And so, after a short break and an unfortunate episode with this site whereby the first version of this entry was accidentally deleted, I return with two new tracks. It appears to be Latin Update Day – not because the music is of a Latin nature, but because I couldn’t think of any really good original titles and ended up doing some cheesy translations into Latin. More on that later, as I go through the rather dull back stories of the two new tracks.

“Sin Pie, Dex Pie” started out when I was playing with a keyboard’s sound effects and decided (like you do) to build a track around two of the rhythmic effects, the footsteps and the heartbeat. This, in turn, suggested a spooky, sinister style, which is what I strove to achieve, although I think I overdid it a bit and ended up with cheesy Hammer-horror style music. Anyway, the working title was “Sinister” all the way through until I encoded to MP3, at which point a quick Google search turned up the fact that the Roman military command “Left foot, right foot” came out as “Sin pie, dex pie”. That should clear up any confusion as to why I entitled a song after baked goods.

“Tintinnabula”, on the other hand, began shortly after I’d listened to Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. At first, it was a 45-second piece for four sets of bells, written very simply by doing about 8 bars and looping them, then layering the different parts. This wasn’t enough for a release by itself, so as I was casting about for music to do I came across this and added another 3 sections on the end. After a truly atrocious ending the first time I wrote it, the second attempt ended up much nicer, although it still felt a little forced. The name for this one is even simpler; the Latin for “bell” is “Tintinnabulum”. Those Romans had good words for everything.

I’m not entirely happy with either of these pieces…they sound a little scrappy or forced in some places, and I don’t think either is as good as GBZ, still by far my favourite of my own works. Still, with this update I have doubled my released solo work, so it can’t be a wholly bad thing. Enjoy, or at least don’t hate too much.