Living Room Music

This is the first one where I set out to record a full LP for the show. Two sides, forty-four minutes and forty-six seconds, and I went at it sort of like Bitches Brew except as a solo producer. Every other episode has been a half hour that goes where it goes. This one has an A side and a B side that were made eight days apart and were always meant to be two halves of the same object.

Side A started on Labor Day and I only got sixty-four bars down before it was time to leave for the union hall. That was the IATSE 115 celebration in the AVL warehouse, which is gigantic — food the members cooked, a Stagehand Olympics that one of our riggers won, and a jam room that nobody much used because everyone was outside watching the free labour. I took my trumpet and played in there anyway, and it turned out to be the warm-up for the rest of the day. Then I took a long nap, woke in the middle of the night out of a dream with a motif still running, and finished the whole side before morning. I connected the Crimson II kit and drummed fills and grooves over the drum track I had programmed. I played guitar. I played trumpet. I played keys, in lots and lots of layers. It is one song. There are parts that are obviously different sections, but it is one song.

Side A sits at sixty beats per minute and reads A minor. It opens in E minor and stays there a good while, moves through A minor in the middle, and goes out through D major. Eleven tracks I played, and exactly one borrowed loop on the entire side.

Side B is the other thing I have been chasing — jam-feel trip hop jazz, which I think is legitimately the kind of music I want to be making. Eighty-five beats per minute, B flat minor, fifteen tracks, and all of it is me except the kick drum. Ten loops on that side and every one of them is a kick, stacked under the floor to hold the grid while I play over it. Everything with a pitch is mine. There is a Steinway carrying most of the harmony. It comes in on B minor, goes through E flat and B flat, settles into B flat minor and leaves on F.

Put the two sides together and the record walks off the sharp side of the piano onto the flat side, with that B minor at the top of the second half as the hinge. Sixty on one side and eighty-five on the other, which is the clearest tell that these were two sessions and not one. When I had Side B up on the playback and set for mixing there were a couple of sections that got me very close to gooseflesh. That is the whole reason to keep doing this.

Forty-four forty-six. Secrets and lies.

I wanted a solid drum and bass groove and I wanted it to hold for most of the half hour. Thirty minutes at 170, and the only ups and downs are energy breaks, places to breathe before it rolls again. The picture in my head was DJing a properly active dance party, the kind where people came to get down and do not need pop hits recited at them. They need rhythms and basslines rolling through, and that is what this is. The melodic parts are there for flavour, some cerebral bits to think about while you follow your feet.

It was a single afternoon. More than once during production I set a thirty-two bar marker cycling and just let it go round and round, not working, just feeling the groove. There were numerous places where I could not keep my feet still or keep my face from smiling. I was not thinking about anything else while I made it, not the books I have been reading, not the machines. It was a fun afternoon making something I would love to watch people groove to. Not yelling and screaming. Just grooving along.

Here is the part that is different about this one. Thirty-two tracks, and nothing recorded in from outside, no horn, no real piano. Thirty-four Apple Loops, which for this show is unheard of, since most episodes borrow one or none. But every one of them is a beat or a fill or a riser. The loops were strictly for the drums, stacked and combined so it stays interesting and never goes to raw repetition. Everything with a pitch is mine. The bass and the melodic parts were the fun of it, layering different synths together, an FM bass under a modular sequence under an organ, to get textures and tonality wider than any single track could give me. There is a vinyl crackle running over the whole thing that I put there on purpose.

It reads as E minor, same key and same tempo as 188, so call them siblings. But it opens in E major and stays bright for six minutes, the room filling before the floor commits. Then it settles into E minor from ten to twenty, and from twenty-two to twenty-seven it goes to A minor and gets more certain of itself than anywhere else on the record. That is the stretch where nobody is thinking anymore. The last two minutes come home to E minor.

It feels very Bristol old school in places, with some English dubstep from before the brostep years and just a little bit of tearout in it. Thirty minutes and eight seconds. That old Bristol groove.

This one started on the actual piano. I plucked out a chord progression in F major, sitting at the real instrument, and then carried it into the studio to make it slow and distant. Thirty-two beats a minute with the grid switched off, which is slow enough that it stops being a tempo and turns into weather. Moody and introverted, and I mean that about the playing, not about me.

It is part of a meditation I have been having about hibernating through the Florida heat. Some biological sluggishness has had hold of me all summer — the sleep comes at strange hours and in strange amounts, and the days go by at about the speed this record goes by. I was not trying to describe that. It just turned out to be what was under my hands.

The piano is the whole record; everything else is underneath it. Several soundscapes, all of them made out of voices — choir phrases, vocalise, a vocoder — none of them singing anything, just breathing under the chords. Then the rooms, which are enormous. One of the reverbs is an eighteen-and-a-half-second castle lobby. That is what makes the picture dark, and that is where the title came from.

Here is the part I did not expect. I played F major. The record reads A minor. Nothing changed the notes — a tail that long smears every chord into the one after it until the tonic is no longer the loudest thing in the room, and what survives is the darker reading of the same handful of pitches. The room transposed it. Blackness is not a mood I applied afterward; it is what the reverb left standing.

It moves more than something this slow has any right to. A minor at the top, six minutes over in C, back to A minor for a long stretch, a strange bright turn into D major around sixteen, and then A minor again from twenty to twenty-six, sitting there getting more certain of itself. And then the last two minutes go out in C major. A record called Blackness that finds the door on the way out. I did not plan that either, and I am not going to fix it.

Nothing borrowed on this one. Five tracks, no loops, nothing recorded in from outside — just the piano, the voices, and the rooms. Twenty-nine minutes and fifty-six seconds, and it stops four seconds short of the half hour, which feels about right for a thing that never quite wakes up.

Thirty minutes at 170, and it started where a lot of things start around here: a bluesy riff I have been hammering for months. I am sure I have used it before. It has never once come out the same way twice, so I have stopped worrying about it.

This one drifted. It leaves the EDM pocket early on and spends a good while sounding like something else entirely — piano solo, organ solo, trumpet solo, the horn section doing what a horn section does — and then the drum and bass walks back in and takes the rest. The analysis says the same thing in numbers: E minor for the first twenty minutes, out through B minor and D major in the middle, and then A minor from twenty on, holding tighter the longer it sits there. It never comes back. Whatever left at the twenty-minute mark decided not to return, and I like that better than I would have liked a resolution.

Twenty-seven tracks, and exactly one of them is a loop I did not make. There is a seven-piece jazz section in here out of the library — two trumpets, two trombones, alto, tenor, baritone — and I played the trumpet myself anyway, twice: once straight, once printed wide to get filtered and smeared across the far channels. That is either stubbornness or the whole point of doing this at all.

If I had to pin the shape of it to a picture, it is a triptych. Three views of one subject. Like standing in the three mirrors at a good tailor's, where you see the suit from every angle at once and not one of those angles is the front.

Then this week several different people sent me the same photograph — Tom Waits, mid-seventies, the cover of the Ice Cream Man single — and told me he was copying my style. Fifty years early to be copying anybody. So there I am in the tailor's mirrors, looking at three of myself, and what looks back is Old Scratch. Hell's own ice cream parlor. Three scoops, and the parlor was always the point.

Thirty-two minutes in B minor, built on the digits of pi. The machine plays the sequence: a bass line walking π through B natural minor, one note held across two full measures; rootless 3-5-9 voicings landing on the and of two and squarely on four; sixteenth-note cascades climbing two octaves and falling back, the span drifting C2 to C6 and home again. Sixteen bars of arithmetic per digit, and none of it decides anything.

Then the tempo came down — 154 to 60 — and the parts stopped being what they were. What had been a shimmer at twenty-five milliseconds became a walk at two hundred and fifty. Each digit now holds for eight seconds into an eighteen-second reverb tail, which means every note is still ringing when the next two arrive. That is the whole piece: not harmony so much as fields you sit inside. More Rothko than Pollack. Over the top, live piano doubled with a synth called Dream Walker, everything else ducked and triggered off whatever the hands were painting. The machine laid the ground; the playing decided where the light fell.

The name arrived sideways — the synth was called Dream Walker before anyone went looking for a dragon. Zythara, Dreamwalker of the Amethyst Veil, is an ancient gem dragon of the Neutrals, psionic-blooded, three mentees to her name, and possessed of a breath that is not fire but force: a hundred-and-twenty-foot cone of pure concussion, invisible, that moves things rather than burns them. She is immune to the thing she exhales. Which is the right patron for this — a long low note at sixty in a room with an eighteen-second tail does not burn anything either. It just moves the air, and keeps moving it, long after the source has stopped.

A note on the key: the analysis comes back split, D major and B minor within a point of each other, because the pi bass never cadences. There is no leading tone pulling home, no dominant preparing anything — just digits. Read in two-minute windows the centre moves in blocks: B minor for eight of them, D major for seven, and one stretch around the seventeen-minute mark that settles into E minor. Never randomly — it holds a centre, then leaves it. All of which live inside the same seven notes. Thirty-two minutes that never change key and never stop moving.

This morning's pages asked whether I know how to think, or ever did — Do I Even Know How to Think Anymore? — and circled how much of what I make is choice and how much is being led about by tethers. I wrote that expecting no episode today at all. It ended up named for a creature whose entire attack is on the mind. I did not plan that; I noticed it hours later from a throwaway detail, which is precisely the kind of delayed pattern-recognition those pages spent a paragraph describing. I am not going to claim it means anything. I am also not going to pretend I didn't see it.

This one started at Radio Poets rehearsal. I'd been messing with a set of chord progressions there that never quite belonged to whatever we were working on, so they came home with me and turned into the psytrance section — the progressions finally doing the work they were actually built for rather than the work the band needed. 150 in C, which is squarely where psy wants to sit.

Then this Cat I know jumped on the keys and howled at me to make some Bitches Brew type IDM. And how could I ignore that. So the back half turns: the four-on-the-floor gives way to something broken and electric, that loose modal drift Miles got by putting a room full of players in one space and letting them circle each other — except run through a machine instead of a band.

The palette underneath is mostly texture and weather. Hoover pipes — six of them — foundation bass growls, jagged and raw, water bubbles, a drying machine, and a soundcheck guitar that never quite becomes a guitar. Glass xylophone and a Christmas piano for the bright edges, a single staccato vocal syllable for the human sound. Reverbs doing a lot of the spatial work: a big cave, a castle lobby, a room next door, and a couple of bent speaker cabinets for the things that need to sound like they're coming through equipment rather than air. Everything with a hand on it is mine — the amp takes, the Doppelganger passes, the played parts across Retro Synth, Sculpture and Alchemy.

Two pieces, then, and the seam between them is the point: one built from something I carried home from a rehearsal, the other from a cat with opinions. Named for the one who interrupted, which is only fair. He was right.

This one was a deliberate move away from the loop-puzzle. The format usually has me arranging pieces — good pieces, but pieces — and I wanted out of that for an episode. So I built a background and then played against it: long stretches of guitar, trumpet and synth laid down live over the developing bed, layer on layer, rather than dropped in as blocks. The machine kept its shape underneath and I answered it in real time.

What I was chasing was a blend — trip hop's weight and swing married into psytrance and drum-and-bass rhythms, and the whole thing climbing. It sits at about 148 BPM in D, which puts it right on the line between the psy and dnb sides of that, and the arc does what I wanted: it opens at a little over half strength, hits full inside the first third, and then holds high and eases out rather than collapsing. Upward progression, but not a straight ramp — it gets somewhere and then stays there a while.

Underneath it all is a fairly industrial palette. Electrical storms, mechanical machinations, hoover pipes, an industrial fork, something called a Cybernetic Centipede, an extraterrestrial presence in two parts, and a train station's reverb sitting over the top of it. Icelandic choir phrases for the human sound. Against that, everything with a hand on it is mine — the amp head takes, the dubwise treatments, the delayed horn, the radio-days texture.

It was made yesterday afternoon, which was a Friday that had already eaten a whole set of morning pages to a stray escape key. Some days the writing goes and the playing arrives instead.

It's been a builder's week. Most of my energy has gone into the worldbuilding software I've been putting together — the tool that finally lets me hold my whole world in one place instead of scattered across a dozen apps — and it's started to feel real this week, the kind of progress where you look up and it's dark out. In the gaps I've been binge-watching Archer, which I'm choosing to believe has nothing to do with anything, though I won't rule out that some of that manic spy-jazz energy leaked into the session. And this one got made the way the good ones sometimes do — I got cut from a load-in this morning once the rig was hung, drove home to a suddenly-open afternoon, and sat down at the gear.

What I was chasing was psytrance with a little awe and mystery to it — that feeling of a wide dark sky you're moving through rather than just a beat to nod along to. This is nominally a "puzzle piece" episode, arranging loops rather than composing from a blank page, but I ended up making a good chunk of the loops myself this time and only threw in some Logic and Splice material for flavor and texture, little bits of color around the edges. So it's more mine than the format usually implies.

Two years ago, a genre arrived in a dream. Drew Daniel woke up from a rave that didn't exist, where the music was called "Hit 'EM" — 212 bpm, 5/4 time, crunchy — and posted it, and for one beautiful week producers everywhere raced to make a dreamed genre real. Episode 116 was my entry. Episode 183 is the return: two years later, I wanted to know if the dream was still open. It is.

The crunch is literal this time. There are glass-mallet bottle hits all over this — actual struck glass, pitched and played — and four different electronic kits passing the groove between them: one called Doing Science, one called Rough Riddim, one called Hyper Speed, one called Lo-Fi Cassette. There's tape noise rubbed into the seams, an Americana synth wandering somewhere it doesn't belong, arps chattering in fives, and everything soaked in a warped reverb the size of a castle lobby — eighteen seconds of decay, because a dreamed genre deserves dreamed acoustics. The set builds twice and breaks twice, then spends its back third at full charge before it drops away like waking up.

Half an hour in a time signature that keeps you slightly off balance, at a tempo that doesn't negotiate. That's the thing about Hit 'EM: it only exists because somebody dreamed it and the rest of us believed them — which, if I'm honest, is the most Living Room Music premise there is.

Episode 182 is the sound of a week I spent building a world. The backstage of it, really — the thinking that runs underneath while the hands are busy, all of it equal parts science fiction and fantasy: a desktop that's actually a living map, a spaceship you fly across it, my whole machine reimagined as a place you travel through instead of a screen you stare at. This is the music that came out of that headspace.

It opens in acid — low, hypnotic, F-minor, a hyperspace rise pulling it upward — and then it climbs into drum and bass, 174 and running, a long journey of a track that doesn't sit still. I've had the World Cup on all week, and the shape of a match got into it: the build, the break, the sudden open field where everything breaks loose. There's an arp in here off a patch literally called Atlas, which felt too on-the-nose to leave out. It lands on an ecstatic synth outro, the comedown after the run.

And there's the other thing: this week, when I fall asleep, I've been dreaming in conversation — talking my way out loud through how to build the next piece of the interface, planning the whole thing in the dark. This episode is what those dreams sound like bounced to disk. Living Room Music, from a room that's been half studio and half cockpit. The cover is the world itself — Orbis, the map that became my desktop, seen all at once from above.