I have various musical projects: as a solo artist that masquerades as a band (Shiny Tram); as a duo with my mate, Tim (Workhouse Disko); as a stand up / pub gig comedian with another chum, Will. (Emergency Biscuit).
The Workhouse Disko stuff will be posted as soon as the latest batch of stuff is ready.
Here’s a Shiny Tram song, ‘Swimming She Says’ – sorry about Soundcloud’s deliberately annoying ads. There are other songs there, if you can be bothered.
Older instrumental music – most of these were longer pieces cut down to a minute or two.
Tyninghame Beach ~ like many of these, this was sampled, resampled, then stripped back.
You Don’t Have to Speak ~ this was difficult to edit down, so is one of the longer pieces here.
Rothko Chapel ~when making this I thought of Rothko’s huge paintings, their simple elements, so I used big slabs of sounds and tried to keep the structure very simple.
Black Mountain ~ this uses a variety of techniques and is more conventionally structured.
Rain 70 ~ not so much a wall of sound as a curtain of rain.
4024 ~ almost an improvisation, piano chords float and wallow and a minimal melody tries to pin the whole thing down.
Strange New Things 71 ~ I wrote a huge number of pieces while reading Michel Faber’s ‘The Book of Strange New Things’. I used a simple texture of sounds, improvising and looping improvisations in real time.
Shimmer ~ another in the Strange New Things series, I wanted this to be like a mirage, a shimmer of notes over a desert of sound.
Home ~ another in Strange New Things series.
Improvisation ~ one of many treated piano improvisations.
Homage to Bleriot ~ something mechanical whirrs here, a phrase squeezed through the mangle, this is a much simpler and unworked composition.
Inverleith ~ a staccato keyboard based piece, almost too repetitive, but then not.
Biodome ~ this was an attempt at writing music for an early video game.
Point ~ this track was used in a children’s song about punctuation: lots of percussive loops.