In a few weeks, my good friend Damian is putting on a play he wrote and produced. I encourage you to checkout twintowersplay.com and go see it if you’re in the New York City area. I certainly will.

He needed some background music for a night club scene, specifically a bondage/BDSM club. His request was “German Techno”, which to Damian and me is a very specific sound that we discovered back in high school. He some really great mix CDs from Club Tresor in Berlin. I was more of a NYC techno fiend.

The main result of this Memorial Day weekend was my new track: Kink. Damian was looking for a harsh and dark sound, and I think I nailed it. It’s a banger and it gets a decent groove going for the last minute.

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Alright, well I’ve done it again. I started this tune over the weekend. I downloaded a new “refill” for my music software which contains new instruments or “patches.” One of them, what is both the stabby / pulsing bass and lead, really had me playing around and I ended up with this. At some point I decided to double up the lead and bass with the piano, then started cutting back and forth between them, and then eventually ended up with 4 distinct voices. It is also my first time using any sort of drum loop, which ended up being the ultra-light percussion running through the majority (not the boom-tick-tick, boom-boom-tick-tick).

I really like this one. I spent most of my time at work today listening to the near final mix. Somehow I’m still not tired of it, so that means it’s a winner! Enjoy it. And thanks to Stompp and eXode for all of their fantastic refills!! They’ve been continual sources of inspiration.

Alright, here’s my latest tune, Trisarje, and I’m very happy with it how it has turned out. I jotted down the first four bars of the chord progression before Thanksgiving but left it alone. Then just before the new year I picked it up again, added a second part to the progression, the main “lead” melody, dynamics, mixing, and all the rest. Even so, it is still a fairly simple song in it’s structure and voicing (only four).

But I like it. I always enjoy when a song continually taps something emotional, which is almost always by way of the melody for me. And in this case it is something about the unexpected progression shift in the last eight “wrap-up” bars that really does it. I also dig how the final note decay has an open filter sweep on it. But enough about how much I’m into my own music, yikes!

You may notice a similarity in the sounds to my previous song, Vroidan, and that is indeed so, I’m using the same main instruments for the bass and arpeggio. But beyond that I think the similarities quickly fade away. Maybe now I can get some traction on some other songs that have I’ve been unable to finish up.

Well, here’s my latest creation, Vroidan. I really fell in love with this melody during the past few weeks. It started out much simpler, and probably deserves a complementing but secondary melody to really develop the track. But oh well, this is how it turned out. As is the case with most of my music, headphones will reveal a bunch of background detail. But listening via speakers should also be reasonable.

I’m continually amazed at how I can never seem to finish some songs, yet others only take a few hours. This would fall into the latter category, I just started it yesterday.

Drem is a cute little village outside of Edinburgh, and is even closer to Gullane where I spent a number of summers as a kid. I always liked the place, and the name. Why on earth the name came to mind while writing this I have no idea, but I like it.