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!

28th August 2011

It’s been a busy time in the studio over recent weeks. I think I’ve completed composition for my twelve-tone serial collection, I just need a good piano sound for three of those tracks. The rest will be electro-acoustic and more experimental in sound. I’ve also been contacting a few labels in regards to a couple of other projects I’ve been working on. I’ve received positive response about the pure music electro-acoustic pieces I mentioned in a previous entry, but won’t know any more until later in the year about that. I’m also sending out stuff for some more piano and string based music I’ve been working on with a ghostly theme. I’m very proud of the tracks, but an interesting thing happened during recording sessions: I recorded a piece for solo guitar, and really enjoyed the writing, recording and listening process, moreso than using samples and a piano synth at the computer. I decided then that from now (for a while at least, I change my mind often enough to make no permanent promises!) I want to actually stick to instruments I have. I’d like to get more instruments and work with them. Instead of going “I want to write music for these instruments”, I want to take the approach of arranging the music around what I have: a continuation of the self-limited sample palette I chose as a response to the over-indulgence in wide ranging synthesisers. I’ll still be using samples in an electro-acoustic way, but it might be a nice challenge to return to actual music – composition and performance – instead of sitting at a computer screen clicking buttons.

In other news, I’ve shifted over the physical releases from Jerky Oats on to a new label, Bullfinch Records. I want to release some electro-acoustic, modern classical and ambient music on CD in DIY packaging, and have a few artists lined up for release. It’ll be starting next year hopefully, and I want to release 2-3 CDs a year. Having a fresh label will not only help promote things, but also Jerky Oats really is a terrible name, thoroughly unsuitable for serious electro-acoustic music. So it’s much more fitting. Wish me luck!

13th August 2011

At relatively short notice, Leaf Pass is out today, which can be downloaded for free by clicking here, courtesy of Treetrunk Records. I recently described the album as ‘the best accident I’ve ever had’ – it began life as a couple of longform Canal Seven-style pieces on a collection called Habitats 1-3, but I was just never very happy with it so I scrapped the release. Then, for reasons unknown to me, I decided to merge it together and split it into 16 tracks a la a normal album, and it all came together perfectly into a record I’m really proud of. Some of the material on the album is new stuff, some is very old – pre-Purlieu, from the Twenty-Four demo disc, for those of you who still remember it – but it all sits together nicely. The presence of pre-Purlieu material, combined with the sunny rural sounding beginnings, moving on to a more sinister end section, came together to make the album a bit of a prequel to Purlieu really. It’s a bit of a diversion from the modern classical direction of the last couple of albums and what’s to come, and was released now as a way to tie things up with Second Thought. This is the last of the five major albums.

I always intended to do linking albums, although it was never meant to end this way. I had four albums planned: Purlieu and Vacuum Road Songs, then Dead Hymns, a dark ambient/industrial album which had the listener going through a sort of ‘personal hell’, followed by Crib Goch, a spiritual reawakening based around piano and string pieces that would end the series. Instead, the hell was replaced by myths and ghost stories of Safernoc, and I took things one step further by tying the last album up as a memory of how the journey began. That this managed to come out just as Second Thought was ending is a wonderful coincidence and basically makes me very happy.

Anyway, Leaf Pass is out now. A CDr version will be working its way to a few special people who’ve supported me and bought the other albums over the years. That’s the end of Second Thought, musically, the last new material to come out, the end of the story that some people have been following since 2002/2003 when I started work on material that made its way onto this album and Purlieu. It’s been quite a ride. I hope you enjoy the album!

3rd August 2011

Some of the pieces I mentioned in the previous two entries fall into the ‘pure music’ category – music that exists for the sake of it, music that has no meaning, no definition, is not intended to be evocative of a particular atmosphere or image, but simply be beautiful music. The one thing that I’m learning is that this approach can lead to some very beautiful music, but is not one I will be following much in the future, probably due to the fact that most of the music I listen to is on the atmospheric/evocative side. It’s been a very enjoyable experiment and I’ve been learning a lot about music. One of the pieces still needs some more live instruments, and I’m committed to finishing it all and putting it out at some point, as I’m proud of what I’m making. It’s just helping me refine my future working process in a way I wasn’t expecting it to at first…

20th July 2011

Expanding upon the ideas I was working on the other day, I’ve been playing with more instrument + field recording manipulations. The last one came out rather nicely, and might stand up well enough by itself. This time it’s a bit more abstract, slight similarities with my side of the Oncoming Storm split with Noisesurfer, so I think it’ll need more work. I’ve decided I can’t just leave stuff at ‘good enough’, I want to make the tracks as good as possible, keep working on them until they’re better than I imagined they would be. So live, acoustic instrumentation will be added at some point in the future, probably when I have it around me. I might split the longform track into sections, too, parts 1-4 or whatever. It’s a nice way to be working, as it’s currently entirely improvised, which comes as a complete contrast to my experiments with composing using twelve tone serial techniques. That isn’t doing much for me or my mood at the moment, so I’ve put those on the back burner and I’m considering other ideas currently. I’ll return to them at a later date. I’d really like to get more instruments, and get the instruments I own back with me – it’ll be nice to write for acoustic instruments after such a long time of in-computer sounds. I always used to put a huge array of sounds and instruments on my music back in the day, I want to get back to that process again. A mixture of computer manipulation and live performance is probably the most enjoyable way to work for me.

Stuff I have been enjoying recently:

Xedh – Vinduskarm
Max Richter – Songs from Before
Deaf Center – Pale Ravine
Gavin Bryars – Piano works
Sibelius – Symphonies 2 & 4