Contour comprises of five long tracks, each track itself a series of mini tracks with a common theme. There's very little vocal work on this CD - this is pretty much a pure synth album.
2008 saw me settle into using the PC as the mainstay of my musical production. However, I shied away from using it for all my instrumental needs. On this album I have used a variety of synthesisers, analogue, digital, real and virtual. If there is one thing I have learnt is that no one single source of sounds is useful to me as a musician.
As with Fuji I have made great use of the P3 Sequencer from Sequentix. This wonderful little piece of hardware has probably changed the way I write music for good. You can hear the P3 in action on most tracks, but it is mostly responsible for the faster sequencey bits.
Most of the tracks make use of drones. These are complex soundscapes that sit in the background of the track. They are normally the first things to get recorded, and quite often the first thing you hear as the track starts.
The hour long album is available from me as a paid download mp3. The download is provided as a bundle of 'high quality' 320kB/s mp3 files. It is priced at 2GBP (two pounds sterling). Please e-mail me here for my Paypal details or click the button above. Once you send payment to me I'll send you your own personal links to download the album files. Please note that no artwork is provided with this version.
The album is also available through MusicZeit both as a 256kB/s mp3 or as a CD quality FLAC download. Artwork has been made especially for Musiczeit customers.
The album cover artwork was designed by Nick Stevens
Track Listing
I have included some 30 second sound snippets of some of the songs. Just 'right hand mouse click' on the blue name and 'save as...' to download the mp3 file. All files are around 400 to 600KB.
Olag Bamurpha This is a long varied piece with a Tangerine Dream flavour for the most part. The laid back middle section has a solo sound that was supposed to sound like a Mike Oldfield guitar part. It was almost all done on Propellerhead's Reason.
Helm This is quite a laid back track really. It starts with the a drone backwash and various little bits keep on getting added to it as the track progresses. I was fortunate enough to be able to use a few real synths on this track, SH-101, SH-1, JP-6, D-50 and a Prophet 5. I should add I don't own all these instruments - but maybe if I had the space...
The Dragon This is actually a remake of a track I did around 20 years ago. That time I had just a Moog Rogue, a homemade analogue sequencer and an echo unit. This time I was luckier. This version contains my old modular doing the main sequence thing running in conjunction with a multitracked Prophet 5 and a variety of softsynths.
Sanctuary The backing drone to this track took me ages to set up. Its a barber pole phaser sound, you can get big complex hardware devices to make this sound, but I did all this with multiple recordings of a single phaser. The resulting audio clips were then looped and overlaid to create a rich rolling sound. It runs throughout the first and final sections of the piece and underlies the simple melody on top. The first part of the track is pretty minimalistic stuff really. And that's me chanting over the top of the synths trying to sound full of eastern promise....
Ether This is a long audio collage that was huge fun to make. Again, you hear various themes as the track plays through, but the basis of the whole piece is a semi-random sequence played on the JP-6. This is the last track on which I used my D-50 before I sold it. I had this keyboard for 17 years, so it was with some regret that I passed it on to someone else.
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