Category: Music

Fellow Travelers

My fifth EP as Anderhill is Fellow Travelers. No, it’s not about communism or socialism, it’s just more experimental electronic music. The title simply suggests that the music is for like-minded people, those who either write or appreciate listening to music with ambient and droning qualities to it.

The EP seems to pick up where the last one, Time & Texture, left off. I could almost add the two EPs together and make a single LP, yet there are subtle differences between the two works. Fellow Travelers has fewer drums and more drones.

It’s another step in my musical journey that continues to lead me up new and unique paths in electronic music composition. – dse

Kinks

Writing in itself is not usually frustrating to me. Composing music is also generally not frustrating. However, the technology used to create webpages and audio recordings are often filled with kinks.

I’ve pared down on how much technology I use, but it still often feels like too much. I cut my social media in half. I’m reducing the websites I operate from four down to one. Still, technology has its kinks that can be both challenging and an obstacle.

Maybe, I’m showing my age, but things didn’t used to be this way. Dealing with our daily responsibilities and hobbies was as simple as dropping a letter in the mailbox and picking up a guitar. Now we have a myriad of logins and passwords to remember. We have programs and technical systems that can randomly glitch. We have Internet that can crap out. And the system is always changing. Kinks.

There are days when I want to erase my digital presence and go back to living like it’s 1981. I likely won’t do anything so dramatic. I might take some short breaks. In this age, part of being a writer and a musician includes the kinks of learning and keeping up with the technology.

One thing that has lessened my kinks lately has been switching to a new hosting service. I moved from a shared-hosting service to a premium host. This new site is hosted through Flywheel.

In the end, I always seem to accept the challenge. Frustration, kinks, and all, I continue to keep doing my best to learn what I need to know to keep this thing alive. – dse

Time & Texture

I really enjoyed composing this 2019 electronic music release. Time & Texture was an experiment in using repetitive beats, ambient sounds, and very subtle melodic structures. It’s not minimalist music in the classical sense, but it is experimentation in minimalism as an art form, as is much of what I compose as Anderhill.

A few of these songs were completed while traveling and spending time in Northern California near the Redwoods and the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps, I’ve caught a little bit of the awe of that natural beauty in the music. – dse

Aleatoric Music

About four years ago, I was growing discouraged about composing music. It felt like everything sounded the same. I wanted to make something different. I had an idea. What if I created music by rolling dice? I played around with the idea, but things started getting weird real fast. I didn’t follow through.

After some research, I discovered that rolling dice in musical composition goes back to the classical era. It’s called aleatoric music, alea = dice.

Recently, I’ve been rethinking attempting to create some aleatoric or chance music. There’s no single method or set of rules as to how this kind of music is created.

Some composers rolled the dice for every single musical change, while others only rolled the dice for some of the basic parameters and structure of the composition. You might imagine that composers who rolled the dice for everything wound up with some weird music. Personally, I prefer the idea of only applying chance to certain aspects of a composition.

In the near future, I’ll be working on some Anderhill pieces that include playing with the use of aleatoric composition. For me, it’s an experiment less in making music that is weird and unusual, and more a challenge to create unique music that has set parameters and limitations.

Sometimes, you just have to roll the dice. – dse

We All Must Rise

Released in January, 2019, We All Must Rise is Anderhill’s third EP.

On this recording, I continue to experiment in sampling everyday sounds. The first track, “Washing It All Away,” makes use of a washing machine, the second track, “Deep Cycles,” a dryer. The fourth track samples an old upright piano, creating a glitchy melodic loop. As with words and poetry, trying different combinations of sounds in musical composition is the joy of the creative process.

The EP has a hypnotic quality about it that makes it very meditative. Later, I also compose long-play versions of the first two tracks. – dse

Out of the Radio Static

Have you ever listened to the radio static? Not much there is there? Maybe that’s the point. It’s white noise. It’s free of information. With the endless amounts of information we’re fed these days, perhaps a small dose of radio static is like medicine.

In composing music as Anderhill, one thing I’ve practiced is using audio samples of everyday sounds. Washing machines, the hum of an air conditioner, and radio static have all found their way into the music. I established this practice of weaving white noise into the music by my second Anderhill release, Out of the Radio Static.

White noise and droning sounds have a meditative quality about them. Random bleeps, crackles, and glitches make for slightly quirky music. – dse