Ascender - another track from Symbolic

Hiya. I've posted a few tracks here before, but I'm working on my album at the moment, so I thought I'd stick another track, "Ascender", up at Myspace.

It's the second one down on my profile, http://www.myspace.com/covertmusic . Hope some of you like it - it's, like most of my stuff, in a kinda indie/electroish vein. I'd really appreciate any comments you all might have.

(If you're short of things to listen to, which round here isn't likely but what the hell, check out my labelmates Redpoint - http://www.myspace.com/redpointhidden - too. They're superb.)

Thought it was wicked mate, no real criticism to offer. Nice one :grin:

  Iain C said:

Thought it was wicked mate, no real criticism to offer. Nice one :grin:

Wow, cheers. I've been working on this track, on and off, for a few months; what usually happens is that tracks sort of write themselves really quickly (it rarely takes more than two or three hours to have the structure of a track down), and then it's just a case of trying to get a mix/set of sounds that work. I reckon this comes from my approach; I'm still essentially as much an indie guitarist as anything else, so a track'll come from a riff based around a few chords. I definitely tend to write starting from that, something like figuring out a rhythm-guitar riff on keyboards, then sketching in bass and melodies/harmonies, and only then worrying about the drums - by that time, often what they can do is dictated by the rhythm of all the other parts. I've only written one decent track, "Gull", where the drums are in a sense the "lead" instrument; normally they're very much subordinate to everything else, and honestly I probably care about them less. They were easily the hardest part of this track to get OK, though.

I think that's why I enjoy working in Reason - it limits what I can do in a sense through only having limited synths/effects, but it pretty closely maps onto the way I think about music. I'm very much "right, let's set up a 'band' - bass, pad/keys/'rhythm guitar', lead instruments, drums - and write parts for them", and there are few enough options that I don't spend time worrying about too many alternatives. I pretty much have to write quickly or I just wind up second-guessing myself too much.

Anyway, this track's still not perfect, I doubt it'll ever be - I find it so much easier to listen to other people's music, without the preconceptions I bring to my own about how it 'should' sound - but it's closer to the kind of thing I was aiming for. Finally got this mix of it after listening to a bunch of Morr Music tracks; it gave me the confidence to just whack the pad sound right up, which is what I'd been missing in the previous however-many versions... I wanted something which sounded big in the way bands like MBV did, that wide-screen kind of sound, whilst still being pretty driving and 'fast'. It's meant to be the first full track on my record, so I wanted it to set my stall out fast.

Gawd, how pseudy is that? I'm just trying to write tracks I don't cringe listening to. :grin:

I loved the melody, nice layering, reverb, beats are secondary, doesnt matter, not every track is a beat track, hence this, i dug your ep aswell, very nice understated melodies and drums

9/10

I can see the indie sentiment, but it works really well, almost cocteau twins melodies, love it.

  plugexpert said:

dude, you should make pop music! :)

Thanks, I think!

You've hit on something there; I'm definitely into the pop/"indie" end of electronic music more than anything else - I love the Jackson and his Computer Band record from last year, Ulrich Schnauss's "A Strangely Isolated Place" is half the reason I got a MIDI keyboard - I even, unironically, like really mainstream electropop like Air and Ladytron. When I was about five, just about the first record I ever bought was "Please" by the Pet Shop Boys; Bjork and Radiohead's "Everything In Its Right Place" show up in my DJ sets, guitar's my strongest instrument, I'm into Wire to the extent that there's a cover of a (post-punk era) track of theirs on my record... yeah, guilty as charged, pretty much. I'm just coming at the genre from the indie/post-rock end of things, not the dancefloor or theoretical angles.

I mean, I liked 'Untilted', but for me it mostly works at a cerebral level; I have to sit down and really listen hard to get much out of music like that. With a hypothetical gun to my head, I'd have to admit I'd rather listen to Kraftwerk, or Plaid, or Wisp, or (my current obsession, been listening to it loads over the last couple of days) Fennesz's 'The Point Of It All', or even some bits of completely straightforward indie-rock like Teenage Fanclub (definite guilty-pleasure territory there in this crowd). I'll take a great tune with pedestrian beats over fantastic beats with a dull tune ten times out of ten.

My favourite EKT of last year was Fieldtriqp's "People Damage", because I just couldn't get 'Si Elle' out of my head for weeks. It just has these interlocking, insanely hooky melodies. The production's top-notch, but that's not what sticks in my mind about the track; it was that I'd be walking down a corridor and bits of the tune would just come back to me unbidden. That's the effect I want to have.

Jaffa: thank you! Cocteau Twins - I'm really flattered. That EP was really the first thing I did after getting a controller keyboard; they were the first tracks I ever properly completed apart from some doodles in Buzz ages ago, and apart from "Rainsong" they were all done in the really cut-down Reason Adapted that came with my audio interface. I'm pretty pleased with how they came out in the end, but I've learnt a hell of a lot (of, with hindsight, really basic things about choosing sounds and mixing) since then!

sickness, all of them.