Wednesday 30 October 2013

Making an album

Sometimes you can sit down at the keyboard and a melody just comes out of nowhere, and before you know it, you’ve got the makings of a great new song, in no time at all! Other times it can be a drawn out and slow, frustrating process, where you can hear what you want in your head, but you just can’t seen to shake it out of your fingertips on to the keys!

The process of making an album has its ups and downs, and at the same time, you completely immerse yourself in it. Play it day and night, time after time, picking it apart or enjoying it. Quite often by the time you've finally finish the album, you don’t play it again for months! By revising it constantly you’re faced with ever-changing decisions; which tracks need to stay, which can go, which need to be longer or shorter (then there’s the issue of mixing, which I won’t even start to go into here!).

But sometimes even the most subtle change can make a huge difference – even changing just one sound in a song can completely transform a song. Or ruin it! Sometimes you might really like a track, but somehow it just doesn’t fit in – eventually it gets removed and it’s actually an improvement. The process of making an album is full of surprises and frustrations. And one of the hardest parts is knowing when to stop – but more often than not, it just feels right, and complete. All of a sudden.

Another complication to the whole process is deciding on cover artwork. Many musicians, like myself, are also artists. Therefore you quite often have a preconceived idea of how the album cover should look. But sometimes having the artistic side can also get in the way – somebody else’s point of view quite often ends up being totally opposite of yours. And sometimes you need that. When immersed in a project such as this, it’s very easy to lose sight, direction or over work things. And that’s when comments and feedback from friends or colleagues is really beneficial. Don’t be afraid to ask for opinions!

But as an artist and graphic designer, the obsessive part of me thinks that the cover art should usually be my own work – it’s an integral part of the project and extension of the music anyway.

Two of my album covers use paintings by renowned British space artist, David A. Hardy, whose work I have admired from an early age. David’s paintings really transport you to another place, and it’s a real honour to associate my music with his artwork. The first of these was my 2007 album Into the Light, and my forthcoming release, Beyond the Boundary.

The creation of an album is all about decisions. Non-stop decisions. Then you just need to hope you’ve made the right ones :)

Monday 28 October 2013

Beyond boundaries...

It’s been a while since I last blogged. So what’s been happening?

Since the spring, I’ve been working on two musical projects in parallel. One of which is an album especially composed for the Institute for Interstellar Studies (I4IS), and is entirely themed around interstellar travel. This is an easy subject for me, as science-fiction is often a starting point for my work and an ongoing influence – and ever since I started making my own music back in 2006, one of my ambitions has been to make a space album. I first tried this in the summer of 2006 when I made a set of demos entitled Discovery. Although it had some nice ideas, it didn’t really turn out how I wanted and I soon got distracted by other album ideas. The second attempt came in 2009 with a set of demo tracks with the working title of Voyage, but again, these musical sketches never really went anywhere, and it was at that point, that I decided to give music a rest for a few years.

Fast forward to 2012, and having proudly accepted the position of honorary musician for the I4IS, I made my science-fiction concept album, Future Worlds, which in many ways felt like the culmination of the past few years’ musical experimentation. But it was firmly rooted in SF concepts, rather than space travel, and it felt like the right time to explore this theme again, both as an exclusive release with which to promote the I4IS and also to be used in their upcoming promotional film work. My plan for this was simply to make an EP rather than fully-fledged album, and a nice tie-in to their forthcoming book, Beyond the Boundary, to which I also contributed. However, over time, this project gradually evolved beyond an EP, and once the running time exceeded half an hour, I soon realised I was on the way to making a full album after all!

As an independent solo artist, when you embark on the making of an album, you know the journey isn’t going to always be the same. Ideas come from different sources. As somebody who experiences synaesthesia, making music is very much an artistic and emotional activity – I cannot detach sounds from colours and textures, and for me personally, that is integral to my output. Likewise are the books I read, or places I’ve been. I like to try and create certain atmospheres, moods and states of mind in my music.

While Beyond the Boundary uses a combination of orchestral/symphonic sounds as well as electronic, my other album project has been much more focused on electronic sounds. The original idea was to make an album using nothing but classic Korg synthesiser sounds, but once again, as the songs evolved, so did the sound palette, but the Korg is still very much at the core of these new songs, deliberately so. I’d heard and loved the sounds of the Wavestation or M1 on albums by artists including Gary Numan and Depche Mode, so to finally get my hands on these was an absolute pleasure – but the challenge was then to make something which didn’t sound (completely) retro.

The second album project is called Traces and to date, has gone through three or four evolutions. The creative process always takes you to unexpected places; round surprise corners. And more often than not, what you end up with, is quite far away from the idea you started out with!

My original plan for the album was for it to be a series of very short, minimal pieces; heavily atmospheric – like a series of musical snapshots. Almost like when you glance through a photo album, each picture from a different point in the past; of a different mood and time. My plan was initially for it to be totally free of concept and open to interpretation. As I got into working on the album, it was inevitable that longer, fuller tracks would emerge. And they did, however, the shorter tracks actually punctuated the album, forming brief transitions between the more layered tracks and longer pieces. And yes, a concept had started to emerge, despite my best intentions!

I’ll be talking more about Traces as the time grows closer to unleash it, but I really wanted the music to have a dream-like quality to it. Like a soundtrack to those vivid dreams where you briefly question whether it was a dream or not on waking, or when a flashback comes the following day. The psychological aspect of dreams has always fascinated me; like mini movies in your head – a crossover into an alternative reality. Authors such as Christopher Priest and Haruki Murakami portray about this so well in their work. Their novels really take you places; the characters so profound, the imagery so vibrant, the mood so dreamlike as they too cross that boundary between the subconscious and reality. This is really what Traces is about, as well as looking at our own invisible footprints of the past.

More soon… in the meantime, you can hear sample tracks from both Traces and Beyond the Boundary on my Soundcloud page.  And don't forget, you can buy Future Worlds and other albums on my Bandcamp page.