Tag Archive: ambient

“It’s Nice to Eat the King” is my first new music recording in a year

Recording music was an escape for me. My focus on big, layered sonics, ambiance and sometimes even downright noise came in no small part because I can get lost in all that sound. It’s meditative. Relaxing. Soothing despite the noise. But for some reason, the pandemic has coincided with the longest musical dry spell I’ve experienced in years. Aside from some digital music created last year for a project I will post about another time, I haven’t created anything. Nothing at all. Hell, I went nearly a year without even picking up the guitar, much less writing something on it. Until last night. That’s when a sonic jam accidentally spilled out while testing some equipment. And damn, it felt good to create again. It’s a…
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New zone out music: Second Slumber – Empty Nest (2020)

Unlike writing, I’ve still kept music “pure.” By that I mean it’s still something I go to when I just want to freely express myself, pushing out what’s in my head and heart and soul in an abstract way without worrying about whether or not it’s “right.” So when throughout 2019 I was working on an album I knew would end up being called “Empty Nest,” it wasn’t a formal project I was working towards — dear lord I do too much of that — it was just something I gravitated to when I wanted to escape my thoughts, cares, and worries of the day. Plug in the guitar, put on the headphones, and hope for the best, right? The following is the result, culled…
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My new ambient record is here. It’s very mellow. Get ready to zone out and meditate

In the spring of last year, I started experimenting with getting far more minimal in my music than usual, trading layers of drones for sparse sounds. Also had some ideas I wanted to play with involving using math to structure long, ever-shifting pieces. Taking those goals and a heaping helping of Brian Eno influence, i started messing with stuff. The result is the following album. Here’s the opening track. Yes, it’s very, very mellow. If you liked that, the whole thing is available for download and streaming. See below for links. The Experiment 4 – The Ambient Orchestra (2020) Time Slipping Slow in B (AO07) (25:38) The Untitled Shift (AO08) (11:17) Movement in G (AO05) (9:03) Shifting Keys (AO03) (10:18) OUTTAKES: First Composition (AO02) (15:44)…
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Unplugged 3: Insanely excited about the next two m2 projects, so that’s great

Sat down for my first purposeful recording session in a long while a few weeks ago. Recorded for four or five hours straight, just a mic in a room (an attic, actually) a few feet in front of my amp. Really cold up there. My fingers were numb. Laid down ten tracks of material, lots of layered guitar work weaving in and out of one another rather than the dense sound assault I’ve done in recent years. Tried a new approach to playing and just attempted various iterations on it. The interplay of the guitars excited me. Had about an hour and a half of material when it was wrapped up. Got super focused on working that material over the other day and started mixing….
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My first new music for 2018: “Coming Up For Air,” by m2

This is the new m2 record, my ongoing music project focused on guitar soundscapes, drones, and dense ambiance. It’s outer space music. Music to write or meditate to. The sound of ocean waves and the moons of Jupiter; of machinery at the bottom of a canyon and of being 100 feet beneath the water. I almost dropped this in the autumn of 2017, but I ended up spending quite a bit of time fussing with the third track, removing it, putting it back, fussing with it some more. Ended up using a severely shortened version of it (about 4 minutes long compared to the original 9). It seems to work best this way. This record is meant to be more open and spacious than recent…
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