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Brother Typewriter – Rendlesham 1980
Finally I’ve got my act together and managed to complete a track of ‘electronic listening music’ (well, if a treated electric guitar counts as ‘electronic’...) It happened as follows: after at least 6 years of prevarication and noodling about with various sounds I was catapulted into action by joining the Burning Lodge Immersion Composition Lodge. Immersion Composition is a speed songwriting technique designed to confront the creeping paralysis that so many composers of modern music face when faced with too many technological options and too many things to say in too little working time.
The idea of Immersion Composition is simple: you spend 12 straight hours writing and recording as many tracks as possible – the aim is to get to 20, although obviously in 12 hours that would be very, very difficult. The aim is to chuck out all the constraints that stop you from composing music in ‘normal’ circumstances and just “go for it.” A ‘lodge’ is a group of musicians who individually undertake one of these speed writing and recording sessions, burn the results to CD, and then meet up to listen.
Rendlesham 1980 is from the first session I’ve done for the Burning Lodge – which was made up of several two-hour sessions rather than 12 hours in one go, due to time constraints. This track, however, was done very quickly, in about an hour and a half. The guitar and backing samples were put through Native Instrument’s Absynth 4 software synthesiser. It’s a simple track, and the playing is quite rough as I did it quite quickly, but I was pleased enough with the results to post it up here. (I was also pleased with the other 4 songs from the session but they’re rock and roll, really, so not so suitable for this blog.)
The title refers to an alleged UFO incident on a US airbase in Suffolk.
I can’t recommend this process highly enough to Dilaters who have all the gear they need to make music but are lacking the time – the results, so far, really have been mind-boggling.
(By the way, the Lodge members have fraternal or sororial nicknames so I went with Brother Typewriter in deference to the well known manufacturer of reliable office equipment.)
File Download (5:36 min / 8 MB)
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