New frontiers - making an album

Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

So…

I made an Album. That maybe an overly grandiose way of describing the product, but I have made five tracks and around about twenty-five minutes of music that thematically work together.

Now whether you would call twenty-five minutes of Ambient ‘deep space’ themed sounds with a musical quality ‘music’ may be open to discretion or interpretation or whether you like or hate ambient ‘music’.

To quote Brian Eno – "Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."

I didn’t specifically set out to create ambient music suitable for a space theme. It just evolved from sitting down and letting my mind wander down whatever creative avenue it decided to. Unless I have a specific project to work on, I just go with the flow and things happen. I certainly didn’t sit down with the intention of creating five thematically linked pieces of ambient music. The first simply led to the second which led to the third and so on. By the time I was into creating the second track New Horizons, I had a story in mind. The music was the telling of that story – a story without words. Now you may hear a different story than me, or you may ignore it.

Really, as with much of what I do creatively, it was a case of using sounds to tell a story, and in this case a flow of consciousness into music. The first instrument or sound played and recorded sets the tone, and each subsequent instrument is influence by the former. I find it is a very organic process with the end result growing from the initial seed, or in this case note. The creation has spanned several evenings and like most things creative they are best walked away from and returned to after a night’s sleep or doing some other activity. While in the process you can become blind as to what you are or have created and it is with in this case a ‘fresh’ set of ears that you either know you are on the right track or not. Overall, I think it has come out quite well. One of the issues can be overworking a piece, keeping going at them until the are overly complicated. The urge can be to just keep adding a little more. I try to keep things simple, to know when enough is enough. It is however what it is, which is five tracks of ambient music, no real melody to speak of but something that can either be ignored as background or used as a backdrop to something else.

New Horizons is really an exploration of sounds. The sounds themselves, the way they work with each other and the way in which they evolve and change to tell a story. What that story is, well that’s up to you. I have my version, you will have yours.

For the first time in creating music, I have decided to make the Album available for purchase with two rates – one for listening to and the second providing a license for the music to be used in non-commercial podcasts and projects. Now I am not expecting to have hoards banging down the virtual door for the privilege of having a downloadable copy or for the right to use it in their projects, but the option is there if anyone wants it. It would be the nice icing on the cake for me, and any pickups will help me invest back into creating more.

So, there it is. New Horizons can be found on Soundcloud as well as the My Music page here to listen to, and if you like it or want it, then for a small sum you can.

.

If you are interest in talking about sound design and music requirement for a project, please contact me at blackcreekpodcasts@gmail.com

Free to use music and soundbeds can be found on my SoundCloud Artistspage.