My dear Mum.

She died on 12 July 2020.

Alzheimers disease is no joke. The photo above, and the one below, are only a few years apart.

For all the time I’ve been working on the music you find on this website, Mum had been reaching her terminal days. Latterly, when I wasn’t making music I was often spending time with Mum, like this.

Precious time indeed.

And so to this week’s music.

I intended this to be a salute.

The 5 solitary bass notes take the form of foghorn blasts, like ships in the sea – one for each member of the family.

As you’ll have seen from the site, Mum, Dad, me and the rest of my family spend a lot of time (although not enough) around the sea and in particular on the Scottish Island of Tiree. The sound of the claxon resonates every time I catch the ferry over to the magic Island.

The track is 71 seconds – one second for each year of Mum’s life.

The track cuts short before it reaches its natural end.

A little bit longer. This week I will let my brother do the talking, since we made this track together (and in particular, he’s responsible for the tension-inducing chords in the run up to the breakdown):

The whole tune – and in particular the interaction between the main synth line and the descant line – seems to speak to the way life’s challenges require us to hold on just a little bit longer that we think they will…

Just when we think things are easing up, something else – some new depth of challenge – comes along… but the resources, and hard wired drive to hold on are always there to meet it.

We both hope you enjoy this one as much as we do.

Toby and Barny.

Synthwave – not my favourite genre of electronic music but I enjoy it now and then.

I do, actually, like some of the early aspects of the synth sounds in synthwave, and I especially love working with early synths. Synthwave itself is probably a tad too poppy for my production tastes.

So: when I was given the opportunity to remix this piece, I took out some of the guitar parts and replaced them with the sounds of purer synths. I would say that much of the essence of this track remains with Michael, so in this respect it’s a faithful remix that doesn’t deviate too much from the original. But I do hope something of my own flavour – which if you’ve been following along all these weeks you my know something about! – does shine through.

And in any case, it’s often a good thing to work with different styles of music, if for no other reason than that it tells you about what you really do adore.

You can here more of Michael’s work over on Bandcamp. He’s based in Glasgow, UK. Here’s his original version of Control:

I ended up feeling ok about this one, but it was a mighty painful process to get there. I feel that I learnt few lessons from pushing through and completing this one, and I’ve made a blog post about how I pushed past the pain and reached the other side.

More deep house this week.

If you’re dreaming of sitting by a pool in foreign lands, or wondering whether you’ll even feel the sun this year, sit back and enjoy. Especially the bongos.

My favourite part of this track are the drums. It’s funny: I grew up a drummer, and before falling for electronic dance music, would regularly play drums with others. When I started producing, I may have taken drum production for granted, and assumed that my drums would work well.

Nowadays I know that drum programming does not happen by magic; it’s a craft to build a groove. For anyone interested, here’s a fantastic article from the good people at EDMProd: they call it The Ultimate Guide to Drum Programming. It’s not short.

Moods come and go. Light and darkness both come and go.

I had a religious upbringing and I’m very grateful for that, not so much for the particular set of beliefs, but for the awareness that life is a spiritual journey, and it has a transcendent dimension (if you take the time to become aware of it).

These words remain as beautiful as ever, and if you peer closely, seem to foreshadow the Corona pandemic almost 3000 years ago.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.

And so here some darkness. It comes and goes – I promise.

Time for a little sunshine!

To tell you the truth, I haven’t enjoyed working on a track quite this much in ages. There’s a lot a really like about this one, and it was a pleasure bringing it together.

May it bring you hope of sunny days to come!

These are not easy times – there is Corona around the world.

If you are in need of comfort, or your heart is in need of warming, I have created this piece of music for you.

May it bring you comfort, and a little hope.

Club music – it’s the music that makes my heart beat the loudest.

It’s an immense experience actually being there – in a nightclub, and I’ve well and truly served my time.

I am immensely impressed by the scores of DJs who have been in the game since the start and are still just about rocking the scene. Carl Cox is a prize example. He’s now 57, and still playing to a few adoring crowds, and up until 2017 held a yearly residency at Space in Ibiza. Here he is in 2016, in a mighty impressive open-to-close set. (I bet no-one I direct to this video will watch it all the way through, but know that he – of course – played the music all the way through, continuously for 9 hours.)

I’ve also a soft spot for the portrayal of club scenes in movies, where they often manage to capture at least something of the vibe and atmosphere of being there. Here’s a good one from Collateral, scored by Paul Okenfold’s Ready Steady Go.

The inspiration for this week’s track was the infamous ‘disco scene’ from Basic Instinct. Here it is:

The track is Blue by LaTour.

So for the 26th week – half way through this year, I’m dusting off a track that I wrote over 20 years ago. It’s so old that I can’t even open the file anymore – I wrote it on software that no longer exists. But I still have the file, so I’ve dusted it off and remastered it.

For the technically curious, here is the original, which suffered from a few issues, including:

• EQ curve way too smiley – too much bass and treble, with little life in the midrange.

• A very dry breakdown section (I didn’t even have a reverb back then!)

Jerome Isma Ae is a German producer who reaches heartbreaking levels of simplicity in his productions. Whilst some producers rejoice in having upwards of 50 tracks in a song, Jerome often deploys less than 10.

I was given the opportunity to remix one of his more recent tracks: Tiger. Here’s the original:

I chose to keep most of the original structure but create a more organic atmosphere to compliment the stricture in the original.

To my ear, producers who use less tracks end up with a cleaner, more satisfying sound. Jerome Isma Ae gets a very clean sound indeed. I tried very hard to keep to the same track sound as him, but I didn’t manage it: I added a couple more. But I loved working in his environment of minimal set up, and peeking behind the curtain of greatness.

This is possibly his most famous work (and that’s him in the photo):

Finally, just as a thought, I am intrigued by whether the country a producer comes from has any effect on the way they produce music (as a distinct question from whether it effects the sound they ultimately achieve).

Do producers from some countries produce in a laid back way, whilst others adopt a more structured approach? This depends entirely on whether country-wide stereo-types even reflect reality in the first place. I won’t comment further on this, other to say that I really don’t think I’m sitting here producing with a stiff upper lip. If anything, seeing the way Jerome pulled things together made me smile nearly the entire way through the week.