Always Save Your Work

I've always saved everything. I have a big box of musical sketches dating all the way back to 1980, when I wrote the first thing that was in the zone (A Bossa Nova, now entitled Aria Nova). Well, another thing I kept around was my Synclavier work. Many boxes of 5.25" floppies. So naturally, once I got a working Synclavier again, I got them out. Wow. Almost all of them are still good! Included in those files are sequences I did of the songs my old band, B-Rock, played. So that's an EP right there, as there are eleven sequences, of which I'm only going to share nine.

There is also all of the classical stuff I did during my masters and doctoral studies! I did a Synclavier sequence of Bach's Contrapunctus 1 from Art of Fugue when I was at UNT. It is very compelling, IMHO.

It's amazing that I have recovered all of this, but I want to share some of the B-Rock stuff first, because there was no written record of it,and only a few recorded things, none of which included these sequences, since I wrote them for myself. If I hadn't saved those disks, and they hadn't lasted these thirty years, this thousand hours or so of my work would have been lost forever. Almost all of these timbre programs are mine, so I'm talking about that programming time time too.

Here are tracks two through six of nine. One and nine are a landing and takeoff, since we're from another planet (!) - essentially a craven effort to show off my sound effects programming skills - and so there are seven actual songs. The two I discarded were not really songs we jammed on, but extra curricular stuff I did with the band in mind.

You Can Find Me

In Search

The intro/exit was improvised by my friend Kate, who is an amazing musician.

Only Asking

Present Time (4495)

What We Say

BTW, this is just a raw recording of the Synclavier's outputs, overdriving a Lexicon FW810s in order to get the tape saturation compression emulation. By the end of next month, I should have all of them mastered, ordered, and burned to a CD.