Hands of Ruin

At the beginning of last year I wrote one tune per week for five months. The more techno-ish side of my work is going up on ReverbNation for now. But here is a track with a darker martial-industrial sound. As with A Reminiscence, I’d intended to get it onto a compilation but for various reasons that never happened. So I present it here now and hope that you enjoy it.

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Around this time last year, I made a track specifically for a Dark Ambient Radio compilation. This was a good exercise for me, since I don’t have much experience with writing ambient music, so I got to learn a bit more about how that style works. In the end my track got rejected for the compilation. (We had about twice as much material as we could fit on a CD, so we voted for the best tracks.) I wasn’t surprised, since it’s not as good as a lot of what went onto the CD. But in case anyone is curious and might enjoy it, here it is:

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Today is my 30th birthday, so please permit me to be a little self-indulgent and present my latest release: Architecture. I say self-indulgent because I have a feeling that these four short tunes are more interesting to me than they are to anyone else. They are essentially my experiments done after listening to various classical music (my favourites are Arvo Pärt and J.S. Bach) and trying to find a little bit of that magic in my own music. I can’t claim any great success, but I hope that this little collection is of some interest to my listeners.

As with Subterranean, I’m making it available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. Listen here or download (24Mb zip file).

(By the way, the last piece in this collection was originally released as Built of Pale Stone and included in the Interface Volume 1 compilation. The first is titled Between High Columns but hasn’t been released before. The other two are as yet untitled and have not been previously released.)

Many years ago, when Boing Boing was still printed on dead trees rather than being the hyperactive blog that it is now, they printed a review of some releases by C17H19NO3. That review caught my eye and when I found a copy of Terra Damnata in a record store in Berkeley I was thrilled.

That CD was a big influence on my early experiments in electronic music. While it wasn’t my introduction to martial industrial music, it was one of the first albums I owned in that genre. I was amazed by the stirring grandeur of Carrier of Shadows, and the mournful beauty of The Lords of Bone and Machinery. Without that album, I might have been making quite different music today.

Since then, John Bergin, the man behind C17H19NO3, has made a film version of his bleak and visually stunning graphic novel, From Inside. (I still haven’t seen the film. I’m desperately waiting for a London screening or a DVD release.) And he’s put his entire musical archive, including Terra Damnata, up on the web for free. Very highly recommended.

Here are a couple of dark-ambient releases that I found and enjoyed recently:

1. Nagual Art - Seance 1931 - Tales from F.

   I love the atmosphere that Nagual Art creates here. The choice of sounds is superb. Scratchy vinyl and echoing clicks and taps give it a vintage feel, while ghostly drones and unsettling melodies on piano, violin and (possibly) harmonium conjure up the haunted atmosphere of a seance. Highly recommended.

2. Last Nights of Paris - 2 Durations for Jane Churm

   Inspired by the story of the ghost of a girl who haunted the town of Wem in Shropshire and the photo that supposedly shows her, Last Nights of Paris uses deep, menacing drones with slow, ominous synth melodies to recreate the scenes of two fires.

The Independent Dark Electronics guys are putting together a second compilation. Of course I’ve submitted a couple of tracks. The deadline has been put back to the end of this month, so if you’re a musician working in the areas of industrial, noise, dark-ambient or otherwise dark and electronic music and you have some tracks you’d like to submit, you still have a couple of weeks to do so.

A bit of googling a few weeks ago brought me to darkambientradio.de. Their radio stream plays some great music.

Also, they’re in the process of putting together a CD compilation of dark ambient music. I’ve committed myself to submitting a track for it but, given the number (and quality) of the other artists involved, it’ll have to be a damn good one to find a place on the CD.

I don’t actually make much music that I’d classify as dark ambient. (The ambientness of Subterranean was a bit of a surprise to me.) I still feel like I have a lot to learn about making that sort of music. I’d like to magically be as good as raison d’être or Desiderii Marginis, but really I just have to spend a lot of time working at it. So a couple of weeks ago I put together an ambient track as practice. The results were acceptable but not special. I’ll have to keep working.

By the way, I haven’t dropped off the face of the planet. I quit my job at the beginning of the year to concentrate on music and other things that interest me. In summer I’ll look for work again, but in the mean time I’m writing a tune per week. When this period is over I’ll look over what I’ve done and polish up the best tracks for release.

I like getting nice surprises. Yesterday I got an email from DJ Vrhovny to say that he’d remixed Entering and Earls Court (from Subterranean) into one track: Entering The Earls Court (Columns Of Babylon Mix by DJ Vrhovny). It’s a great mix. It takes the tracks in a different direction and gives them an exotic feel.

If anyone else wants to do any remix work, I’m totally open to hearing it. And if you need any of the source material, just send me an email and I’ll see what I can do.

Interface Volume 1 is available now. It’s a compilation put together by the Independent Dark Electronics group, and includes two of my tracks: Subterranean Flames (original version) and Built of Pale Stone.

I recommend downloading the whole thing. There’s a lot of good music on there.

My second EP, Subterranean, is now complete. It’s noisier and more ambient than Falling Light. I’m making it available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. Listen here or download (32Mb zip file).

And if you’re wondering what happened to the first version of Subterranean Flames, that will be released soon on a compilation with some of the artists from the Independent Dark Electronics group. More on that when it happens.