Living Room Music

This one started on the actual piano. I plucked out a chord progression in F major, sitting at the real instrument, and then carried it into the studio to make it slow and distant. Thirty-two beats a minute with the grid switched off, which is slow enough that it stops being a tempo and turns into weather. Moody and introverted, and I mean that about the playing, not about me...

Thirty minutes at 170, and it started where a lot of things start around here: a bluesy riff I have been hammering for months. I am sure I have used it before. It has never once come out the same way twice, so I have stopped worrying about it.

This one drifted. It leaves the EDM pocket early on and spends a good while sounding like something else entirely — piano solo...

Thirty-two minutes in B minor, built on the digits of pi. The machine plays the sequence: a bass line walking π through B natural minor, one note held across two full measures; rootless 3-5-9 voicings landing on the and of two and squarely on four; sixteenth-note cascades climbing two octaves and falling back, the span drifting C2 to C6 and home again. Sixteen bars o...

This one started at Radio Poets rehearsal. I'd been messing with a set of chord progressions there that never quite belonged to whatever we were working on, so they came home with me and turned into the psytrance section — the progressions finally doing the work they were actually built for rather than the work the band needed. 150 in C, which is squarely where psy wants to s...

This one was a deliberate move away from the loop-puzzle. The format usually has me arranging pieces — good pieces, but pieces — and I wanted out of that for an episode. So I built a background and then played against it: long stretches of guitar, trumpet and synth laid down live over the developing bed, layer on layer, rather than dropped in as blocks. The machine kept its s...