My friends Jackie and Stephen have started a series of salons in Dennistoun called, "House Music." I had the privilege of performing last night along with the artist Sue Tompkins. The feeling in the room was great and it resulted in some very nice performances.   I've mixed the recordings of the performance and released them on the "name your price" site,Bandcamp, where you can download them in a variety of formats, including FLAC, which will give you the same quality as CD

I've added another person to the Influences playlist - Syd Barrett, the founder of Pink Floyd. Toward the end of his time with Pink Floyd, there were stories of him simply playing one chord throughout an entire performance. I used to think that was odd, but now I think he might have been onto something. By the way - there's a direct literary connection between this song and the name of my band, Cinema Volta.  The first person who guesses right in the comments below will

I've put together a collection of composers and performers who have influenced the creation of "Music Chamber."  I think you'll be able to see a common thread here. All of these pieces have a focus on the resonance and sonorities created by massed voices, whether human or instrumental.  You'll find Rhys Chatam, Glen Branca, György Ligeti,  and Charlemagne Palestine.  This playlist will keep developing as more influences come back to me. And on a side note - I produced the G

I've released the "Angels" pieces as an album called, "Music Chamber."  These are the high quality masters of the tracks, which I highly recommend listening to.  Because of the nature of the music, a lot of the overtones and "phantom" voices are lost with the compressed streaming versions. I've put these up on the "name your price," site, Bandcamp, where you can download them in a variety formats.  I recommended you choose FLAC, which is a "lossless" format that will give yo

I've just finished a three part guitar piece called, "And Angels Sing Thee To Thy Rest," and here are the rough mixes of them. They are very simple pieces each in an open tuning, and all of them played into a massive reverb. Part 3 was written for David Gamper and performed at his memorial concert at Roulette in NYC last year. Part 1 is in open D on my Stratocaster, using two Spider capos. Part 2 is in open E on my Yamaha acoustic, also using the Spider capos. Part 3 is

An easy to follow essay on how we got into this mess: Who killed the music industry? An interactive explainer | PandoDaily.

In my previous post, I discussed the recent announcement by Thom Yorke of Radiohead that he was pulling his music from Spotify. This announcement has caused quite a stir, with lots of people taking pro and anti Spotify positions.  It's important to have this sort of debate, but the focus on Spotify is causing people to miss the real point. Although his target was Spotify, ProducerNigel Godrich defined the real problem when he posted, “Making new recorded music needs funding

Reflecting on the link I posted about Thom Yorke quitting Spotify, I kept thinking about the statement in the article that, "The industry average offers slightly less than 0.4p a stream – meaning that 1m streams of a song would generate about £3,800. Most songs receive far fewer streams." The problem with this statement is that it equates streaming with sales, instead of viewing it as the modern equivalent of spins on radio, which is far more apt an analogy. People stream th

Tom Yorke is right about the problem of funding new artists, but he's got the wrong enemy in his sights.  Spotify is not a cheapskate record label, it's a generous radio network. More on this in a bit. Thom Yorke blasts Spotify on Twitter as he pulls his music | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

I only took four years, but here's a new one: March Loop by Cinema Volta

Another new track and this time you didn't have to wait six months for it. This track was made very simply with just my Les Paul, my eBow and a really long, dense reverb courtesy of RaySpace. There were no looping or harmonic effects used at all, which is unusual for me. Infinite guitar 1 It's interesting how an instrument can guide you in certain directions. My Strat leads me to play mostly in A and G, while my Les Paul demands to be played in E.

Here's a new track done with a new guitar on a new computer with new software in a new apartment in a new city in a new year. I recorded this in my flat in Glasgow with my brand spanking new ebony Les Paul custom on an Intel iMac using Cubase 4. New Guitar 2, 24th February, 2007. I did use some old stuff to make this as well, primarily my very, very old eBow. I also had to use Cubase SX 3 to do the final master because Cubase 4 doesn't support dithering yet.

I told you this would be sporadic. Here's a slow guitar mediation. It's just something dashed off pretty quickly, has a lot of distortion, but I like it anyway. Guitar Mediation One, June 16, 2006.

Sten Hanson recently had a birthday celebration at Fylkingen here in Stockholm. Sten's old friend and my fairly new friend Charlie Morrow was not able to make it over from New York for the event, so he asked me to assist him in a collaborative piece. He chose two tracks, one of his and one of Sten's and I assembled them into this track, adding some of my processes as the glue to hold them together. Sten's Birthday Now for the fine print. This track is not covered by the Crea

Here's another Guitar Meditation. Guitar Mediation Three, March 26, 2006.

Here's the first of the tracks. Guitar Mediation One, March 30, 2006.

And another one. By now, you can see the biggest difference between this project and Daily Ambience is that the tracks are not necessarily posted in chronological order. These guitar meditations make heavy use of filtered delays and slowly decaying loops. I'm working on ways of making the setup I use responsive to playing. I've got a long way to go, so there will be more of these in the future. Guitar Mediation Two, March 26, 2006.

And one to grow on . . . 2006-02-14 This track is a summation of the entire year's output, rendered by iTunes Signature Maker. It examines a group of files, extracts what's similar and combines them into a single audio file. If you want to stream all 366 tracks, here's a Spotify playlist: A Year of Daily Ambience. This has been quite a project - at this point I can't believe it's finished. I'm not sure what comes next. I'll take a bit of time off, then plan the next project.

Here it is, the 365th and final track of this project. This is a piano study placed in Gasverket. The timing and duration of the notes comes from the decay of the reverb. Each note was held until the sound had completely decayed, then the next note would be played, selected somewhat at random. At the same time, the piano was also being sent to Augustus Loop, which was set to a 25 second loop time. 2006-02-13

Here's a quick and dirty didjeridoo track set in Gasverket, a huge, brick gas tank here in Stockholm. 2006-02-12