FOUR, by Kieron James

So here it is. The fruits of around three weeks work and the first track for the album FOUR. The track has been beautifully mastered by @pure_tone whose attention to detail and ability to make stuff sparkle is second to none.

My plan at this stage is to complete FOUR before moving on to the other three albums, two of which are collaborative. I’ll be posting four bars of some of the individual channels here too – to see which inspires the collaborators and me to write for Blue Omen, Half-BIT and Sómio.

“Organised Sound” is a phrase coined by the stratospheric colossus of sound, Edgard Varèse. I was switched on to Varèse’s life and work by Chris Randall’s Analog Industries blog. From time to time he produces limited run, sound-themed tee shirts. I missed his Delia Derbyshire edition (sold out), but managed to get hold of one of the fabulous Varèse shirts designed by Stefan Goodchild.

And that’s the story behind the first track for FOUR.

Organised Sound by kieronjames

I posted a few days ago about my plan to release four albums this year and this week I started on the first track (not necessarily in terms of running order) for Four, which will be released under my own name. As mentioned in the last post, the other three will be produced under the Somió, Half-BIT and Blue Omen projects / collaborations.

So, here are twenty bars laying out some of the ideas I’ve been exploring for Four Track #1 (as yet untitled).

Once the track is complete, I’ll also post four bar samples of each of the stem files and select one sound for each of the “sibling” tracks on the other three albums.

Update: 22/01/2010

Hard to believe I spent three to four hours getting the sound on these four words and I’ve still not mixed or EQ’d the vocal track! Anyway, @groovecriminals was curious about what had taken me so long and whilst I’m sure it’ll be a disappointment, may as well put that work into the context of the piece:

Organised Sound (work in progress) by kieronjames

Update: 21/01/2010

Got a little more time on this. Have some doubts, but I’ll sit on it for a day and see what I think tomorrow / Saturday.

Four Track One (work in progress) by kieronjames

Update: 17/01/2010

Uploading the second update via Soundcloud as I’ve no FTP access today. May continue to do this as it makes it easier to annotate files. Might even consider upgrading to a paid Soundcloud account. Anyway, not had much time for this as I’ve been working on a track for Gavin Fisher (aka @bootslam. Added a bit of guitar (new melody) and some effects using PSP Nitro.

Four #1 by kieronjames

First Upload: 07/01/2010

[See post to listen to audio]