No. 4 on Time Shift - Africa-style Trip-Hop "The Veld" is a song that expresses my nostalgia for the veld (or veldt) of South Africa - the wide open, wild landscapes of the interior of the country. There are many types of veld: the bushveld, the highveld, the lowveld, and so on, and my favourite, … Continue reading My version of ‘The Rain in Africa’
Track 3 on "Time Shift" The lyrics of this track are self-explanatory, even for someone who has never been on a mine site. When I wrote it, the lyrics were the easy parts. Expressing the ideas in music was a different challenge altogether. This is how I did it: I expressed the feeling of going … Continue reading “The Trembling Ground” – The sound of seismicity
To celebrate SpaceX’s breath-taking firing test yesterday, Feb. 9, 2023, of the gigantic Starship Super Heavy booster rocket (230 feet, 69 meters tall), with 31of 33 first-stage booster engines lighting up in a volcano of flame and smoke, here is the music video of my new track called “Space Crackle”. https://vimeo.com/797778275 Credits in video. Track … Continue reading To celebrate SpaceX’s massive engine firing test – here’s “Space Crackle”
Track 2 on Time Shift Sound Engineer Luke Garfield, who mixed and mastered The Ocean in E, called it "sonically luxurious". I think that's the nicest thing anyone has ever said about a song I've produced. I want to frame it and put it on my wall. He had to avoid the piece sounding chintzy … Continue reading “The Ocean in E” – Sonically luxurious
I've just published the first track on my new album, "Time Shift". The album is the result of a little walk down memory lane in 2022, particularly just before Christmas, remembering the standout things in my former life in South Africa: the local music scene, the wildlife, the wide-open spaces, the sounds that you only … Continue reading First track on “Time Shift” album: “Groove was in the House”
My ears are tired of writing music. They are ringing, buzzing, echoing, twanging and refusing to process any more auditory signals. I often think that Sound Engineers have the most amazing hearing - and the most amazing auditory signal processing cortexes in their brains. It's something you're born with, but still, to be able to … Continue reading My ears are tired
"Busted Piano" gets tweaked One of the features in iMovie that I hadn't known about until recently, is that you can set the speed of a clip by percentages, faster or slower. This means that you can much more precisely match the movements of the people in the clips, to the beat and tempo of … Continue reading How to visualize an A.I. piano performance for “Busted Piano”
The closing track on Painting Music is Outro. So Outro is the outro. Sorry for that pun. Couldn't resist. I was stuck for a name, much like Deadmau5 said he sometimes is, and then he resorts to calling his tracks things like Some Chords and Lack of a Better Name. Outro is the track in … Continue reading Away and back again – “Outro” on “Painting Music”
After a long debate with myself about where and how to place the lyrical videos I've made of my music, I finally settled on Vimeo. It's not free - but I did not feel comfortable with the sometimes questionable advertising, and being lumped together with all sorts of weird stuff on YouTube. Vimeo is a … Continue reading I chose Vimeo for my videos
This lyrical video was enjoyable to make, because it was not as hard to synchronize as others had been (since it is an easy 4/4 beat at 110 bpm), and because there were a lot of options for depicting the themes of the song. When you get down to it, how do you express two … Continue reading What exactly is “Exquisite”? – Lyrical video of “Exquisite Machine”
Track 8 of 9 on the album "Painting Music" took major effort. It was the most difficult track on this album and the one of which I'm proudest. I started it on Sept 9, 2022 and finished it on Oct. 6, 2022 - 4 weeks of working on it every day, all day. Doing this … Continue reading The most difficult and the best result – “Exquisite Machine”
If, like me, you are self-taught, the theory and structure of music are sometimes quite difficult to understand. I know what I want something to sound like, and I know what sort of melodies and which keys, tempos and rhythms give which feelings. But often I don't know how I got there, or what to … Continue reading I’ve Discovered E chords! (And they make me happy!)
À propos my post about music videos, I was sitting with my mouth hanging open when I saw the official video for German band Rammstein's latest release, Adieu, the last track on their album Zeit (Time). It was released on Nov. 24, 2022 and has had, to date, more than 9.8 million views. There's high … Continue reading This you’ve got to see: Music video of RAMMSTEIN’s “Adieu”
This track, just released on SoundCloud, is Track 7 of 9 on the album Painting Music. It's a new mix of one of the songs on the album. The song started with two types of sound recordings: the first was made on the “Sky” canvas of Google's experimental “Paint with Music” platform, which is in … Continue reading Becoming more machine-like: Hirajōshi and Air – Chris Perry Style
Busted Piano is the result of playing around on the Plink platform, and in the video you can see the visualization used on the platform - a moving line, waveform of little blobs. I chose a particularly whiny, mechanical sounding synth for an instrument on Plink. To my ears, it sounded like a badly maintained … Continue reading Track 6 on “Painting Music” – “Busted Piano”
How I visualize my music Update: Feb. 08, 2026 - The specifics in this post are outdated by now. I meant to share the steps in the laborious process of creating contents for music releases. That has not changed. However, I have stopped agonizing about the term "lyric videos". Courses for horses. It is what … Continue reading Now for the videos
Track 5 on album "Painting Music" Appleblossom Blink is a somber melody with some sweet chords. It's an original instrumental created from sounds generated on the web audio generation platforms Google Arts & Culture Paint with Music and Plink by DinahMoe. The composition is in the Japanese Hirajōshi scale, and features the melancholy shakuhachi flute … Continue reading “Appleblossom Blink” – A bit of East & West to a trip-hop beat
In his conversations with fans, The Red Hand Files, Nick Cave recently responded to someone who is angry because he found out that a public figure who he despises is a fan of a particular musician, same as he is. His questions are about who owns music - to whom does it belong? I found … Continue reading To whom does music belong?
The melody of Swagger & Swing started as notes on the fourth option on the “Paint with Music” platform, the “Street” canvas, which looks like a granite wall or pavement (shown below, left). This canvas has a more atonal sound than the others, and includes effects like scratching and hissing, which give a more grunge-like … Continue reading “Swagger & Swing” – Track 4 on “Painting Music
Track 3 on "Painting Music" This track has nothing to do with the 1717 Water Music Suites by George Frideric Handel, though when I chose the name I might have dredged up a memory of it, since it is one of my favourite classical music compositions. I could not resist having some fun with the … Continue reading “Water Music” – Waves, whale sounds and melancholy wind
A.I. Opera: It Started as just fun and ended up as real - and really nice. Dealing with very short audio clips like these ones, forced me to keep things focused and tight, and did not leave much room for getting fancy. The parameters impose their own discipline in the creative process. In the visualizer … Continue reading Track 2 on “Painting Music”- “A.I. Opera”
The tracks on my latest album, Painting Music, are the results of me experimenting on online platforms that produce both sounds and visuals from a user’s input. One of these is “Blob Opera”. All the platforms are experimental, meaning that as users use the platform and upload their creations, the database is expanded and the … Continue reading Singing opera with Blobs
Cōdae · Hirajoshi and Sky All the songs in this collection contain small clips or samples of machine-generated musical notes. I used online platforms that produce both sounds and visuals from a user’s input, the main one being “Paint with Music” (which is why the album has this name) which uses Google Magenta’s DDSP (Differentiable … Continue reading Track 1 on “Painting Music”: “Hirajōshi and Sky”
I make music in ways that interest me, and in ways that I can get my head around - bad grammar, but what it means in practice is that with every song I produce I make a bunch of mistakes, and learn something about myself or about music, or about the creative process. And then … Continue reading My New album “Painting Music” has dropped
Everyone has to start somewhere, when you create things. Something cannot come from nothing. I have learned this rather late in my life. You have to DO something: take a step, make a move, decide something, in order to create that thing you have in your mind. Or that thing that's been bothering you and … Continue reading From hesitant beginnings to happiness
Sometimes, you can work at a composition until you have tried every trick and technique you know of, and it still doesn't sound right. Something went wrong with the programming. Recently, Lex Fridman (computer scientist, artificial intelligence researcher, and research scientist at MIT) interviewed world famous, pioneering programmer and developer. John Carmack. Carmack said something … Continue reading When the only way forward is to can it – A new “Sunrise”
The documentary about Nick Cave and his albums Ghosteen and CARNAGE, This Much I Know To Be True (2022), is now available on MUBI, I just had to watch it. It was beautiful, memorable and thought-provoking. I don't often get so enthusiastic about something that I jump straight to the conclusion and just say - … Continue reading Superb: “This Much I know To be True”
About the Outro on Armin2016 Thinking up a name for a new song is as tricky as trying to name a band or an album. Just like with a book you've written, you have to find something that explains its essence, also contains words that fits it into the genre or category, and at the … Continue reading For lack of a better title, just call it “Outro”
When Morning Comes, on the album Armin2016, is a short, rhythmic track with a real hook of a chorus in which the key changes from minor to major. That’s followed by a throbbing drop and and outro of pulsating synths. It’s simple but full of energy – a song with which to greet the day, … Continue reading How long is a piece of…song?
It has been said about upright pianos that they turn into “1200-pound heirloom paperweights”, unless they are kept in tune and are played regularly. Otherwise they are simply large, heavy, awkwardly shaped pieces of furniture, not good as bookcases, nor any good as seating, often a home for mice, and sounding worse than an out-of-tune … Continue reading A story about pianos, diamonds and goats
