#27: S-cape In Salford

At the beginning of 1993, while in my first year at University College Salford, I bought a synth module to  add to my limited music-making set-up. I can't recall the exact model number but it was a Cheetah rack mounted module with a few little buttons and a LED number display and was meant to be an editable digital synth. With button combinations to access menus that weren't visible made it very non-user friendly and it was a matter of hours before I realised it was an unwise purchase. I returned it and instead purchased a friendlier sound module called Dr Synth made by Roland. This had a multitude of sampled sounds ranging from synth waves, percussion, traditional orchestra and acoustic instruments and others in between. It was also multi-timbral so I could layer a few lines of music at once and it soon became the backbone to my digital orchestra. While there were some editing features in the sounds including filtering and envelope controls, these weren't possible to use when in multi-timbral mode. So for what I wanted to do, I was a little limited if I wanted to run several musical parts at once. 

With some experimentation over the next few months, I manipulated the sound palette by assigning several sounds to the same midi channels and using pitch shift, panning and other features to build more interesting sound combinations and effects.

I found the best way to explore the new sound palette was to sequence up a few little test tracks. So I hooked it up to my sequencer, which also controlled my Yamaha and Korg keyboards, and spent some evenings in my little bedsit programming some electronic instrumentals. The first one, later called Trancewaves, was a sort of ambient trance track and other tracks followed of a similar nature. Either ambient, techno, electro or sometime combinations of all three. All the tracks could be played by the machines with some manual live editing and sound manipulation, and on Sunday 23rd May 1993, I spent the whole night programming extra bits, and recording a cassette album's worth of material. I gave the cassette album a title of 'Welcome To My World' for no particular reason, and decided to give the 'project' a name, as it was different to the Production material I had previously done. So 'S-cape' was born and this became the moniker used really for instrumental electronica music I created with this particular set up. It wasn't tied to a particular electronic genre, nor any sort of song structure, and with it being more experimental, it felt a kind of escape from the way I had previously been working. I later recorded a further cassette called 'N-Trance; where I included more live sound manipulation and playing along with the sequencer lines. As part of Salford University's afternoon gigs organised by Andrew Greenwood, I seized the opportunity to perform as S-cape, having previously performed solo Production gigs. This particular gig was held at a nearby pub called The Squealing Pig where I set up the gear and performed a few tracks including ones I hadn't previously recorded. Included in this set was Patrol where I exploited the experiments I had done with multi-layering sounds on the same midi channel. For this one, I layered up several drum set patches onto the same channel, with individual pitch settings and effects, and would mute and unmute several parts which allowed me to improvise and mix them live. Almost as if I had created my own live drum set, 

I recorded this live set to cassette, and along with some new tracks, compiled the third S-cape cassette album 'Live Mind'. When I say album, I really just mean a cassette with a homemade sleeve that I'd copy for friends who requested it. A second gig at The Squealing Pig followed, along with sets at the Subclub, the Pavilion (a gig which has its own blog post here), a support slot at the Black Horse pub for a great band called The Pudding Spoons and then I was invited to join BoomBooom, who were a collective, who put on club nights and happenings at various venues. Initially I performed at their more ambient BoomBooombient nights at Night and Day Cafe in Manchester, and then later performed sets at BoomBooom nights at locations such as Jabez Clegg, Castlefield, a club in Hulme, a club in York and Manchester's Music Box and Roadhouse. 

Video footage that captures one of the BoomBooom nights at the Night and Day Cafe can be seen here where i have edited down a ten minute snapshot from the original video tape. Filmed by Vicky in 1995.

I'm indebted to BoomBooom and to Andrew Greenwood for giving me the opportunity to perform the tracks live. Making the music was my sole focus in those years, so to play them out of rather large speakers and seeing people dancing around to them was the ultimate high for me, and as I can't ever see it being repeated, remains a most cherished memory. Now in hindsight I wish I had done much much more and pushed myself further to play as many places as possible.  

Halloween BoomBooo!mbience 

BoomBooom had put out some compilation cassette albums and included an S-cape track on one of them before putting out a CD compilation of BoomBooom artists. This was my first encounter with homemade CD production so it was quite a new thing to hear and see a track on a compact disc. BoomBooom also began broadcasting an internet radio show called BlazzNet, as well as broadcasting some of the live gigs, which at that time around 1995 was quite innovative and exciting. 

As I had only been writing new tracks to perform at venues, I decided it was time to record all the latest material, particularly as BoomBooom were to include tracks on compilations and internet broadcasts and had asked me for something to play. I had written quite a number of tracks that needed titles, and I remember sitting in a pub with a notebook trying to come up with a lìst of titles to then distribute and assign to the various works. 

Something I still do to this đay.

A few S-cape gigs including two in one day.
Also a poster for a second Subclub gig. I can't actually remember
performing as S-cape twice there.

By early 1999 I had my own computer which included a CD burner so I was now able to burn my own CD's and print out labels and sleeves - a step up from the cassette album.

I had borrowed a DAT machine, set it up in my flat with all my gear and recorded all the S-cape tracks I had created in recent years, including re-recorded versions of some of the earlier "cassette" sessions. As N-Trance had now been used as the name for a chart topping dance act, I renamed that particular track Intrance, for what it was worth, and I also toyed with the name S-cape a bit too. For certain gigs I dubbed it S-kape, and also while messing around with various fonts, quite liked the look of using a Greek font. So that became a kind of logo that no-one could pronounce or possibly even notice. Not the best promotional move.

A gig at The Black Horse pub in Salford with set list poster.
Also a poster for the first Squealing Pig gig.

In 1999 I put together five CDs of S-cape material, of which I did a few copies on request from friends. At the end of 1999, I performed a final set as S-cape at a club night at Band On The Wall in Manchester, where having now acquired a sampler and new synth module I performed a more improvised set using lots of samples which I looped round across multiple lines and used the mixing desk to arrange the tracks. I had never done that before, and was never to do it again, as within the next month I left Manchester and moved to London. That seemed to close off any avenue I had in performing as S-cape again, as it would mean starting over again and I was now in the middle of recording Production material. 

So I view the leaving of Manchester as closing the door on the S-cape moniker, project, act, entity, name etc. Plus, the name has been used for other things. I like the idea of that name attached to a bunch of tracks I created in those years as being part and parcel of a great experience of having time and opportunity to focus on music creativity; meeting some great people, and keeping some great memories of Manchester. The association with the name S-cape is more than just a name under which I twiddled some dials, pushed some buttons, swept some filters, and sequenced some synths. For me it is a chapter heading of sorts for an audio diary of my time in the North West.

Having said that, I have continued to write electronic instrumental tracks, which to me sound like the natural progression from S-cape, particularly the Dancesounds Volume 2: Classwork album, released in 2002. 

More recently, the Duster Jack material I've been working on is the more electro side of what I was doing in Manchester, and as abstract a concept a project name might seem to some, it feels like a sort of offspring of 

S-cape.

Some live recordings.
NB the left cassette features tracks I hadn't yet got titles for.

Now S-cape exists only as a pile of cassettes and CDs in a box, through which I had a rummage recently. I decided to upload a selection of them to a Bandcamp page as a kind of archive area. Being cassette recordings, it meant the quality wasn't to a high standard, but I quite like the old worldly charm of hearing tape hiss and hum in places. If only for me, it conjures up memories of hitting the record button on a portastudio, in the bedsit of a terraced house in Salford in the early nineties. 

Hearing the live recordings brings back vivid memories of me uncoiling cables and setting up keyboard stands while around me others assembled decor, food stalls, video screens and record decks for BoomBooom extravaganza evenings. It's certainly more vivid than any photograph.

So now the bulk of those recordings are in cyberspace on the S-cape archive Bandcamp page.

S-cape Archive Volume 1 to 5 is the repackaged five CD set of the 1999 live-to-DAT sessions I recorded in my Salford flat over a few evenings. They include some re-recordings of earlier tracks from the cassette albums.

The cassette albums,  Welcome To My World, N-Trance and Live Mind are also there along with a couple of extra live recordings. Live In Salford is the second Squealing Pig gig, and Live in Manchester is the 1996 gig I did at Jabez Clegg as part of a BoomBooom night. 

Depending on feedback and response, I may add to that archive in time. For now, I hope you find them of interest, particularly those friends and supporters at the time who may also share memories of some of those live gigs and cassette sharing.

s-capemusic.bandcamp.com

#26: Music For Dance

At the end of 2001 I was renting a room in South London and had started working on some new music for a new purpose. Rachel, my future wife, prompted the idea of writing music to suit dance education; whereby tracks would be composed, produced and presented to students of contemporary dance tailored to meet their examination criteria. It sounded like a good plan to try out, so I started work on a number of tracks each of which displayed some change of dynamic - be it tempo, time signature, texture, etc. I acquired various sources of reference material and started to build up a library of sampled African, eastern and tribal drum and instrumental sounds, as well as some synth elements. I put together 12 tracks that ranged from electronic synth to experimental sample based works covering a fusion of genres. Added to the album were three tracks I had written and recorded years earlier as S-cape, which had a more electronic ambient vibe. These tracks made up the first release titled ‘DancesoundsVolume One, Choreography’.

We had a twenty pound note and spent it on some stamps, jiffy bags and blank CDs. I burned the CDs on my home computer, printing out the labels and jewel case sleeves, and we put together a flyer with order form promoting the album and sent it out to a number of schools we had addresses of. This was in February 2002 and it wasn't long before we started to have sales. We burned more CDs, printed more labels, sent out more letters and then took more sales. Rachel started building a database, I was building a website and soon we were looking for an accountant. By September of that year, we released a second volume entitled ‘Classwork’, which featured longer tracks structured around a dance class with music for warming up, footwork, travelling and cool down. These were more electronic dance based and more akin to the music I had done as S-cape a few years earlier. We decided to get our CDs burned by a company rather than do them at home, and we started to use printers for the sleeve and promo leaflets. The orders built up and the database grew quite quickly.

Rachel worked on the admin and promotions, including designing the leaflets and putting together guidelines for tracks. I worked on the music composition and production, as well as the website. It was a good team in a modest cottage industry. Volume 3 'Stage Dance' was released in January of 2003 and contained more classical influences with traditional instruments and shorter pieces aimed at use for dance festivals and competitions. I didn't have a strong palette for orchestral and traditional sampled sounds, so I've never been happy with the tracks on this CD; particularly since upgrading my sound library in recent years and listening back for comparison. However, they continued to contribute to incoming sales, and I was soon working on Volume 4 'Solos & Groups', which, like Volume 1, was aimed more at choreography use for dance students. It is probably one of my favourites of all the albums with its wide range of styles and sounds, which was fun to compose and record. 

Volume 5 ‘Dance Drama’ and Volume 6 ‘Percussion’ were released together in 2005. The former contained tracks with narratives depicting street scenes, water, the Wild West, spy drama, communications and machines. These were fun to make as they incorporated a lot of use of my sampler. For the water tracks (stream, river, sea) I recorded the sound of water in the garden using the outdoor tap and a bucket. For the Wild West movie scenes, besides using what sound effects I already had in my sound library such as gunshots, horses galloping and the sound of wind, I took my minidisc recorder to a local pub and recorded the punters and background noise of clinking glasses and chatter. This served as the background for a piece for a Wild West saloon over which I played a honky-tonk piano track. 'Machines' featuring sampled printer noises shifted pitch to depict big factory machines, and communication included my own voice as an answerphone machine and other telephone effects. For ‘On the Street’, I recorded the sounds of traffic on Oxford Street and then cut up the samples around the car horn sounds, which I then played and sequenced as a track.

Great fun to record and put together.

The Percussion album also made use of sampling on a few tracks. All the tracks used percussion sounds and instruments so there were drum tracks, chromatic percussion such as xylophones, marimbas, glockenspiel and use of orchestral percussion sounds only. But I also created my own by recording sounds made by various kitchen utensils and cutlery, as well as hitting pots and pans and shaking containers from the spice rack.

We also started to sell music for dance by other composers on our website. Our promo leaflet had now grown into a catalogue of several pages, more so when we started to incorporate dance education books.

I recorded another choreography album the following year called ‘Composition’, which sits as another of my favourites. Ten tracks blending hip hop influences, with contemporary uses of traditional sounds and some synth effects. Volume 8 ‘Creative Workshop’ featured a mixture of ambient, jazz influenced, and some up-tempo tracks that were structured suitable for different choreographic and class work routines.

Volume 9 ‘Ideas For Dance’ featured more narrative tracks with music depicting space or time travel, pirates discovering treasure, a balloon rising and falling, this time based more on musical themes, harmonies, instruments and styles rather than sound effects.

Volume 10 ‘One Minute Thirty’ provided another challenge as every track had a duration of one-minute-thirty seconds (which served as the title), so each had to maintain some form of structure, and a change of dynamic. This was a mixture of electronic and sampled traditional acoustic sounds across various genres. Volume 11 was titled ‘Musical Cues’ and each employed a compositional device as the basis of each track. That could have been a form such as canon, or a rhythmical device.

We also had started selling digital downloads of the tracks by adding on a digital store to our website. This also meant we could sell music on demand. While we had been providing alternative edits of some tracks on the end of CDs, we started offering a service where I would edit a track to a required length from a customer, and make it available as a download only track. Around the same time, we started providing a music search service where we had dance teachers and students searching for a suitable piece of music for a performance or choreographic task in an examination and on receiving an enquiry, Rachel would select suitable suggestions by referring to a spreadsheet we built containing data pertaining to each bit of music. The customer could then preview the tracks and buy the downloads. This proved to be quite a popular tool and gave us some indication as to what type of music people were after, particularly when we received requests for similar themes or settings. In some cases I would compose and produce new music that might fit some requirements ahead of time, which would then be additions to the catalogue and form the basis of the next album. In 2010, we released Volume 12 ‘Mood and Atmosphere’ which featured more cinematic styles of music with an improved sound palette and some new compositional ideas.

One thing Dancesounds has done over the years is stretch and challenge me a little when it comes to compositional style, sound selection and use of form. Instead of always sticking to 4/4 steady rhythms and standard harmonic structures, I found myself experimenting more with time signatures, polyrhythms, using timbres in different ways and playing around more with sampling and creating new sounds.

In 2012, after ten years, we wound the business down, in part prompted by a house move, a change in circumstances and the quietening down of CD sales. After 12 volumes of work, plus extra albums of edited tracks, extra compositions and commissions, we had built up quite a catalogue of material and a customer base of happy clients.

While a number of CDs are still available through the NRCD(National Resource Centre for Dance), I also put the entire digital catalogue on Bandcamp. I also released Volume 12 through CD Baby which now makes it available across various digital outlets and services such as iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, Google Play, and many many more. The tracks are occasionally played and sold and I recently set about remastering them all with a view to reissuing a selection of the albums, as well as preparing them for availability as music for media by way of a production music library.

This week sees the re-release of albums ‘Composition’, ‘Creative Workshop’ and ‘Solos & Groups’ which are perhaps my favourite three. These, along with ‘Mood & Atmosphere,’ now sit on the other digital services mentioned as well as various others.

Around six years ago, I began editing video footage to a few tracks to give them some life on places like YouTube. I've always been keen to write or edit to visual media, and while I’ve contributed music to a few short films, I never managed to find a foothold in the right place to get any further. So sometimes I just have to make my own and do it myself.

Cracking Codes

Edited video of my trip to Derek Jarman's Garden a few years back. 

 In all the time we were selling the CDs we would occasionally get some feedback from students or teachers who had used our music, but we would never actually see examples of the combined efforts of each art form; except for one time quite early on when we were invited to a local school in Tonbridge, who were putting on their end of year dance performance, using around seven pieces of my music. So it was quite a thrill to see students perform their choreographed routines to tracks from the catalogue. A few years later I began doing a few commissioned arrangements and compositions for stage festivals and competition performances, which were filmed and sent to me. And more recently I stumbled across a few tracks that had been posted to YouTube by dance students showing their choreography routines. So while hearing and seeing evidence of the use of the music has been minimal, it is very rewarding to see.

Chroma. 

My competition entry of a short score  to a Wayne McGregor dance video. 

Part of the Royal Opera House Create project competition. 

It didn't win but here it is anyway. 

‘Composition’, ‘Creative Workshop’, ‘Solos & Groups’ and ‘Mood & Atmosphere’ are available in digital stores including ITunes, Amazon, GooglePlay, and Spotify.

And the full catalogue remains available at Bandcamp.

www.dancesounds.co.uk

                  

#25: Production @25

This sentence is sure to give me a shiver as I write it, but a quarter of a century ago I started writing and recording synth pop songs under the name Production. At 16, I was already in a school band performing soul, pop, blues covers, which later progressed on the live circuit, but I also started borrowing a 4 track portastudio and a drum machine, and along with my trusty Casio keyboard, began experimenting by putting some tracks together. Later in 1990 I bought my first proper synthesizer and began manipulating and programming sounds as well as sequencer lines, and then started to fill notebook pages with lyrical ideas drawn more from imagination than any autobiographical musings. I don't think the world was ready for any lyrics about paper rounds, though in hindsight, maybe I'd have made more in-roads had I done.

I started compiling demo tapes of recorded songs, instrumentals and remixed versions before trying to work out how I could perform them live. I tried various line-ups including trio, duo, full band, and managed to pull off a few school performances before the move to Salford University. By this time I had begun sending out packaged demo tapes to what I then thought were the correct avenues for moving up a few ladder rungs - record labels, publishers, etc. Some of which were returned with polite replies on variations of 'no'. Performing live was always quite tricky and I felt that I never focused properly on correcting the parts of what I thought should have constituted a good performance. While performing as Production I also began performing instrumental dance tracks under the name S-cape and later performed more under this name in Manchester club nights run by BoomBooom. And while I enjoyed  performing S-cape tracks,  regularly going back to Halifax for many Fabulous BB Kings gigs, a few solo covers pub gigs, and gigs with a friend under the name Inside Edge - as all previously blogged, Production was the format, act, entity, call it what you will, where my heart really lay. Even if performing vocals was one of my weak points, and writing lyrics being another -  anything that I did under the Production banner always felt closer to my heart. 

In early 1994, I took Production back home to Halifax for a club gig with an expanded line-up of friends and musical colleagues, who worked really hard in helping me put on a gig, including stage platforms and lights, backing singers/dancers, musicians and more.

In 1995 I expanded Production to a trio, and besides performing some afternoon gigs at university, we also performed at Salford SubClub, which was a highlight for me because it then finally felt like it had reached the format, line-up and set-up I'd been aiming for. Sadly it was only for a short time and after graduation in 1996, I was back to recording on a portastudio in my flat, after having the luxury of using studios for a few years.

Soldiering on, sending out demo tapes and promo packages, and working out how to get gigs in Manchester were all met with brick walls and as desperate as it was, I always felt I wasn't doing enough, nor was I good enough at the right things. 1997 did see a couple of gigs at Manchester Roadhouse; the first with a quickly assembled three piece line-up, but by the second gig in June, Production was solo again. Back to the duo format the following year for a gig in Burnley and then solo again. I was busier performing occasional gigs under the other guises and other aforementioned line-ups.

After moving to London in 1999, to start working for the BBC as a pop music librarian, meant leaving familiar places and networks of friends and musical colleagues. This also meant an end to performing gigs, as I had been doing, and having to start again in an unfamiliar place. I continued to record, made a CD via mp3.com and sold maybe a couple of handfuls and was also invited to perform a support slot at a London venue to a band I knew called The Sepia - to whom I remain forever grateful.  Initially attempting to expand the line-up, by showtime it was back to being a solo venture. While recording was usually a solo venture, with the occasional guest slot, personnel could fluctuate at live gigs so there was never a fixed line-up for long enough before another gig came along, despite efforts to have one. So whenever I was asked if I was in a band, I wasn't really sure how to answer. Was it a one-man band with vacancies? I had no idea.

Live in London, 2001

After moving to Kent, and into other musical recording ventures, Production, in whatever form it was then in, was placed on a shelf, with cassettes, videos and documents of recordings and gigs boxed away. But at the end of the day, Production was and is just a name, and even tracks I wrote as Production  became S-cape tracks, and vice versa, and even some of those were used for Dancesounds releases, so it shouldn't really make a difference what moniker I attach to what track. It doesn't have enough significance, or importance, for it to be of interest to anyone other than myself, yet at the same time, after 25 years, Production seems to have been a kind of peg where I hang my favourite coat, even if it was more practical to wear a different coat at times. I often found myself performing the wrong tracks, in the wrong venues, to the wrong audiences, under the wrong guise. I became increasingly aware that while I may develop and rework a batch of songs over time, my point of view of a track is very different from someone hearing it for the first time. So the listening context is going to be wildly different. One of many mistakes I felt I made when wearing the Production coat, and there are many I could list, was not thinking more about how the tracks and performances would come across to an audience for the first time. I believe the correct phrase is 'winging it'.

However, it is strange how your perception of past events can change. And while I often thought that if I don't carry on doing it, despite the lack of motion in the wheels, then it wasn't really worth starting at all. And if you reach a point where you know the wheels have come off, then do you then view your past efforts towards it as being wasted? I thought I might, but I don't really because part of the journey was who I got to meet, befriend, work with, and interact with along the way, which wouldn't have happened otherwise. So when realising an idea, such as a performance event, a recording, some mad promo exercise and so on, I was lucky enough to have friends and colleagues willing to go along with it and support, and maybe even humour me from time to time. Sometimes you just have to just do something without worrying about how it might come across, or be interpreted. I wouldn't be writing a blog otherwise.

1990 'cassette!' - remember them?

 

In recent times I've heard from old friends reminding me of a particular demo tape they had, or a gig they attended, or were part of, and in a way that feels as good a reward as anything else I was aiming for, even if I became unsure what that was. So I remain grateful to all those who offered support and help - be it technical, musical, visual, and any other way to keep my morale ticking over. While to some it may seem odd to attach some kind of importance to something that might be common practise for many other musical practitioners, or a peculiar hobby for someone who could have spent their time better, but when it forms part of your routine, either gives you some self-confidence or tests your self-consciousness, then it's a part of your past that is hard to shake off. More so when recalling the enjoyment I got from doing it.

A friend recently recommended I should dig out some of the old tracks and air them in cyberspace, but I'm not quite sure I could face hearing my past efforts in that way without cringing. Some things may well be best left for the memory banks, and in some cases its very far reaches.

#24: Projects New and Old

As planned, the remaining batch of tracks I composed and produced under the Duster Jack umbrella for last December's upload to Bandcamp have now been reassembled properly into a second digital album. As with the previous album presentation (dubbed Time To Dust) this new one (dubbed Android) has a couple of new tracks - 'Android' and 'Processor'. So regardless of any online activity that should occur around those tracks, for me it means a clearing of the decks and Duster Jack can now sit to one side while I press on with some other unfinished doodlings.

Tonic Proud is a temporary pseudonym for an album's worth of tracks I've tinkered with for a few years now and never had time to finish them properly. But when I revisited the tracks 2 or 3 years ago, I decided that every minute spent on any aspect of them - be it recording, programming, mixing, editing etc...and however far apart those minutes are, they will constitute another step in the right direction and that years down the line, eventually...they will be finished. A couple of years ago while reviewing some rough instrumental mixes, I told myself if I keep chipping away at each track, eventually, some time in the future - be it weeks, months or years - I'd be listening to fully finished versions, regardless of what becomes of them in the aftermath. 

Mixing is the part I hate the most about creating any sort of music. While painful, it is unfortunately necessary and always more  drawn out than I would like. But I think I'm at the finish line and I will give it a launch very soon.

And alongside all of that, I've been going through all the tracks I did for the Dancesounds label with the aim of remastering and recompiling them for another outlet. That work is accompanied by a mountain of admin involving track categorisation, writing blurb, filling up spreadsheets and other brain numbing exercises. Playing tracks from a rack of keyboards in the corner of a pub to a handful of bemused punters now seems such a distant memory.

A few pending musical experiments are also scribbled down on my 'want to do list' which I will pepper the various social media sites with as they progress.

For now though, you can visit the latest Duster Jack album release here and indeed the previous one.

http://dusterjack.bandcamp.com/

And any Tonic Proud related news will appear here

https://www.facebook.com/TonicProud for the time being

#23: Time To Dust album

So following a trial run of releasing recent tracks as Duster Jack via Bandcamp throughout December, I've decided to widen the reach with a digital album release available in places such as iTunes, Amazon and many other cyberspace outlets. The album is made up of tracks from the recent Bandcamp set of ep's including some mix tweaks and remastering as well as two new tracks.

The album is called Time To Dust and the tracklisting is as follows:

1) Introducing

2) Gate 19 (new mix)

3) Prime Location

4) Forget Not

5) World Construct

6) Time To Dust

7) Cycle Break

8) Clipper

9) Frequency

10) Open Port

11) City Mainline

12) Endpoint

I am aiming to somehow conjure up some time to create a visual accompaniment to one of two tracks for a YouTube presence but who knows when that will happen.... Am pondering over some ideas on how to present one's own musical endeavours and may take the plunge and action these in the next week.

Anyway, expect various tweets and Facebook updates with links to where it all can be found,

In other related and not so related musical news, I've started some rough mixes for 'Tonic Proud' and I now fluctuate between hating it and thinking it might be okay with some more work. I think the enjoyment may have been zapped out of it now but will soldier on.
And I am currently working my way through the 12 albums I did for Dancesounds label which was primarily for use in dance education. Looking to compile new releases of various tracks that will be sequenced for a different mindset, i.e more for listening that functional use. Will most likely re-record, remix and rework many of them and then start releasing those.
So that should keep me out of mischief for a while.

The album is currently available at http://dusterjack.bandcamp.com and is scheduled to appear on Amazon on Monday 2nd February. Others will follow.

#22: Introducing... Duster Jack

As has already been documented in this random selection of blogged musings, my daily routine had a shake up earlier this year when, after nearly 12 years of working from home, I became a commuter again, travelling daily to a new job in Richmond.

This has meant time spent on the train which has always been my favourite form of transport. However I  knew one  downside when it came to anything music related would be having even less time to spend on creating any. Considering the time I previously had was minimal anyway, it felt that maybe the productive years were long gone . While I have been hacking away a few minutes at a time on unfinished tracks from several years back in my home studio setup, both time and energy are nowadays quite scarce.

However, around the time I started commuting, I embraced one of the more recent developments in technology - that of a  tablet which I bought with some birthday money. Initially I used this to catch up with some YouTube tutorials, TV programmes, web article reading and a little bit of blogging, Then at the tail end of the summer I found some music software that included a sequencer, sampler, vocoder, drum machine and a selection of synths. After a little bit of exploring and experimenting I was suddenly thrown back to my teenage years when I had some new electronic pals to play with. My home studio set up is by no means cutting edge by today's standards, but it does have a large enough palette of sounds and sequencer tracks to keep me amused and that usually would be seen to be a good thing. However looking back I have found I am usually more productive when I am restricted to number of sounds and tracks and the most pleasure I always get is seeing what I can do to sounds to make them different from how they first arrive in the box

The Caustic 3 software I downloaded onto my Android tablet has enough there for me to explore and create that should last me a little while. So in September I began experimenting with the virtual toys such as the modular synth and creating new sounds, or morphing and modifying  existing ones. I used the vocoder to manipulate synth sounds and effects as well as the occasional bit of speech, and while others in the train carriage would either be eyes deep in phone apps, laptop spreadsheets, the Metro paper, or just asleep, I was creating drum samples and building up patterns. I suddenly felt musically revived and started to get the same buzz I used to get over twenty years back when I would crouch over a portastudio, a drum machine and a synth in my Salford bedsit and construct electro synth tracks fuelled by my passion for the records I used to play. It also dawned on me that I had spent a good number of years doing music for other people which have been good projects and served me well - be it music for dance choreographers and teachers, arrangements for dance festival competitions, short film soundtracks, but it made a change to do something for myself.

Whether I then pass the tracks onto someone else for other use remains to be seen, but in the moments the tracks have been created they have been to please only myself.

So as a couple of ideas turned into a handful of tracks, after a few days they became ten tracks and then, by the end of October, I had twenty tracks I felt happy with. I couldn't help but compare this flurry of activity to the other musical project I had been trying to finish this year and had grown a little tired of. As soon as the twenty electro tracks had reached a point I was happy with, I started working on ideas for other tracks.

It was then I realised that come the new year, it will be five years since I released the last Dancesounds album: Volume 12 Mood and Atmosphere, and therefore had really put any new music out into cyberspace. I decided that if I don't do anything else, I should at least get some tracks out there somewhere if only to prove to myself that I can, when opportuniy arises, set to work and get something done and dusted

So the aim was to get the tracks to a place other than my computer device by the end of the year.

Rather than twenty tracks all in one go, I thought stretching them out over a few weeks might be better for those interested to digest. Five four track digital eps seemed to be worth a shot with a couple of weeks seperating each one. However as I started tinkering with mixing and mastering, the weeks left in the year were diminishing and I knew that I could be tinkering with the tracks forever if I wasn't strict with myself. So I decided that no matter what, they would come out in December and would be one every week.

I arranged the tracklistings and took some photos while on my commute depicting images I see everyday, thought up a new name for myself, created a Bandcamp account and started to release them from Monday 1st December onwards.

Whether they are streamed or downloaded by any of those recipients of tweets, status updates or other social media delivery methods, is out of my control, but at the very least I can't help but feel a little sense of achievement to reach the end of the year having outputted some musical content. I can also now look towards 2015 as hopefully a creative period where I can write new tracks, further take advantage of the tools to hand by using sounds from my home studio into the tablet based sampler and audio editors, and vastly reduce the timeframe between executing an idea and uploading a finished version to the web.


Duster Jack can be found on Facebook , Twitter and Bandcamp

The digital ep's are being released throughout December

Introducing...         (1st Dec 2014) 
City Mainline         (8th Dec 2014)
World Construct   (15th Dec 2014)
Forget Not             (22nd Dec 2014)
Export Setting      (29th Dec 2014)