff that might get used in the future. I’m getting in touch with labels to see what will be released where and when. Hopefully a few bits and bobs will be out over the course of 2012.

I spent much of yesterday playing with a melodica, writing, recording, manipulating sounds. It works very well at forming an ambient backdrop, and I came up with some great sounds. I think I really need to get a guitar very soon. Given the opportunity to write tracks, rather than piece them together on the computer, it should slow down my progress without stopping me from being musical!

1st September 2011

This afternoon I’ve been piecing together some of my favourite bits of those old tapes I wrote about some months ago (nearly a year ago!) A lot of the strange noises and collages were inspired by The Beatles’ Revolution 9, and I’ve been putting those together in a fashion befitting their origins. Nostalgia is a funny thing, that led me immediately to consider my past and my music again, and, having had a couple of drinks, I felt quite nostalgic about Second Thought. Not that I’m regretting ending it, but just… memories, really. When it all started, ups and downs, how it ended.

Anybody with an ear for some beautiful music should listen to Tectonic Grind by Sensible Nectar. The tape’s out of print so it can be downloaded for free in the Out of Print section of Rainbow Bridge. Some of the noisier stuff might be hard to get through (I’ll be honest, it’s not really to my taste either), but the melodic guitar stuff is wonderful. The last track, Unsafe In My Own Shuffling, Weak, Dreaming Arms, is probably one of the most beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard and really should be listened to. If only I could create that sort of thing with my guitar.

If only I had my guitar!