Music From The Depths

In October of 1957, Russia launched the first satellite into space. I was born about 25 years later, which was plenty of time to get people to the moon and back, and inspire tons of kids to dream about space. I was one of those kids.

For me, the idea of space is certainly romanticized. But, in a real sense, it lets us do two important things. 1. Dream about what exists beyond our atmosphere. 2. Come together here on Earth to accomplish incredible things and celebrate them.

I wrote this for a special person who is going through a lot right now. I can't be with her in person, but there's a lot that you can say through a simple song.

I can't believe that I wrote this song 17 years ago. At the time, I was studying in college, preparing to take a semester abroad. I knew that things would change. I would leave, and friends would graduate and go on to do amazing things.

With any case where paths separate, there's a felt loss. And it's easy to dwell on that part. But good comes, too. It's the bittersweet thing about how time passes.

This song is about that. Or, at least it was 17 years ago.

EP-012 revisits the original instrumentation and smooths it out. To fit in here, I gave it more of an ambient twist.

Enjoy!

About fourteen years ago I wrote a song that only four people heard. I thought it had promise, but with "life stuff" I stopped work on it. This week as I was starting into the episode I decided to rework it. I may release the actual track at some point, but for now I hope you enjoy this ambient/drone mix of it.

Water is fascinating, but also very dangerous and sometimes deceptive. Years ago, I was in the ocean walking back toward the shore. I had been careful not to wander too deep because there are things hidden by the water. Without warning, the ground disappeared, and I was on my way back out to sea.

This mix reminds me of that day.

What started as an ambient mix quickly moved sideways when I added some guitar work that my friend RJ sent along. Sometimes sideways takes you back out to sea; other times, it just takes you someplace different.

A couple of days before I started work on EP-009, I caught a video where Adam Neely breaks down The Girl From Ipanema. I always found Bossa Nova to be fascinating, but I had never considered why it fascinated me.

If you're into the technical or theory side of music, that video is incredible.

Inspired by that, and Bossa Nova in general, I let it influence this week's track. Before you hit "play" with those expectations, you should know that this isn't a Bossa Nova song. It does take hints from how Bossa Nova builds drums and layers rhythms, but that's as far as the similarities go.

And that's because about halfway into the song, my friend RJ sent me a guitar track that layered nicely onto what I had written.

So, like how The Girl From Ipanema borrowed from Samba and Jazz, this song borrows from Bossa Nova, Massive Attack, ambient music, and Rock and Roll.

Enjoy!

In EP-007 I re-visited a technique I used in the early 2000s – I built some of the background percussion by taking a sound or rhythm in the foreground, exporting it, manipulating it, and then re-importing it back into the track. In this episode I wanted to push on that a lot harder, so I gave myself a challenge.

Every sound you hear in EP-008 is from the same starting point: one complex rhythm track. No additional instruments were used to create this one.

Enjoy!

I started this song fully intending to make it a nice, calming, happy mix. The end result was something different. I thought about rewriting it, but sometimes we need the honest soundtrack for what is really going on around us.

We need the reminder that there will be bad days. Sometimes even bad weeks, months, or years.

Sometimes you're left standing in ashes. And that too can be okay.

I wanted to do something special for this episode to celebrate the 100th download. (It happened either during EP. 004 or Ep. 005, depending on how you count the numbers.) 100 is the first milestone I had for this, and hopefully the start of many. So, to celebrate, I wrote an hour-long ambient mix for you. ...and then had to shorten it to 45 minutes to fit within my upload limits. I'll be looking into that.

Anyway, my friend once pointed out that some people like ambient music while working, or doing complex tasks. But other people prefer ambient music for things like meditation, and prayer. If you're listening to ambient music for that reason you want it to stay out of your way and let you focus. Well, this mix is a lot of that.

Some mixes at an hour or more are just the same few bars on repeat. And there's a reason or two for that. But I didn't feel right just looping things a few hundred times and calling it a "special mix." While I did want to stay true to minimal, drone, ambient music, there are subtle themes that cross back and forth to give this a lot of subtle background intricacy while the main part of the song does stay its minimal course.

I hope you enjoy it!

For this episode, I wanted to get back to playing guitar. And then promptly snapped two strings. Ah well, there are still four other strings on a guitar, right? ;)

This glitchy ambient mix draws inspiration from the ocean.