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Old Oct 11 2008, 9:00 AM
Mike Mike is offline

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Overall, I personally found your musical ideas a bit too simplistic, although Oriental Voyage contained some fairly interesting stuff. Trance (and, to an extent, lounge/chill-out) is inherently a music of simplicity, but there does need to be enough in there of interest to prevent the listener from slipping into a state of boredom. Reich and Glass often start with semi-interesting ideas in the first place which become more interesting on repetition, development, layering and so on. It's all about the process, as Reich says... I think you also need to consider whether the stylistic mash-ups really work, or whether they're just a sort of token addition. Normally these things come about because there's something about a certain combination that just "clicks" (e.g. hip hop and breakbeat fused with Indian bhangra).

Sound in general is also fun to explore. For example, in Olympus, I heard at the very beginning what sounded like left over reverberations from some chord or other. Possibly this found its way into the recording by accident, but wouldn't it be interesting to sample this sound and explore the possibilities? I've used sounds in my own electronic pieces that are just reverberation noises from separate works, the swillings of harmonics you get when multiple notes are struck on a piano with its sustain pedal down, etc.

I would perhaps recommend getting acquainted with a couple more softsynths, maybe a sampler, and possibly lusher samples for those acoustic instruments. Because electronic music offers so many possibilities in terms of the sounds you can end up with, as opposed to simply notes on paper, it's liberating to equip yourself with tools to that end.

Here's some intriguing lounge stuff to listen to: http://www.myspace.com/starklounge
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