Featured in Alltop

Featured in Alltop

Sunday 15 December 2013

Novation // Launchkey Mini Performance ft.KillTheRobot


Quite short but brilliant demo of a recent product from those nice people at Novation UK. I have several Novation pieces of kit and they're most loveable!

Tuesday 10 December 2013

"I must get one of those" - number 0

Actually; I am so not going to buy one of these!

The Heineken Scenthesizer – ‘Music Will Never Smell The Same’

Tuesday 3 December 2013

Haken Continuum Improvisation

Who says electronic instruments are necessarily mechanical and inexpressive?!

Done with the Haken Continuum fingerboard.

MIDI-Controlled Sculpture Dances In The Video For Timo Maas’ Tantra

The video for Timo Maas’ Tantra features a custom MIDI-controlled machine, built for the video. Beautiful music!

Wednesday 13 November 2013

Human At Last

Again recorded live in the studio using my Elektron boxes.



Soda Swarm

This is a rework of the track Soda Swarm that featured on a YouTube video back in the summer. Has a few extra parts in the coda as well. An improvement I think. Recorded live in the studio in the same way.



Get more music from Seen From Space on SoundCloud

Saturday 29 June 2013

Recording Bach: from the sublime to synth-porn

An odd collision came about recently between two strands of my musical life that normally don't intersect at all.




I'm a member of a couple of amateur choirs, and sometimes take part in "scratch" performances and workshops. On such a workshop I heard about the opportunity to be on a CD of a reconstruction of Bach's "St John Passion", as it would have been performed in Bach's day. The recording, to take place in Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh, was by Dunedin Consort, one of the professional groups my wife has sung and recorded with a lot in the past.

How the re-enactment of a Good Friday service in the Leipzig of 1724 was to collide with my preoccupation with electronic music, will become clear in a bit.

Tuesday 14 May 2013

Traditional music? "from today, everything is different"

While deploring all stereotypes, as we should, let's entertain a couple of fairly harmless ones for a minute.



First: the lover of traditional music - celtic folk or Dixie jazz, Chicago blues, calypso etc; and Second: the devotee of new music - urban pop, electronica, indie rock, prog-metal and so on. Obviously to separate them rigidly is artificial; many of us listen to (or even play) music from both categories.

I suspect that, if asked, many people would put lovers of classical music into the first camp. This is understandable: most well-known composers are dead after all. Some have been for centuries. Their music is far from "new", and it smacks of The Establishment more than just about any other art form. Its (professional at least) practitioners come through conservatoires and ivied halls of academe - very foreign planets to most people. How "traditional" can it get?

Well, here's my point: it ain't traditional at all.

Tuesday 9 April 2013

Synth evolution: 40 years "in search of space"

Most musicians look back on a particular moment that set the ensuing decades onto a new path for them.



Perhaps a song played on the radio, a new LP in a friend's collection, a live performance - out of the blue and always life-changing in more or less subtle ways. With me it came in a record shop in Bath when I was 15 or 16, quite young enough for new enthusiasms to arrive like steam locomotives.