in the later parts of the CV19 lockdown I completed a spoken word project. it is titled Theometasopohical; a word derived from some of the inputs to the work that guided the process.it had been a long time since I used the studio and this project is a little rough but otherwise complete. “a drum beats, it tells a tale of time, my heart beats, it tells a tale of rhyme.” stay tuned for uploads…

the Foil EP was the next project for 2022 and is a very short offering. it started it’s incarnation from a really wild text I received from a friend who witnessed a rather drawn out intervention by the authorities to move on a drifter. there were a bunch of references to foil and the context changed rapidly.

around the same time I was part of an online guitar course that gave me some drive to repair and mod my fleet of guitars. in summary there are 4, 5 and 6 string basses, a Banjo, various ukuleles, a Les Paul, a Stratocaster, lap-slide and a heavily modified acoustic ‘Frankenstein’ that has three pickups and various percussion gadgets attached. the key instrument for this project though was a Samick Avion Les Paul by Greg Bennett that I have modified in pure stereo – each pickup is independently fed to a tone pot and direct output, this then was fed into stereo effects to give a much wider sound than a single output via a splitter.

the studio is based on a Windows98 system running Logic Audio with plug in delay and reverb. Behringer supplied the mixer, the Crave analogue synthesiser, Stereo Effects and Stereo Reverb. some drums were compiled on the MQ6100 otherwise the various drums in the room. there is a Roland Juno D, Zoom 707 and and Ibanez UE305 and TS9.

also I had started some work in random tones this year for my spoken word treatment and extended that to this project. in a respectful gesture of Dr Sheldon Cooper, listed my 5 sets of lyrics and various vocal skills, sounds, effects and styles of percussion and rolled a dice to match them up; drawing up my arrangements in a coffee shop before powering up the rig. oh and the lyrics were created from an online poem generator using key words of my choosing.

in summary, multi tasking in a littoral environment. that’s all from me for now, take care and I hope to chat soon. Bestest. D.