Hands of Ruin

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.

My cousin Tam, who possesses a vast knowledge of classical music and is the main contributor to the Where’s Runnicles blog, has written a review of Falling Light. He sums up with:

It’s an interesting record, and one that rewards repeated listening, and which is well worth the modest fee.

I’m very grateful.

I love Mind.in.a.box. I should probably be a little bit worried that they seem to be writing about my life.

I first discovered Mind.in.a.box when a friend gave me copies of their first two albums, Dreamweb and Lost Alone. They’re not very cheerful albums and that was not a very cheerful point in my life. After a slightly disastrous relationship, You Will See had particular relevance to me:

You will see, I can climb up there.
When you lost faith,
You turned your back.
Destroyed my trust,
There’s no future for you and me.

Since then I’ve been fascinated by self-improvement. I spend a lot of time working to change the ways I think and feel, using all sorts of techniques such as reframing and hypnosis. When I heard Crossroads, their most recent album, it was uncanny hearing a bunch of my biggest obsessions being put into song. Redefined (which builds on Machine Run – one of my favourite tracks from Dreamweb) has the lines:

I have found a new life.
There’s a line in my past,
Cuts it off like a knife.

And from What Used to Be:

You are still holding on to the past,
But you have to look up at the sky.
You know that life is moving too fast,
To have regrets before you die.

At least my name is not (yet) Black.

As a musician, I can’t help but get excited by the amazing production quality of their music. The choice of sounds is always perfect. They put a lot of work into processing the vocals in all sorts of interesting ways. And there’s far too much detail in their music for me to get my head around.

Sadly they don’t play live, choosing to work only in the studio. Perhaps because their music is carefully constructed, piece by piece, and they wouldn’t be able to repeat that process live. I wouldn’t care though. They could just come on stage with a CD player and press play and I’d still be over the moon. Oh well. I can hope.