No More Music (Clean Machines ID Jingle)

There's no more music that you want

There's no more music that you need

There's no more music that you should hear

Except the music made by the...

Clean Machines of the Betwixt and Between

This is a song that popped into my head last autumn, walking down the Euston Road. I got worried that I'd forget the song by the time I got home, so spent about £1.50 in a phonebox ringing my mobile up and singing it into my voicemail! As the title suggests, this song was meant to be a snappy jingle, but of course it didn't turn out the way I thought it would when I started work on it...

One of the purposes of starting this blog, apart from clearing out songs from my brain, was to make use of music equipment/software that I'd bought and hardly ever used, so I thought I'd have a go making a song entirely out of snippets of my vocals, put through a BV512 Vocoder in Reason (and yes, I know I said I wouldn't use Reason again for a bit, but there you go... )

And then I put all the chopped-up bits into Steinberg Remix, (a severely stripped-down version of Ableton Live), which was available for a tiny while, about 6 years ago, and which you can buy brand-new for about a fiver on Ebay nowadays. I like it because its pretty intuitive, and its default colour is orange. It has the smallest operating manual ever, almost, and you can start making noise on it within about five minutes of installing it, which is my kind of software...

The result is sort of spooky, and not snappy at all, it kind of disturbs me. I'm thinking its maybe influenced by us going to see The Last Silent Movie, by Susan Hiller, this weekend, which features field recording snippets of extinct, and nearly extinct languages from around the world, and which made us wonder, thinking about how lonely the last surviving speaker of a language would feel, knowing that their language would die along with them, and having no one to speak to, so yes; spooky, loopy, vocodered and gloopy, is obviously the way to go this week.