I’m currently going through the tracks that will be the 11th volume of my archives.  The journey is interesting, personal and revealing… For most of the tracks (practically all of them) that I have released my friends have been the only audience.

It’s hard to fathom that the tracks I’m going through now have been conceived 11 years ago. Here’s one track from the past – Solina. Solina is Finnish and means the sound which water makes when it flows around small pebbles and things. In this case the actual sound comes from the kitchen sink of the flat where I lived back then.

I had a microphone by the sink, let the water run and recorded the track live without much preparations. The basis of the track is a 7/4 beat that probably took a some time to create. Back then if a track took more than an hour to compose I considered it too much.

The steady pulse that goes with the beat is DX-7, which is set to play one note only, and which takes the trigger from any midi input that comes from the drum machine. I used this method often, and all kinds of fruitful melodies revealed themselves now and then.

Over the beat Polysix goes through an arpeggio, which is not synced to anything. The few note melody comes from a Casio keyboard, which I intuitively played while mixing the track. The hardest to mix was usually the drum machine, DR-660, because I had to mix its sounds individually in and out, and the interface is not very intuitive.

All the mixing was done while performing the tracks – there wasn’t any automation or pre-recorded backgrounds.

This is the only take of the track. I usually had some plan in my mind how I would mix the sounds in but I never planned how to end the tracks. The latest element that is mixed in, the noisy choir, is something I grabbed from some passing TV-show of the moment.

The tenth volume of my archives is now available from archive.org.

I’ve just uploaded a new track to MySpace.

The track has been loitering on one of my hard disks for some time, since 2004.

The recording was accomplished without overdubs, and the track features distorted analogue synth lead and uncontrolled resonances on a slow and steady beat.  I accidentally opened the original 44 kHz recording at 48 kHz for mastering, so the final track became 47 seconds shorter and somewhat higher pitched than the original.

The track is called Nimetön, which means Unnamed or Nameless. It’s also the name of the ring finger. Now that I looked it up I also found out that in some cultures the finger in question has healing and magical powers.