Clean Machines of the Betwixt and Between

H.O.T.T.D.[Song For Midsummer's Day]

2009-06-24T17:15:00.006+01:00

Gosh... so that's it. A whole year spent making one song or piece a week, and posting them up here, on Clean Machines Of The Betwixt And Between, has passed... feels quite strange really! And to end on Midsummer's Day too, what a bonus... so I had to mention it somewhere in this week's song title, didn't I listeners? Oh, and I like the fact that I managed to rhyme "Elizabeth Wurtzel" with "My head it still hurts..."!

Yes... and it's my birthday tomorrow, and I'm really pleased that I managed to keep making this much music! I'd recommend it to anyone, really... the music that I've made for this blog has fed back into the music I make with other people, and I've learnt to work faster and more productively, and, most importantly, to not care too much about any ideal of perfection... just to show up and start putting music onto my trusty MacBook, and trusting that something, somehow, will take shape, and then, at the end of the evening, a new song or group of sounds will have been brought into being, and I like that, and it's what keeps me going, music and love, and making stuff, and the world is good. Yes!

STEPHEN A WOOD;

LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE 2009.

It Was Twenty Three Years Ago Today...

2009-06-17T23:06:00.002+01:00

...Yes, historical curio time, listeners! It was indeed 23 years ago, one fine day around this time of year, mid to late June, that I did my first gig! We were called Television Head at the time (we changed our name to Attic Head for our next gig the following autumn, and the rest is, erm, history...), and we played the Herculaneum Room, on the Carnatic halls-of-residence site, in Mossley Hill, Liverpool 18... "C86 Explosion" indeed!

Television Head were Elizabeth Ford, Mark Saberton, Simon Jenkins and myself... and we were joined later in our set, for a riotous and unusual version of "Purple Haze" by David "Thomsett" Palmer, and Daniel Overton... (I'm still in contact with almost everyone, but Simon and Dan, if you ever read this, get in touch...!)

This is one of the first songs I ever wrote, called "Looking Down", and its quite surprising, and a little strange, listening to it again after all this time... makes me think of the passage of time, and how I felt that sunny June afternoon, chain-smoking with all my bandmates 'cos we were sooo nervous, and how I felt about the future then, and all that kind of stuff... which is kind of apt now, too, as a whole year of blog posts is almost up; next week is my birthday, and I started this blog on my birthday last year, so that means 52 pieces of music have been freed from my head, and released out there, into the world... all very strange, and actually a bit emotional too...! Just one more post to go, then, who knows?...!

N>T>T-N>T>P [Neither The Time Nor The Place...]

2009-06-10T23:30:00.003+01:00

This rhyme just popped into my head yesterday teatime, I recorded it to Dictaphone 'cos I knew I'd forget it otherwise, but it was quite odd; why would the words and meter of the song occur to me there and then, with lines like 'When they get the gack in, then I really feel like yakking"?!

Oh well, that's the Clean Machines for you I suppose... this track also features the debut appearance of a plastic green and purple pull-flute, free this week with "Peppa Pig" magazine, listeners - get them while they're hot!

The Road To Spondon Town

2009-06-03T23:42:00.002+01:00

Well, I was doing Vocoder Vocals, for "Dusseldorf Airport", to prepare for tomorrow's Funsize Lions gig at The Lexington, and this happened, a little electronic folk song, to be sung by a robot with its finger in its ear, in the middle of a Campaign For Real Oil pub, sometime in the next hundred years.... Spondon is in Derbyshire; I remember my Dad asking for directions, about twenty years ago, and the lad in the petrol station said, "... take the road to Spondon"... the phrase, and name, stuck with me for years, so here, courtesy of Clean Machines Of The Betwixt And Between, is the end result...!

CCS 1:23

2009-05-27T20:17:00.004+01:00

This is very loud and kind of stupid, so Please Please Please TURN THE VOLUME DOWN BEFORE PLAYING!!!.... Don't know how it got quite so loud really, but I realised by the time I posted it that my tinnitus was even more pronounced than usual... this was going to be a quiet folky piece! Just goes to show how easily sonic mutations can arise; even with the simplest of intentions, you just have to go where the music goes that day, I suppose...

Oh yes, and remember to turn the volume down, listeners... did I say that already? Pardon? ... oh dear....

Auspicious Pictures Of Land & Sea

2009-05-20T20:20:00.001+01:00

Codex From A Splintered Carnival

2009-05-13T20:41:00.002+01:00

Another attempt to do a Terry Riley rip-off has gone all skew-whiff again! This doesn't really sound like him at all, unless it's the sound of him lost in a labyrinthine souk with only a Yamaha PS100 for company... the clicking sound you may hear every now and then is the sound of my fingers on the keys - there's no audio output on a PS100, so had to stick it in front of my Macbook and record it through the built-in Mac mic... busking it or what?! Yup...

The Ice Cream On Super8 Scene...

2009-05-06T19:11:00.002+01:00

Skronk & Skree

2009-04-30T00:03:00.002+01:00

Look! I actually missed my deadline, by about three minutes! This piece is a bit rubbish, and its WAY TOO LOUD!!! so please TURN THIS DOWN BEFORE PRESSING PLAY, if you dare to check this out... I know that I won't be, too often.... if I've learnt one thing this evening, its that you shouldn't drink vodka to try to get in the mood, or the zone, or whatever you want to call it... I started doing something else entirely, but then got befuddled, and ended up taking 23 seconds of random guitar skronk and skree, and trying to transform it in Remix.... I realise now, why I've always drank afterwards, when the piece of music or song is posted up here, and done and dusted... normal service resumed next week I hope!

At least I've got the whole noise thing out of my system... I realise why I've never been in a noise band, its 'cos I like melodies too much to give 'em up!

The Meridian

2009-04-22T23:58:00.002+01:00

Phew! Only just made my midnight deadline tonight, listeners!

Funsize Lions, in "A Mystery Cover Version"!

2009-04-15T23:23:00.002+01:00

Yes, it is indeed a cover version, by Funsize Lions! All will be revealed next week... It's a version of a certain song, by a certain band, with singing on it by none other than the fabulous China Carolina, and with Casio VA10-put-through-the-magickal-Remix-blender by Stephen A Wood, who may or may not be me, of course...

It's been recorded for a project that our friend Trev is doing, but yes, more details next week, as no one else has heard this yet, so I am posting it here for China, to hear for the very first time since she came over to our house to record the vocals, and to eat mushroom pasties and drink wine, which was a couple of months ago now... and of course, you all get to hear it too! So that's good, yes? Yes!

Out Of My Memory...

2009-04-08T18:26:00.002+01:00

Oh dear... a bit ragged, this one, I'm afraid... it kind of falls apart in bits here and there, then all the pieces kind of rally round and reassemble themselves for a while, but bear with it, please; also, it starts with an unintentional 10-second silence, so please don't push the volume up, thinking nothing is happening, 'cos it does, but just after ten seconds...

On Finding The Way Back Down

2009-04-01T22:27:00.001+01:00

From The Gathering...

2009-03-26T11:52:00.002Z

The first track of the last quarter of this year's worth of posts! Who knows where the time goes, as Sandy once sang... and talking of time, which we were, you will have noticed that this piece has only just been posted, today, which is Thursday, not Wednesday as usual; however, the sounds were actually recorded yesterday, so I think it still counts... this piece is actually five three-minute overlaid fragments recorded at The Gathering, in Old St.Pancras Church, last night. The Gathering meets every Wednesday night to improvise, and fun sounds always ensue...

I was "playing" my trusty old Doctor Sample, (the ones with the big buttons that light up, like Add N to (X) used to play on stage) going through my Microcube, with my Dictaphone perched on top. The bits I am doing are the ring-mod sounds, and the squawking gutteral vocal sounds that are foremost in the mix, also a bit of tremolo and phaser segments of different mouth noises - the batteries in the sampler gave out after about ten minutes, so I had to abandon my original plan of live sampling all the improv madness around me, which I did for a while, and instead just used the sampler as a microphone instead, making noises into the built-in mic until all power failed and I drank a can of beer, then went to the Skinner's Arms with Dan and Amy!

The Deliberation

2009-03-18T20:44:00.001Z

Hello Smiler!

2009-03-11T17:05:00.001Z

Crazy Nights, by Spinmaster Plantpot [Funsize Lions Remix]

2009-03-04T21:28:00.003Z

First of all, warning: Please Please Please, be very careful when listening to this on headphones!!!

Because it's really very loud! You probably won't believe this, but I've actually halved the volume, halved it again, and then taken the level right down again! I don't understand how I ever came to record something this loud (something to do with compression maybe?), but kind of wish I knew how to do it again... the original loud version was actually louder than every other track on my iTunes, maybe it wouldn't be as loud as the controversially loudest-ever Metallica album, but just about... anyway, yes, look out for your eardrums...

Secondly, this isn't actually a new track, its a remix, by me, of an original acapella recording by my friend Spinmaster Plantpot (hello Paul!), from a couple of years ago now (if you ever get the chance to go and see him, do it, he's great!)... I basically mangled the track up, and added drums and a "solo", so yes, not a new song, but this week has been so busy again, that I thought I would post this up anyway; it's one of my fave tracks of mine, and I thought it deserved a wider hearing, recreating as it does the feel of a quite full-on night out/in, so yes, hope you enjoy it!

The Psychedelic Situation

2009-02-25T21:16:00.001Z

A Lost Chord?

2009-02-18T22:08:00.002Z

Well, of course, not really a lost chord, because it's here, maybe for ever now, who knows... and really its three chords all on top of each other, but basically one very big drone in the key of B... or maybe you think it has more of an E feel. Again, its not really a song, but time was tight this week, 'cos I've spent three days sawing and drilling and banging bits of wood together, to make a shelf/rack for my guitars, so now they are all hanging out together in the corner, between two bookcases, so I thought I'd do this drone-chord in the tiny fragment of time I have this evening. I've been thinking about the lost chord all week, maybe next week I'll start thinking about the last chord; there's a theory out there (okay, I read it in a Sonic Youth interview once, I admit it) that one day, all the sound ever produced in the history of time will come back to Earth in one great big aural tidal wave, and destroy us and the universe and everything, so that huge sonic rush really could be the last chord ever!

Anyway, each time I've listened to this chord tonight, I've heard a new bit of melody emerging, it really is very strange; so if I haven't managed to locate the lost chord, at least I may have found a lost melody or two...

The White Angel Breadline

2009-02-11T19:20:00.001Z

Runcorn Bridge Song

2009-02-04T17:41:00.002Z

Okay, so first of all I have to admit this isn't a new track, but one recorded in July 2007 by my old friend Ed Knight, who also plays bass and discreet keys on it, and who now lives in Canada (hello Ed and Mavis!) I play Ed's Godin guitar, which sounds slinky and sweet...

Runcorn Bridge spans the Mersey, between Runcorn station and Lime Street, and if you look out of the window as you cross towards Liverpool (and you should always do), the sunlight and dramatic view of the river seem to strobe on and off as the metal uprights and railings of the bridge flicker by.

I wrote this song as a tribute to this great bridge, which always serves as an appropriately grand landmark to tell you you're fast approaching one of the most magical cities in Britain...

Try New Alkaline Special!

2009-01-28T17:36:00.001Z

A Room In The Palace

2009-01-21T17:51:00.002Z

Okay... so this afternoon, I sat down on the stairs with my Spanish guitar and started to play something into my Dictaphone... I was trying to record something else completely, a more-or-less finished instrumental, when all of a sudden, I found myself playing this instead! My fingers started to form the shapes, and, before I knew it, I was recording a piece of music as it unfolded right before my very ears!

So I captured the whole thing on tape (which is why this is so loud, but also so hissy...) and took out a piece in the middle, put it into Pro Tools (LE, from the year 2000! One of the best pieces of legal free music software ever!) and messed around a bit with reversing little tiny bits of it... then I saw a piece of paper on my wall, which provided the title - it seems to fit the music somehow I think, and that was that, done and dusted, and all in time for tea on a Wednesday afternoon...

Four Finger Future Finder

2009-01-14T17:38:00.005Z

Gosh... Week 30, or 31 depending on how you count it, and this; a spangly, disco-ish track, that motors along and probably ends too soon, now I come to listen to it again, but there you go, and I got to include a descending psych guitar-style riff as a bassline, one that I've wanted to use for ages - I've only ever managed to sneak it onto one other recording before, on "Dr McCoy" by Ricky Spontane, and that was on guitar - here it's on a Reason synth patch instead, which I hurriedly titled "Jean-Michel Jarre Synth" at the time, though of course on listening back just sounds like a giant yawping disco-psych Vocoder... a bit like speeding towards the dancefloor down an endless corridor with bright white lights set into the flooring... which is exactly what a Clean Machine Of The Betwixt And Between should always do, of course.

Torn Negatives

2009-01-07T20:13:00.000Z

Archaeopteryx Skyline

2008-12-31T16:05:00.002Z

I've always liked that bit in Fear And Loathing..., where HST writes about how (if my memory serves me correctly) they're just out of Barstow when the drugs take hold, and then the sky seems to fill with bats... this song goes one further, and imagines the skyline teeming with Archaeopteryx, the first dinosaur bird... its also very loud, and probably the punkiest most primitive thing posted so far on this blog, so watch your ears, and Happy New Year 2009!

Snowflakes Falling On The International Dateline

2008-12-24T00:12:00.003Z

You will have spotted that I've nicked the title of this piece from Lester Bangs's 1971 Creem essay on the Count Five; "Snowflakes Falling On The International Dateline" being the title of their fictitious 5th LP, but hey, it fits the mood of this song, and I wanted to do something Christmassy and with a slow-motion-film-of-snowflakes feel, and with voices that sound like bells, or vice versa, so here it is! And Merry Christmas to all my friends out there, and a Happy New Year! And thanks for listening to my music, and sticking with it so long - this post today means I've been posting now for six whole months, so this is the halfway point, it feels good to have made it this far!

One Pink Sock

2008-12-17T18:12:00.003Z

This is the shortest track I've posted so far, clocking in at about 4o seconds, but it's short and sweet, and to the point I think. It sounds a bit like those folky guitar pieces that pop up on things like "Tomorrow Come Someday", or lots of other late sixties/early seventies British films/kid's TV; maybe a little mysterious, and slightly nostalgic - it makes me feel nostalgic anyway. I shall dedicate this track to Oliver Postgate, because the programmes he made were a big part of my childhood, and now he is gone. But not forgotten...

The Mournful Sea Fort

2008-12-10T22:49:00.001Z

C-86 Explosion!

2008-12-03T20:19:00.001Z

Mystery Track (Until Next Week, Maybe?)

2008-11-26T22:23:00.005Z

How did it get this late tonight? Not sure where the last three or four hours have gone, except that I was messing around with these chords which will become a song soon, but for now are, I hereby declare, A Work In Progress. I just ran out of time tonight. I woke up this morning at 3.55, and couldn't get to sleep, and the words for this song just started pouring out. I knew that if I fell back asleep, I'd forget them, so I had no choice but to get up and start writing it all down. So yes, now I have many words, but no real order for them to appear in this song... yet. Only two other people may possibly have an idea of what the real title for this song is, and they're Talya and Boz. Oh, and I didn't mean for this to suddenly become a Mary Chain-ish sounding piece of music, but that's quite apt really, given the subject matter of the lyrics; a celebrated summer, twenty two years ago now...

On Leaving The City

2008-11-19T22:36:00.006Z

So... I wanted to do a kind of motorik Harmonia/Neu! rip-off (again...!), with that feeling of motion and high speed travel, and that Michael Rother-style high drone-needle guitar. So I did! Then, still on the theme of travel, I remembered that I got sent an email from Holland News (I subscribed to their newsletter in the hope that they would send me their brochure from the year before, that Sanna Annukka had illustrated). This email was kind of strange, because it was an article on Utrecht, but written in the first person - "I Am Utrecht", and listing all Utrecht's attributes, "Residents, visitors, students, artists and business people, I have room enough for them all to develop their creativity and extend their horizons... here with me you can find your direction and go your own way, for I am venerable and have grown wiser with time."(!)

Well, I thought this was brilliant, and knew that it had to be used in a piece, somehow, so I'm using extracts of it here, as read by an old school version of Kathy, the voice on my old G4...

My Wife, Before I Met Her

2008-11-12T22:36:00.002Z

Hot off the presses! And a track actually featuring real other people playing on it! This is a song I wrote for Ricky Spontane to do, and which we still do when we play live... soon there will be a "proper" recorded version of this, all mixed and ready to go, but for now, or rather this week's posting, here's a version we did while practicing this afternoon, and recorded in one take, on one track, into Garageband.

The sound quality's very lo-fi (of course!) but it has a certain rough-and-ready charm to it, and features Boz on bass, and Talya on DD9 drums, and the neighing noise at the end.

I wrote the song after I'd watched a film about Jackson Pollock, so it isn't really about me at all, but then again, it isn't about Jackson Pollock either, so there you go; the words just kind of wrote themselves, and formed an orderly queue...

Licence To Crenellate - From Embrasure To Merlon And Back Again...

2008-11-05T17:16:00.005Z

First off, I must confess, this isn't actually a new track. Secondly, it did take longer than a week to compose/arrange/record, but I'm feeling too sleep-deprived and discombobulated today to do a new thing, then I listened to this piece which I'd done a little while ago, and thought that it deserved releasing, for anyone to hear if they wanted, and I did think of a new name for it, even if it is a bit silly, so there you go... and actually, the name is quite apt, when I come to think of it, seeing as it conjures up images (to me at least) of castles and battles and suchlike. And also it serves as a good musical accompaniment to all the fireworks that are exploding non-stop outside our house tonight...

The piece is divided into little bits, (I hesitate to call them 'movements'), which are as follows:

1. Fanfare/fighting in the surf.

2. Aftermath: out on the shoreline at dusk.

3. Swooping and soaring: over the battlements.

See you all next week, with a new piece of music, and hopefully a renewed me, fighting-fit and champing at the bit!

Theme From Conquistador

2008-10-29T17:06:00.004Z

This is more of a work in progress than anything previously posted here, kind of a snapshot of a bit of music halfway on the way to something else, but the way it sounded today, when I added the Casio VA10 aeroplane noise to the fuzz guitars and backing, struck me as a sweet shredding sound, so here it is, in all its one minute and two seconds glory!

I've been getting ready to DJ at my friend Lucienne's event at the IKON Eastside in Birmingham, and so I've been going through my entire vinyl collection looking for stuff to play - so I've been listening to a lot of Davie Allen and the Arrows stuff, particularly "Cycle-Delic", which has the same "Are those trumpets, or a massed swarm of fuzz guitars?"-type feel to it as this piece does; it gallops along and is over before it begins, almost, which I like, this week at least...

Count Ten Bridges

2008-10-22T20:15:00.001+01:00

The Night We All Drove Down To Freshfields In Angus' Van And Got Really Freaked-Out On The Beach...

2008-10-15T17:35:00.003+01:00

Little Fake Pockets

2008-10-08T18:32:00.003+01:00

Years and years (and years!) ago now, I remember crashing out at the then home of David "Tinrose""Thomsett" Palmer. He had taped Sonic Youth's "Evol" from the original vinyl, and we were listening to it in a state of some disarray, rather the worse for wear. While taping the record, he'd forgotten to pick up the needle from the record, and so had taped about 10 minutes of the locked-groove ending of the last chord of "Expressway To Yr Skull". The sound struck me, with its own peculiar chiming, cyclical tone - I couldn't work out whether it was my imagination, or whether there really were slight variations as each repetition sounded, and the memory stuck with me.

This piece of music has turned out a bit like how I remember that sound; it also sounds like the sound of the early evening, when you've accidentally fallen asleep after work, to find that its now gone dark, and you feel slightly removed from reality, so all you can do is wander around the house for a while, then go to the window, and, on finding the nearest tree, look at it as it moves to and fro in the breeze...

Why Are You Crying?

2008-09-26T20:55:00.004+01:00

Week 14, and yes, this is a very early post, 'cos I know I'll be away from internet access and my MacBook this coming Wednesday, so here is another piece (don't know if you'd call it a "song" as such, but there you go...), the title came to me as the notes appeared. I actually recorded this earlier this year, before I started this blog, thinking at some point I'd re-record it for Clean Machines O.T.B.&.B., but then I decided to just post the original, straight, just as it came out of the guitar (or was it my little electric sitar? Can't remember now!), my eBow and my MicroCube, that afternoon in mid-April.

It kind of sounds tortuous and sad and squeaky, I imagined a little squeaky furry creature asking a slightly larger one what the matter was, and the melody suggested the words of the title.

Oh, and this is quite loud, somehow, so please watch out for your ears, boys and girls, and keep the volume low! And try not to listen to this on headphones please! Thank you, and see you all soon!

Open Your Eyes, Bridie White

2008-09-24T21:09:00.002+01:00

I used to read those lists of rare records in psych-collector catalogues, and one sub-sub-genre that kept on cropping up in the descriptions of these "$300 psych monsters" was "real stoned-loner vibe", or even "stoned-loser vibe"(!) Imagine recording a private press album 35 years ago, only to find that (a) your record, which you probably couldn't get rid of at the time, is now fetching up to three or four hundred dollars on the collector's market, and (b) your name is destined for all eternity to be linked with the epithet "stoned loser/loner"!

Well, I recorded this song tonight, and its come out with that real stoned-loner vibe to it - lots of reverb, one nylon string guitar coming double tracked, wobbly vocals and a middle eight that doesn't really know what to do with itself, plus an abrupt ending... and yet again, I really didn't mean for this song to come out sounding like this, but I was running out of time and so here it is!

And in case you were wondering, Bridie White is the role that Hayley Mills plays, in "Whistle Down The Wind", the name just fitted the chorus melody, and soon I will write some more verses - I thought of another today, but left it in another room and so decided just to wing it - this is Clean Machines Of The Betwixt and Between, after all, and "winging it" is the secret to our sound! Yup.

Trig Point Rag

2008-09-17T23:34:00.001+01:00

One Trillionth Of A Second Too Late

2008-09-10T20:13:00.002+01:00

My contribution to celebrating Big Bang Day! This song is for two particles who miss each other by the tiniest fraction of a second while careering in opposite directions around a 27km looped tunnel, 100m underground in Geneva. It actually did have words (well, one verse's worth anyway), but I'm too full of cold, with a muzzy head and muzzier voice to match, so it shall remain an instrumental for now - but yes, have a good week everybody and get consuming lots of Vitamin C! Cheers!

The One O'Clock City

2008-09-03T21:24:00.003+01:00

Yet more psychedelically sensory overload this week, after the calm soothing tones of last week's offering! Again, I didn't plan for this to sound like Silver Apples locked in a small room with The Byrds playing "Mind Gardens", it just came out that way! Watch out for your ears though, boys and girls, the sitar sound is kind of sharp and needly... I need to give my ears a rest for a while I think, maybe the next song here will be played on a marshmallow, although I've been reminded how much I like playing my Jerry Jones Baby Sitar this week, its a sweet little brown and white bit of wood and it sounds soooo nice!

Spaced-Out Day

2008-08-27T21:56:00.003+01:00

This one's quite minimal really, just voice, and "bass" and "drums" (Groovebox really), and "organ" (Casio DG-20!) and it makes me realise that I have lots to learn about recording levels and compression, and finding out why mixes go so unpredictably whoompy sometimes. The whoomphiest sound around can be heard on the theme from the "Young Doctors", as played by The Executives (who also did the amazing femme-vox psych-pswirly "Moving In a Circle...), but 'Spaced-Out Day' comes quite close - I thought I was just making the bass as deep as possible - oh well, no time to fix it, 'cos I have to post this tonight, of course, so here it is, the sound of Week 9, a tender comedown ballad after last week's psychedelic mayhem, and maybe, just maybe, I'll read about the proper use of compression in time for next week. Until then, have fun and be nice to everyone!

Cherry-Eyed Girl Of The Mutant Lowlands

2008-08-20T14:19:00.004+01:00

I was wondering what to call this track, and decided to sleep on it; in the early hours of this morning, a title popped into my head which I later realised I'd thought of as being a good name for a song when I was in school (think I was reading 'The Chrysalids' at the time, hence the mutant bit of the title). I must've written it down in an exercise book, and somehow filed it away in the back of my mind too... which proves that this blog really is a good way of clearing out the old cluttered shed of my memory if all kinds of titles, as well as melodies, from years ago are suddenly coming to light. This track seems to have some of the drift of that Harmonia Live 1974 album, but with added Keiji Haino & Sitaar Tah! elements... and there's one little fragment that sounds like Cale's viola near the end of "Heroin"; basically a big accidental yammering psychedelic sprawl. Just shows what you can do with a groovebox, two backwards guitar tracks and an EBow! Oh, and three big cups of tea in as many hours...

Maisie

2008-08-13T22:53:00.004+01:00

Again, I had no idea how this one would turn out... I thought I was making an acid house track! So I made a few loops, from my old Yamaha DD-9, and added a few bits of MC303 Groovebox bass-notes (both my Grooveboxes are starting to get tetchy in their old age, spewing out error messages and mangling notes and sounds with stuff that was already recorded on them.... very strange); anyway yes, no acid house here then, more of a strange lo-fi space-toybox plastic psych feel to this one - sort of how I imagined The Legendary Pink Dots sounded, before I ever got to hear them, and featuring a tinny tiny faux-Arabic guitar solo, recorded on our dining-tabletop this windy and autumnal London evening. Yes!

The Sally-Anne Motorcade

2008-08-07T22:49:00.004+01:00

So yes, a day late... but then again, I was on holiday, and I was trying to post something before I left on Tuesday, but ran into many technical difficulties, so erm, here is Week 6, and "The Sally-Anne Motorcade", an old song really, from last year, and the usual lo-fi roughness that you may well have come to expect from this blog, but its kind of a rushy song, it just breezes along, and is one of the only recordings I've done that features my little brown electric sitar (rather than the big yellow one, and it sounds sort of like a normal electric guitar anyway, but we'll gloss over that...), and I wanted to post something up before midnight tonight, so at least its only one day late, and not two.... I think I may turn the aforementioned technical difficulties into bits of songs soon, but who knows what song might need clearing out of my brain and get launched into the electric ether next? Usually this is the bit where I say something like "See you in seven days", but this time it's the first I'll be saying "See you in six" instead, so yes, until then, take care, and goodbye for now.

The Ancient Slate Pendant

2008-07-30T18:19:00.001+01:00

No More Music (Clean Machines ID Jingle)

2008-07-23T14:55:00.003+01:00

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.

The Last Wave

2008-07-16T23:22:00.002+01:00

And after what I said last week, about not leaving things to the very last minute, here's an even later-posted song, uploaded with only about 30 minutes to spare.... and it's the lowest-fi song yet, the piano sounds like it was recorded in the Langley School Project's gym, and overall its very very quiet, so yes, there's about a hundred things I'd like to change about this song, but that's for another day; the main thing is that this song actually got out of my brain and into the electric ether.... and it changed lots on the way - the way it sounded in my head was like Neu! or something, very motorik and octave-y, but then I lost about five hours work on the "tasteful" version yesterday, and had to do this instead, which definitely isn't tasteful, but there you go.

My next song probably won't be done in Reason, I think I need to give my ears a break. Recording bass sounds through Scream 4 units, going through headphones at 1.30 in the morning gives you a nasty hissing sound when you wake up! So yes, something quieter next time I hope, but then again, who knows, with the Clean Machines of the Betwixt and Between.... see you in seven days!

From An U-Bahn Escalator

2008-07-09T22:27:00.006+01:00

Okay, so this is Week 2, and one thing I should remember from now on: if you're going to do a song a week for a year, don't wait until Wednesday comes around before starting it from scratch!

But yes, here is "From An U-Bahn Escalator", which I have written for Funsize Lions (Two chords and a Moog - the most perfect pop-op electro sound around!) to sing - I'm not entirely sure what the lyrics mean (yet), but they seem to describe a strange and mysterious disappearance, sometime late one summer. Yes...

First Week!

2008-07-02T13:35:00.002+01:00

So now I've done my first track! I'd just finished it, and was wondering what to call it, then I realised the name of this blog would be perfect for it, because it sounds like the music is being made, and sung, wordlessly, by the Clean Machines of the Betwixt and Between...

I hereby name this track the Official Theme Tune of this 7-days-old blog!

There, its done...

2008-06-25T19:48:00.000+01:00

So yes, as from today, every week, I'll endeavour to post a piece of music, that I've written in the past seven days; if I do this for a year, then that's 52 bits of music appearing, 52 bits that would otherwise stayed trapped in my head and subjected to endless revisions but never actualised...

As Andy Partridge once (kind of) said, if you leave things too long on the back burner, they get ruined and you can't do anything with them, so this is a preventative measure... my way of pottering round and clearing out the musical shed of my brain, of using all the half-finished bits-and-bobs, and whatever new morsels that occur to me, before they all splurge together in one undifferentiated mass... see you in seven days!