Rock music, only in the granite sense
Posted by: ryno in Brian Eno, MIDI, Photography, composing, creative commons, giveaway, keyboards, mp3, music, musical instrumentsDownloadable mp3 stuff under Creative Commons included.
Around the end of 1988, I kind of lost it…
… “it” had been getting more consistently lost as I failed to deal with the dual strains of Horrid Woman’s increased nastiness (let’s just say my doctor insisted I go to the police once he’d patched me up) and the weight of lifting the lid on the tin of marine worms that was my job1.
Eventually I wound up blowing my retirement money on an ill-advised farming venture in the Snowy Mountains.
I won’t dwell on the business, the people and what ho, during this post. There were a number of positive factors, like Maggie, the orphan magpie.
Maggie was allegedly killed by a TERRIFIED policeman: she always loved to swoop and land on our shoulders.
The country is beautiful too.
The red tree was hollow, and you could hear little birds singing inside the trunk
To stand on this hill in the wind, arms outstretched and eyes closed, is to almost fly
And that’s where the music kicks in. “In The Wind” is about that feeling. Because it’s quite long and there is still a cost in “free” downloading, I made an edited version (still 7Mb in size), as well as offering the complete piece (33Mb) for those who like long, boring ambiences to help them fall asleep.
Way back here I went into detail (probably unnecessarily deep detail, as is often my wont) about composing pieces where harmonically-compatible items of differing lengths are allowed to repeat alongside each other, producing different patterns of coincidence3.
This piece was composed in the same manner. I hope you enjoy it.
TFF™0
0 Those Fornicating Footnotes™.
1 Lid being lifted, it took over a year to get anybody who would act to peer into the mess. By the time Bums Were Kicked2, I was already long gone.
2 Mostly the wrong bums, of course, and one of the most guilty was Punished By Promotion: this actually succeeded to some degree by removing access to, shall we say, peripheral incentives.
3 Brian Eno, discoverer of this technique, describes it best. More here and here.

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February 21st, 2008 at 11:29 pm
aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh. Soul country. It’s supposed to be HOT here tomorrow, let’s chuck it all in and move south!
February 21st, 2008 at 11:57 pm
I’ve copped temperatures well over the old Fahrenheit 100 mark down there too, darling. (Not to mention the house I lived in for a while where straight-off-the-snowfields wind would blast between the sizable cracks in the floor boards STRAIGHT UP MY TOWEL in the morning!)
Now if only I could come up with a spare million or two, we could dig in amongst that granite for an underground house.
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:15 am
I love underground houses! they’re one of two of the types of houses I’d consider building. The other is straw bale.
I don’t think those are boring at all! I like listening to the (very subtle) changes!
My sleep music can’t bore me or I won’t fall asleep. I must be weird like that. The same goes for if I have the tv on. It has to be a movie or something that I find interesting.
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:58 am
There’s fuel for a few epic-length raves in your comment.
1 - Yep, two of my fave house styles there - the third being wood-frame barn style. (Seeing as we’re in the same TV broadcast zone, I’ll bung in a mad prop for ABC-1 “Grand Designs” at 6pm on Thursdays. http://www.channel4.com/4homes/ontv/grand-designs/ - and it seems that episode 6.1 (not aired here yet) is an underground house!
2 - New Scientist magazine (which we buy when we can afford it) is a music special issue this week (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726441.200-music-special-the-roots-of-music.html)
There’s an online special too - http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/dn13355-music-special-five-great-auditory-illusions-.html- in which you can hear examples of some of the musical illusions. The ones on phantom words and phantom melodies are interesting: it may explain the charm I find in Philip Glass and Steve Reich works, and some of what I like in my pieces of odd-length repetitions.
[Rest of rant saved for future doctoral dissertation (Just kidding!)]
February 24th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Ooo thankyou! I’m an ABC lover from way back. Will watch for the show.
Thanks for the reading fodder!