Are We The Music Makers?

nomos

Administrator
I'm just curious how many musicians we have on the boards here. Some of the people whose blogs I've been visiting have made offhand mention of their own music. Nick Gutterbreakz even posted some of his old tunes. So what are people making? What are you using to do it?

Myself - I started making hip hop in 1991. It got increasingly 'inauthentic' as I started hearing a lot more rave, jungle and punk, all of which had an energy that seemed to be missing from hip hop by mid-decade. I started making more overtly experimental music. It started like manic lo-fi Warp and ended in aural stasis. No movement. No sign of life. Sound for the sake of itself. This was the period when I swtiched from 'gear' to software and I had some trouble getting used to it. My output went way down and I nearly quit altogether. Then, in the last couple of years I've started playing with breaks and things again - mucking about just for the fun of it. It's not always super original but I'm enjoying myself again.

As for equipment - I just finished selling off all the electronic boxes I'd collected over the last decade: samplers, effects, four track, drum machines, synth, etc. Now I'm using Ableton Live, an Evolution Midi mixer and a controller keyboard for everything. I'm actually producing way more than I have since I was 19 or so, largely because everything is in one unit and I don't have to mess around with cables, settings and capatibilites anymore. It's great. I had one recent setback, however, when I found a Korg Polysix in the neighbour's garbage - pristine save for a leaky CMOS battery. I didn't have the heart to see it go but I don't have the electronics skills to fix it.

After all of this, however, I'm still not too keen to let other people hear what I do. It's partly a confidence thing, but in another way I guess it's kind of like my private world and I don't really feel a strong need to send it out for criticism.

So, anyone else want to let us know what they're up to? Whether it's commercially released or, as Nick said "music made by One for an audience of One."
 
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nonightsweats

Active member
autonomicforthepeople said:
I'm just curious how many musicians we have on the boards here...So what are people making? What are you using to do it?

used to be in bands from 78-84 then stopped completely until this year when i picked up some vintage keyboards and borrowed a digital delay so that i could make improvised spacey jams with friends. i know that sounds horrible but it's was quite an enjoyable experience to interact with other players again if nothing else.
 

mms

sometimes
released some music,not very much, i'm looking forward to collaborating with people in the near future to make some more, now i'm free to fuck around a bit more.
it
 

Grievous Angel

Beast of Burden
Grievous ANgel (www.grievousangel.net)

Ragga techno, dancehall, jungle. Some of it's pretty good.

Tippa Irie got in touch about a rerub I did of him live saying how much he liked it.

Might put some records out at some stage.
 
S

simon silverdollar

Guest
hey greivous angel, i really, really liked that 'abstact 2-step' mix you did- one of my favourite records of the year, easily...
 

matt ob

Member
Currently working on a live set of techno type tracks - not yer banging one's but those of a deeper and, hopefully, twisted variety. Got more details and some older tracks for download here: http://www.randomtag.com.

Been getting more and more influenced by the sounds coming out of Croyden and beyond recently so looking forward to working on some dub step type tracks under a different pseudonym. Need to get arse into gear and try and get some of this stuff released one day.
 

kek-w

Member
Fucked-up abstract electronic-based shit as KId Shirt, sometimes with beats, sometimes not; also use owl- and train-whistles, childrens' toys, latin percussion, megaphones, anything that a non-musician can 'play'...moving away from pure electronics; it got boring.

Played (as non-musician) in 'Punk' bands in the seventies; post-punk/Dirge early-eighties; electro-pop/house/acid/industrial mid- and late-eighties. Dabbled with Techno-y/Breaks stuff Early Nineties before completely swearing off working with other people and moving into totally abstract stuff. Nearly ended up putting stuff out on Universal Language and (bizarrely) Mo-Wax...but it fell thru...story of my life...

Don't have much time to do music these days (tho' played solo live for the first time ever a couple months ago), but when I do it's a mixture of analogue kit and PC-based plug-ins, etc dumped onto 4-track, DCC tape or hard-drive as the mood takes me.
 

Grievous Angel

Beast of Burden
cheers simon, there might be more 2step mixes coming -- got a few records left over from that one, and I wanna redo the first Brixton Bass Pressure CD as well... but first a dancehall mix, probably as a collaboration...
 

Jay Vee

Member
I've released music in the past as Duermo. I'm currently composing new Duermo material, which is mainly percussion heavy, spacey dance music (think Arthur Russell with Walter Gibbons/Rhythim Is Rhythim/Gnawa) and also been having loads of fun writing some Italo Disco/Moroder/Robotnick- influenced things. My music is all electronics based in that I rarely use or record non-electronic instruments. Machine music, right?

I also play laptop in Kid Congo Powers' band, the Pink Monkey Birds.


I also work as an all 'round assistant in a small recording studio.
 

grimly fiendish

Well-known member
from 1991 to about 2001 i wrote, recorded and - very occasionally - played live as one half of a duo. synths, guitars, delays, the best effects we could create with ancient equipment ... we were, depending on when you caught us, years ahead of or behind our time. (we never got as far as putting records out, though.)

but it fell by the wayside. work, life, children (his), girlfriends, wives: these things became more important, and we lost the impetus to get the music out there, to care. it's all tony wilson's fault, actually: i met him through a mutual friend and he said, in passing, that if people didn't have a burning need to create, as opposed to just a dilettante desire, they shouldn't bother.

and that was the final push i needed to knock it on the head.
 

hamarplazt

100% No Soul Guaranteed
I've made electronic music since the mid nineties, but been too lazy to get it out. Or it's just not good enough or too strange (I prefer the latter interpretation, obviously). I know I should send out more demos, but, well, I've always had a problem with promoting myself (still, I try... right now, actually!!!). Don't really know where to send it, either.

I suppose my stuff could be described as a mixture of analogue hardcore, computer game music (the SID-station have become the by far most important instrument in my set up) and, I dont know, experimental electronics I guess. Not allways that experimental. And never truly "abstract", as I'm far to fond of riffs, grooves and melodies.

I never use a computer, and rarely any samples. Not that I have anything against completely computer made, sample based music, I just like a lot of separate machines around me. Everything is recorded live in one-takes, and as a result the tracks often get longer than they should be. I have something like 15-20 hours of recorded material on mini discs. Sometimes I play live, and then it really is live. Sometimes this is solo, sometimes in duo projects.
 

Rambler

Awanturnik
I used to have ambitions to be a classical composer. I completed around a dozen scores - mostly chamber music, but one was for string orchestra, chorus and percussion. A couple of them I'm really proud of. Only three have been publicly performed - a short choral piece when I was still in 6th form, a wind quintet from the same time, which was sight read at a workshop by the Haffner wind quintet and was easily my proudest teenage moment, and a wind/brass sextet played by Sounds Positive at a concert at the London College of Music and Media - sadly the two pieces I'm happiest about I've never heard. After a while, it became clear that I didn't have what it took to make composing a career - ideas and inspiration came easily enough, but turning them into music was very hard. I had no fluency for actual note-by-note composition, no matter how much I knew what I wanted to achieve with a piece.

The ideas still come, and if I was given a clear 6 months to compose, hassle free, I'd come up with something. The last piece I wrote opened up a load of avenues I'd love to explore - I've heard pieces of Christian Wolff since then that work in similar ways.
 

Eppy

New member
I generally spend more time making music at this point than I do doing anything else aside from working at the day job, breathing, etc. I'm currently in an indie band called The Song Corporation and a power-pop trio called Snack Shop that I just finished mixing the demo of. Song Corp has been around for a year or two now and we gig regularly around NYC. Snack Shop's just starting but will presumably be doing the same. I used to make electro in a band called Galvanized with a girl named Dahlia, but now she's in Berlin. I make quieter and/or experimental solo stuff as The Claps. I do electro stuff with no clear purpose right now and under no name. I'm possibly going to start acting as producer for a girl named Heather.
 

Jamie S

Member
(timidly puts head above parapet)

I play the guitar for a band called The Articles, who as luck would have it, are playing this Friday night at The Buffalo Bar, next to Highbury and Islington tube. It's our own night, called Farewell Meat, Hello Flesh. £3 to get in. Us, another band, some DJs playing post-punk/mutant disco type stuff. Er... come along and throw fruit.

Ignore the naff photos and check out the (recorded and mixed on the cheap) demo MP3s at www.thearticles.net
 

nick.K

gabba survivor
I Dj, make mixes, made bootlegs, soundtracks to short films, and recently discovered that I can sing along to entire albums in the car without tiring. So... er... no.. not a musician
 
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