It’s been about a year since I posted anything here — I’ve been super busy doing not much of anything, but I’ve got a little time now so I thought I would catch up.
The last song posted in this blog from 2016 was MakeMake ( pronounced maw-key-maw-key). Three more songs found their way to YouTube after that, during 2016, after which things dried up for nine months or so. So let’s start with those three:
A bit of a palate cleanser, ‘Prov ‘Tude in C is a short improvised piano piece, a sort of antidote for all the meticulously architected and complexly layered songs I usually do.
(YouTube link: https://youtu.be/_ScC5qcaHX0 )
Next is Something From Nothing (the title a nod to both cosmology and the creative process). It’s a fairly cheerful mid-tempo groove-based thing. with a short, darker interlude. The interlude relies on some spacey audio clips made on my Mac back in the 90s, and featured in a song at the time called I Don’t Understand. More on that later.
(YouTube link: https://youtu.be/NmhNL0Dn-xI )
Rounding out 2016, the last “something” before nine months of “nothing”, and continuing the spacey theme, a deliberately paced groove thing called Sonic.
(YouTube link: https://youtu.be/89yENO6iyjs )
After a lull of nine months or so, during which the dust cover mostly stayed on the MIDI keyboard, I recently got back in the saddle with another short little “palate cleanser”, courtesy of J.S. Bach.
(YouTube link: https://youtu.be/wyh2Fs3VFTU )
Next is something called I Still Don’t Understand, which utilizes some of the same audio clips mentioned above in Something From Nothing and which were originally used in 1998’s I Don’t Understand. That song didn’t lend itself to a remake in the same way I revisited other tracks from that era, and I struggled with how to use those clips, which formed the lion’s share of the original song. This then is the second (and last) new context those clips will find themselves in.
(YouTube link: https://youtu.be/_js7Clf2YNQ )
Finally we have Active Mal, the most fully realized of the three recent songs. A slow groove slides into a slightly faster groove in 7, and ending in dramatic fashion with Jimi setting his guitar on fire.
(YouTube link: https://youtu.be/LFWx5qrVrnc )
Okay, now we’re caught up.
