DeleteThe.Net

I have been trying to use my time this week to get back to making music. In truth I’ve been trying to use my time for years to get back to making music. I still make music all the time, that is what I do for a living in fact, nearly everyday, I sit at this computer in my studio with a piano sized keyboard in front of me and various electronics surrounding me and I put together sounds and make music. But I find it is sometimes hard to find the time to spend making music for my own purposes, I guess that’s the case with a million passions transformed into careers.

So I went to see a Chopin exhibition at the British Library last week, and it reminded me of the times I spent when I was younger learning to play the piano. My teacher, Lorna, instilled in me a passion for Chopin when I was at that age, but I was below the skill level necessary to play Chopin’s Etudes which I loved so much and that frustrated me. I would hate practicing them because I couldn’t play them and so I would stare at the piano like I was halfway climbing up a cliff face and it was the overhang that I just couldn’t get past.

Seeing the particular Chopin Etude lying open in front of me in the exhibition in a glass case, reminded me of that feeling. Now I look back on it with a bit more life experience I realise that the open page in front of me now, the soaring triplet melody with the gentle bass accompaniment, had crushed my passion all those years ago. I have always loved to play the piano, to press the keys and to explore the keyboard to try and see it without the bounds of technical ability, period, history, key, structure, all of these cliff faces that hold me back. I love to just press the keys and see what noise they make, good or bad.

With this in mind and with the trivialities of life weighing my mind down this week, I wanted to just play music like that, to lose myself and escape into a landscape that I could explore. A landscape with cliffs and vast oceans maybe, but one where I can fly and they don’t hold me back. So I pulled a dusty suitcase down from the loft, the one I used to carry the old mixer and pedals in when I play improvised music not so long ago. I strung up all the pedals and electrical goodies I could find with my guitar and Max/MSP and I just messed around sending audio where it wasn’t supposed to go and looping things backwards and forwards pushing different sounds into the mix. No rules, no wrong notes, just sounds and noises and all under my control. Before long the whole afternoon had passed I hadn’t noticed it go. I was relaxed and free.

I wanted to share it so I thought I’d put something up. Improvising is a very personal thing and I wouldn’t imagine anyone wanting to hear what I did all day, so I put together a quick little video. I aimed for about 3 minutes, when I finished, it was 15. So I edited it down to 5 minutes with some terrible editing to post up. Sorry about the stupid filter, I got carried away because I only have iMovie and I can’t be bothered to re-render it on this machine. But there it is…