Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Making Room

I decided to experiment with SoundCloud for posting new music.  It's a great place to post works, but it's not really a blog.  I like having the space to write about what I post and being able to customize my page, but Blogger doesn't allow uploading audio files, so you have to make videos, and the videos they import get compressed, so they sound like crap.  The solution is to post videos on YouTube, which I've been doing, and link them to Blogger, but all that work to make a video is a pain and superfluous, since none of my content is visual.  On the other hand, it's nice having an object to put in the text to mark the music, like "Here it is!" and Blogger doesn't have an equivalent object for SoundCloud.  Maybe I could have a pic of a crow or something and attach the link to that.  Dunno; we'll see.

In the meantime, here is a new piece:  I call it "(more space)".  It's a quickie and has lots of flaws -- it's barely mixed, there are several places where the gain is still to high, and the ending is clunky, just to name a few -- but I felt the need to do a piece in one sitting and get it published.  Things have been pretty challenging in my little corner of the universe recently, it felt good to focus on my inner ear and just get something out into the world.

The piece is best listened to on a system with a good, clear bass; it's not bass-heavy, but its low end knits the whole thing together.  It represents the sort of thing I'm most interested in doing:  almost exclusively timbral in nature, minimally rhythmic, minimally melodic.  Harmony (in the broadest sense of what happens when more than one pitch plays at a time) cannot be ignored, but it's not emphasized either.  I find how sounds change fascinating, and I aim to produce music that draws the ear into that.  I hope you find something that draws you in here.