About Slow Music

Released: 12 March 2019

Slow Music is a collection of seven very long pieces of ambient music, mostly created between December 2018 and February 2019. Some are drone-based, most involve some generative processes, and one reworks some strings from a much older piece of music. They are all very, very slow.

In making them all, I followed a rough approximation of what I vaguely understand to be Brian Eno's usual process, which is to say that I built palettes of sounds and melodic fragments, set in place some rules on when and how they should play, set up some generative fragments and processes, then sent the whole thing playing and waited to see what happened. There are elements of chance and randomness in all of them, and the seven recordings on Slow Music are just selected versions of the pieces.

The process feels a lot like painting in the dark. If I'm really honest, I'm not sure that they even are music. They feel more like found art, or something.

About the She Knows EP

Released: 1 July 2020

I've still not found the right verb for the process of making this kind of music. Sometimes it's obviously composing - I'll sit at a piano and write something, then arrange parts to go with it. Often it's quite different.

Anyway, the four tracks Sh Ek No and Ws were made using a combination of those techniques. I had in mind that moment in Space Oddity where Major Tom says goodbye. Imagine you're floating lost in space.

About Swim

Released: 15 July 2020

Swim is partly an attempt to add some melody and rhythm to the Tempestlapse formula, before it seems too formulaic. Having said that, I've added those elements in a very Tempestlapse way - pretty much everything you hear on Swim has been created generatively. That means rather than choosing exactly what notes each instrument should play, I've set up a whole bunch of semi-random probabilistic rules to determine what notes are played and when, and then edited the results into something like music.

What's it about? I suppose it's loosly to do with movement - with the physical process of rearranging your body in different shapes to make it travel from one point to another. Each of the tracks is a kind of soundtrack to that process. The title track obviously relates to swimming, and I'll leave the others open to your imagination.

About Losing Yourself

Released: 1 August 2020

I think this is mostly about dissociation.

To be honest, I find actually it quite scary to listen to. Sorry about that.

Even if you hate it, I reckon it's worth skipping to the final track, Watching Yourself From Below. Most of the album is pretty dark, looking downward. That track flips things round.

Released: 15 August 2020

Thinking is five shortish (by Tempestlapse standards) pieces of synth music, soundtracking different thought processes one may, from time to time, get locked in.

It begins with Thinking; that slightly restless sort of thinking where you're trying to solve a problem and not getting anywhere. From there we move on to Fears - you know when you find yourself thinking semi-compulsively about something you're afraid of or don't want to happen? That. Nostalgia and Regret probably don't need an explanation. Finally, Reentry is an attempt to put into sound that sensation you get when escaping from that kind of unhelpful thinking, getting back into the real world and the moment.

About Will This Do?

Released: 1 September 2020

Will This Do? tracks my personal response to the months roughly February-June 2020. The title refers to the apparent attitude of many of our world leaders; but perhaps also mine - who knows? You be the judge.

About Indistinguishable From Magic

Released: 15 September 2020

This record was an attempt to create an anti-earworm. It's generative music that, instead of washing over you as background noise, instead tries to draw your attention away from whatever is going on in your head. Each track has the same, simple structure, and a small handful of instruments provide the sounds, but from that minimalist setup, huge variations are possible.

The fourteen tracks on Indistinguishable From Magic make up a small fraction of the almost eight hours of semi-generative, semi-improvised pieces composed in this way.

About Autonomy

Released: 1 October 2020

Autonomy was recorded live in July 2020, and it was a lot of fun to do: I had three attempts at playing through the set, and this was my favourite version. Autonomy blends live instruments, pre-recorded pieces and generative sounds, plus lots of knob and fader twiddling. There's such a chaotic blend of randomness and individual control involved, playing this piece felt a lot like surfing really big waves - most of the time you can steer things in one direction or another, but if the wave decides you're going a particular way, you're going that way or falling off. I hate the term 'soundscape', but that's probably the best description of this. Best listened to at not-quite-full volume on headphones while travelling through a city.

About Mind Control

Released: 15 October 2020

Mind Control is a somewhat dark and introspective piece of semi-generative music.