anguaji-music

[anguaji-music]

Tumblr absences.

I've been quiet on Tumblr for months now - I hate that, and I hate posts like these, explaining the absence of posts. It's meta and boring and usually fills in for other content. I've been busy, with work (I have a full time job developing now) and music (I spend my weekends and evenings writing the score for The Terminal Velocity Of Snowflakes, coming to Live in December) so I haven't posted a load anywhere except the odd tired tweet. But more than that, I felt like what is the point of keeping Tumblr up to date? I love the platform, I always have. But it's completely dominated by the visual medium (and most of that is fan art) and there's very little back and forth on here. Even very few likes, reposts... It's not a very engaging medium if you're not posting snackable content. Content, content... Despite the sensation of dropping info into the void, I'm going to post a little here, but if anyone can suggest a more sound friendly blogging space, I'm up for it. Ps the price hike on MacBook pros is crushing me. Gutted.

[anguaji-music]

I'm mid writing this piece. I'd normally not share, but it's perfectly my mood rn.

[anguaji-music]

Lazy Sunday beats in a very ramshackle set up. This is old Macbook! Remember old Macbook?? It's old. I'm working on some old trip-hop and this is where the files are. This is not how I normally work. But it's surprisingly comfy. Note tea.

[anguaji-music]

The Savage

2016 In spring 2016 I was commissioned by the Live Theatre to work on their summer event The Savage - a dramatisation of the book by David Almond (known for Skellig). Read more about it here or take a listen to some selected tracks right here in tumblr :)

It's been a magic time for me, but man it's been busy. Lots of in and out to the theatre, lots of late night recordings. But I've loved it, even the gut-wrenching nerves.

[anguaji-music]

Twenty Fifteen: Winter

So - winter 2015! We're finally here. What happened in the dark days before christmas, 2015?

Well, I got a lovely opportunity to work on a very small commission for the Live Theatre's Christmas Adventures just before the Christmas hols, and then I got to fool around with some small sketches before the close of the year.

And what a year, eh? All ups and downs - so many musical opportunities I can't stay mad, but these were twelve months I'd prefer not to repeat in a hurry.

Here's the tracks I've felt were interesting enough to share. Oh! And before we all get on with 2016, a quick thankyou for reading and commenting on these posts and tracks, y'all - I've enjoyed drawing a line under the period here on Tumblr, and you've all been lovely. :) Thank you, thank you, thank you...

Will I Ever Figure It Out?

In the party season, I was asked to put together a little ambient dubstep snippet for the Live Lab's Christmas Adventures on the 21st Dec. The evening was a mix of comedy, games and a couple of short plays, one of which, The Terminal Velocity Of Snowflakes (by the lovely Nina Berry - https://twitter.com/ninajayneberry) needed a few music spots. Tweaked versions of Sunday Mornings and Hey, Piñata featured during the runtime, but an original snippet was needed for an emotional beat. "Ambient emotional dubstep" was the order of the day, and this was what was produced! The timings worked out really well from my end, although an earlier version would have been tighter, but riskier. The drop just before the main beat comes in was placed there to give the actors a little catch up time, just in case.

I had a funny winter, so in addition to what the script demanded, I felt very close to the emotions needed in this track. Watching the piece performed was one of the highlights of my year - hearing this time perfectly and see the actors work with it was exhilarating, and I confess I mushed up when Hey, Piñata came on through the theatre sound system.

Bleaker

After the summer theatre work was over, after Trigger, Happy was finished and mixed and mastered, after Christine's wedding was over (many months of fretting over their music finally paying off) but before the Christmas Adventures, I was left in a lovely empty place with music. I got to experiment with some new patches in a different setting and just playing with sound, for fun. I started this piece very recently, in mid-November, early-December. I don't know what it'll end up being but when I started it, I had a sudden homesickness for a time when drum and bass sounded rusty and complicated. It's a very quick sketch though so it'll change vastly I imagine. Still there's an emotional content to it that I didn't necessarily mean to express. Or maybe it's a musical inkblot.

Late Vibes

Just a mildly optimistic shorty blort from the mid-christmas period. I've been enjoying any spare time for small tune beginnings, though I've barely had the time to do much with them - lots of small beginnings but not a lot of polish. Hopefully that'll change in '16. Incidentally, I need to pull some timing around on the drums as it's not hitting the beat quite right in places. It's driving me wild, and yet here it is. I'm an enigma.

This is the fourth part in a four-part series of retrospective posts on Anguaji Music I thought I'd share before we're all off into 2016 and doing other things. Part Zero: Prologue Part One: Spring Part Two: Summer Part Three: Autumn Soundcloud set (will be updated as the tracks are made available): Soundcloud: Twenty Fifteen (set) Bandcamp page: anguaji.bandcamp.com

[anguaji-music]

Oh, the usual sort of day. Practicing mandolin, learning node.js and gulp. Thinking about a roguelike. Drinking tea.

[anguaji-music]

Twenty fifteen: Autumn

Summer was a snowglobe-esque jumbling of my life. After the feverish working hours of the early summer months were barely over, my partner had to move out of his flat in July and in with me and my box room. Just after that, we lost a close friend to cancer, which put everything else into the strange perspective of grief. By the time early September rolled around, I was in a strange place, winding down my second job and ramping up work on music and Trigger, Happy. When October hit, I was pretty deep into the finishing of T,H - more as a distraction than anything. The autumn was dominated by Trig, which is documented elsewhere, but I did spare some time for playing in Maschine. I also wrote a little piece for a friend's Do that I'm sharing here for the first time outside the event. I've also included Hey Pinata here with some words on where the reworking went with that piece.

Hey Sad Chip, Whatcha Doin?

This is a good example of how silly my work in progress titles are. I'm trying to shame myself out of the habit. In between the sound tracking work I've scored and the release of Trigger, Happy, I've been trying to use Maschine as a song maker and beat tune thinking spot. I love score work, but I still love beat-based stuff. Unfortunately the stupid sad thread of the year runs most obviously in these track doodles as they haven't had their shell polished yet. I've had to pull some weird shenanigans to get maschine to export this properly - silly Maschine, why won't you let me love you? I'm going to have to drop this sucker into Ableton to finish it properly.

Happy Go Lucky

Just a fun sketch using some old samples from Sony's creative sample packs (which I must buy more of when I have more money). Rare appearance from Geosonics on here - the creaks and ice pads - I love Geosonics, but as I've often maligned with my pal who also bought it, the synths hardly ever end up on a finished track. The arrangement is by nooooo means finished, so please bear with the slight repetitiveness in the middle of this unfinished scribbling.

A Bright, Clear Morning

Written for my friend's wedding for the down-the-aisle walk. Originally I'd planned some guitar compositions and had started on them already by summer, but I was doing my daily piano practice one morning and this just about wrote itself and I knew what it should be for. The original take had a very cantankerous part in the middle with some unusual key changes, but I got worried in case it got played over the whole ceremony by accident and so I played it safe with the final arrangement.

Hey, Piñata

Trigger, Happy by Anguaji Music

I was shellshocked by the summer's losses and changes and the work on Trigger, Happy in September/October was a welcome distraction. It was good, creative busywork and there wasn't too much time to overthink the tracks as I got down to business. The changes in our situation and in our lives still show in the music, though. They're best represented in Hey, Piñata. Our friend Nigel died in August. He was buried in a beautiful park space outside of Durham, in nature, which is perfect for what he'd have liked. I've never been to a pretty funeral before - only shiny black suits and cold churches for me - and the sad day in the woods reminiscing has stayed in my memory. The sound of wind in the trees. The rain. Paths and grass in the forest. Hey, Piñata was always a track about feeling so battered that you didn't know which way was up, although it also has a hopeful tone. After Nige, after the summer, that idea took on another dimension. Grief is not grandiose, and there was definitely a hint of grief now in the arrangement. Instead of drama, I tried to conjure a feeling of nature and resignation (but also perseverance). Layering the sound of wind in the trees seemed just right, and I thought of Nigel often while I was finishing this piece.

This is the third part in a four-part series of retrospective posts on Anguaji Music I thought I'd share before we're all off into 2016 and doing other things. Part Zero: Prologue Part One: Spring Part Two: Summer Soundcloud set (will be updated as the tracks are made available): Soundcloud: Twenty Fifteen (set) Bandcamp page: anguaji.bandcamp.com

[anguaji-music]

I love The Adventure Zone! And I love this guy's illustrations. I keep meaning to make some sound sketches Inspired By the Adventure Zone but since Griffin began popping his own OST in it's less transparent (meaning, harder to envisage any other sounds).

The Adventure Zone, The Crystal Kingdom, Chapter 2

In which the adventurers are confronted by the crystal golem and everything is made out of crystal!

[anguaji-music]

Twenty Fifteen: Summer

The late spring into summer was a pretty chaotic time for me. I’d shed one job at this point and was thinking more about my music career than I had in years. I’d lost my grandmother in February, and I felt keenly that life was a very finite thing and was I making enough of it? Was I happy? And if not, why not? I was wondering what to do with my own life, that I’d expected to be more musical in a practical sense by now.

At the perfect time, I was asked to contribute to some theatre work to some Live Labs projects, based at the Live Theatre in Newcastle. I’ve loved working with the theatre - the fluidity and excitement. And it’s led to a few extra commissions, too, which is fantastic. These four snippets were produced as semi-underscorings for several projects - one of which, Red Is The New Blue, is coming back to the main stage at Live in February 2016 and you’re all invited. I’m polishing a listener-friendly version of the ambient OST to co-incide.

These tracks are mostly synth-heavy as the projects demanded it, and less reference to rhythms and beats than my work tends towards, so they were a wonderful departure for my music-self.

Mars Thinking 4 - Engine Rooms

This was one of the snippets for Red Is The New Blue, an experimental new play for the Live Lab programme at the Live Theatre, Newcastle. What I knew from talking to the producer was that the piece was going to be sci-fi, about the colonisation of Mars and the people who’d volunteered for a one-way trip there. Depending on the budget and dramatic needs, we had some definite set pieces to loosely underscore, but other than that the only brief initially was a “retro future” musical aesthetic. My process for this kind of commission usually works by throwing a bunch of ideas together very quickly for taste testing from the client, and then gauging the sounds they seem to like best. From there, I work more on the exact pieces we need and refine. Quite a few of the original draft ideas for the project were used in the final show, but this one didn’t fit anywhere - which is a shame, because I really enjoyed the creation of it and the end result. It was also the first two-people-in-a-studio collaboration that I’ve ever worked on in electronica - Vinny (my sound engineer boyfriend) and myself just working in front of Ableton shaping sounds and drinking beer. Maybe it’ll find a home somewhere else :)

Monologue Outro

While we were waiting for RITNB to be finalised, I helped pop some sounds together for some scratch theatre. We were on quite a tight deadline, so I drew from my existing library of music and the director really liked the idea of All Things (then in its demo form) fading in the piece and then playing over the end scene. To make the outro less intrusive, I created an ambient version of the track, drawing out the synth lines and leaving a very minimal version of the song - the guitar parts from the track, I reused as echoes to mirror the emotional content of the scene. This track changed a good few times between first draft and last, to coincide with the timing of the scene as it was rewritten during rehearsal - I love the excitement of working like that. At the time, I really only heard All Things in this piece, but listening back now, I can hear a lot of my film scoring influences - particularly Nathan Larson - that I plain wasn’t aware of at the time! The creation of this intro and outro version of All Things went later into the revision of the finished track on Trigger, Happy’s release. Listen to it here: anguaji.bandcamp.com/track/all-things-2

Mars Spinning

Space! Mars! Women’s Problems! Solar Flares! All this, and more, featured in Red Is The New Blue - the play I underscored in Summer ‘15 for the Live Theatre in Newcastle, and my first major undertaking as a musical commission. Exciting and exhausting. This is a listener-friendly version of the opening music (the theatre versions are often much longer so the techs can fade in and out as a scene unfolds on the night). The original was played under some prose poetry evoking Mars. So hard not to Holst it up. The track itself acts as a bit of an overture (thematically) or more as a prologue to the rest of the play’s soundscapes. The overall themes I worked in were mostly ambiguous, to fit the play’s own themes and general sense of being overwhelmed - wonderment with a quiet foreboding, homesickness and panic, longing and acceptance. The pieces each mostly went under a major poem recital (the play itself is a mix of performance poetry, drama and multimedia) so had to be fairly empty and uncrowded, but often also emotional. Red Is The New Blue is having a second run on the main stage of the Live Theatre in Newcastle in February (info here), and I’m planning to release the finished soundtrack around the same time so look for more on this project!

Adrift 4 - Still Drifting

Originally, we needed some punctuation pieces to play over scene changes. Some had to be emotional (echoing or foreshadowing the scenes sandwiching it) or empty soundscapes. In the final production, the punctuation pieces were dropped to help the pacing, but here’s one that got away. I quietly loved creating the punctuation shorts as they were an excuse to chuck any old thing together and see what worked - the kitchen sink approach - and the end result was a feeling of emptiness and pause.

This is the second part in a four-part series of retrospective posts on Anguaji Music I thought I’d share before we’re all off into 2016 and doing other things. Part Zero: Prologue Part One: Spring Soundcloud set (will be updated as the tracks are made available): Soundcloud: Twenty Fifteen (set) Bandcamp page: anguaji.bandcamp.com

[anguaji-music]

Twenty Fifteen: Spring

I slow-started 2015 musically - when the last days of winter rolled off, I had two jobs and not a lot of spare time. This was a grand theme for the first half of the whole year until I made more space for music by - er - stepping away from employment for a while. 

The first few tracks on my playlist are beat-based “songs” (the beginnings of, I should say) rather than focused pieces. They’re fun and I want to finish both of them - I like how they’re sounding, but the working on them got lost in the hubbub of my day jobs at the time. 

Disjointed

This was the first track of 2015 that I was really into, that didn't just feel like a tinkering practice. It started with a fun jumbled sample-flipping bassline in Maschine, and I got to experiment with some newly-minted boom bap kits that I put together from some Drum Broker packs. I owe a lot of fun play sessions to the Drum Broker and Beat Butcha this year. I'm really looking forward to finishing this track up - it's very close to my favourite kind of oppressive trip hop sound that I'd like to make more often. I'm going to have to take it out of Maschine and into Ableton to finish it though - I find the arranger too blocky in Maschine to work on a whole track in it solely.

Quietly This

I've never really connected with Maschine 2. Due to a quirk in the upgrade process, the software on my Mac jiggered its library around so lots of my usual sounds were missing so I never really used it properly. So in the spirit of being less bitter, I took a (pretty lacklustre tbh) Maschine 2 webinar and discovered a few of the new cool features. Neat! This was a doodling result of new playings with the software. I love the minimalism of the two-sample drums (the bassdrum is a drumsynth sub from Maschine which I loved playing with) and I enjoyed playing with a very muted and melodic feeling. I'm going to finish this track arrangement pretty soon - I'd quite like to create a few tracks with a similar sound and feel for a small beaty ep...

This is the first part in a four-part series of retrospective posts on Anguaji Music I thought I'd share before we're all off into 2016 and doing other things. Part Zero: Tumblr Post Soundcloud set (will be updated as the tracks are made available): Soundcloud: Twenty Fifteen (set) Bandcamp page: anguaji.bandcamp.com

[anguaji-music]

2015! What a hostile year. But the black and white opinion of it ends there, because irritatingly it’s also blossomed a lot of music for me - music opportunities and paid composition work - so I can’t hate it as roundly as I’d prefer to.

Son of a bitch.

So in the spirit of putting 2015 behind me, I thought it’d be fun to post the work-in-progress snippets and demo tracks from the year (and some released music for projects, and some pre-release music that will be out in 2016!) as a show and tell. I’ll be updating my tumblr here as I roll out the posts!

I’ll be breaking them up by season, so look for Spring tomorrow :) 

[anguaji-music]

White out! All this came down in an hour or so. Beautiful but cold - the dog had forgotten that he can't eat it all.

[anguaji-music]

A little breakfast vignette for you all. There was meant to be a cup of tea in there but while I was taking this picture, I drank it.

[anguaji-music]

Testing out a mobile setup.

[anguaji-music]

I'm a little overinspired today. Too many things I want to get up in.

Time for some list making. And maybe a walk?

[anguaji-music]

Really excited about the new DJ Krush album - I’m penniless right now so I’ve been playing the first track over and over on the youtubes. Thrilled to see it just dropped onto Spotify so I’m going to have a solid listen of the whole thing this afternoon. OMG.

[anguaji-music]

I’ve started a long-form blog to accommodate my more in-depth articles and occasional tutorials. I’m kicking off with a post-mortem series on the Trigger, Happy tracks - discussing their origins, references, and production woes and triumphs. :) First up is Fun Time Girl! Enjoy x