This was a piece I created after going to a gig with a friend in late 2024 - we got chatting about atmospherics in music after seeing a solo performance by Hayden Calnin, and I was trying to emulate both that quiet, dramatic style, blended with a bit of Bon Iver........
My oldest daughter was studying Film and media studies during lockdown and had to make a silent movie in her final year. She gave me the opportunity to work on the soundtrack - she got a first for the work, with the soundtrack being commended by the tutor.......
About a thousand years ago I was chatting to a much younger colleague about house and dub music and clubbing, a world I was not and never have been familiar with, but in an attempt to win an argument I tried to demonstrate how easy it was to make that kind of music by attempting to parody a band called Swedish House Mafia. Although this was a relative failure (it proved much more difficult than I anticipated!), it was a fun experiment and this under-produced, unmastered demo was the result....
Earlier in 2025 I applied for a commission as part of the Bradford 2025 City of Culture work to devise a soundscape which related to the history of the cloth industry in Bradford - I didn't get an interview unfortunately, but this is exactly the type of work I want to do in the future, so in order to help my learning and development I went ahead and made a lo-fi unmastered short demo anyway. It features loom machinery noise, clips from an interview I did with a retired loom operator, a brass band arrangement of Nimrod from Elgar's Enigma variations, friends and family reading an AI generated poem, excerpts from the song "Bradford born and raised" by singer songwriter artist Roger Davies, and music composed by me, based around the letters "BrADForD" - I'll explain more about this in a future blog post.
In the early 2000's I made two albums of spoken word and ambient music with a Christian community based in Manchester called "Maranatha" - this is one of the pieces from the first album, called "Shalom", with me playing my composition on keyboards and flute.......