My crazy electronic tunes

Hi there,

this are two projects I have done...

MySpace.com - www.arcosine.com - London, London and South East - Trance / Electronica / Experimental - www.myspace.com/arcosine - mixing trance and house with other musical genres (punk, african beats, film music etc...)

MySpace.com - NEPTILOS - London, London and South East - Down-tempo / Ambient / Healing & EasyListening - www.myspace.com/neptilos - kind of the same above but more lounge chill-out music

Comments welcome !

I liked the NEPTILOS stuff more than ARCOSINE, because it was more classical and less repetitive. I really liked the melody in "Walking in the Desert". What was that instrument? I know I've heard it before.

Anyway, I know Trance music is supposed to be repetitive, but I think you overdid it at times. One thing I did like, was the fact that you actually changed keys in a very classical, developmental style, and that was something I had not heard much of in Trance music, even if you were just repeating the same thing in a different key.

An ending note:
"Adagio for Trance"?
WHAT! THE! FUUUUUUCCCC......

Hi there,

Thanks for your comments. :-)

I know my music is repetitive, it was made that way in purpose. It was intended to be a bit minimalistic and also more directed to the dance floor, not really for home listening, and that is why I have long boring songs Of course you could say the same from Steve Reich or P. Glass if you are not a minimalistic fan or don't know what minimalism is. (I'm not comparing myself to them at all, I'm just stating that).

So if you want more complex stuff have a look at my song Oriental Voyage based on the Gamala Taki method and Polyrhythms stuff. Track 6 on my Neptilos Myspace page

About Walking In The Desert, the initial instrument is an Indian sitar (not very good quality sampled tough)... and about Adagio For Trance I'm perfectly aware the tempo of the song is too fast for an adagio (and I actually wrote one Adagio for strings and oboe that can be heard on my Neptilos Myspace Page - 3rd song). Since the song features a bunch of strings on the song and the song has actually a slower tempo than the typical trance song, I decided to call it that way...

Thanks

Andre

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

Interesting stuff, but I agree that it's a bit repetitive for my taste. Oriental voyage had some good moments, although I'm not a fan of stereotyping geographic locations or musical "genres" into clumps.

Lost souls was also cool - this kind of highly repetitive, rather straightforward (I don't mean that in a negative way) music is definitely worth listening to, but in my opinion it's a different kind of listening than a lot of other music on this avant garde/electronic forum. I think it's more background music, nothing that draws too much attention from the listener... it leans more towards pop than art music. I wouldn't be surprised to hear these tracks on a film soundtrack one day.

This raises a bigger question (and one that's probably already been discussed) - why the hell did they lump avant-garde and electronic together into one forum??? Some electronic music is avant garde, and some avant garde music is electronic, but they're in no way synonymous or even similar genres. All sharks live underwater, but not everything underwater is a shark.