This is a track that zoe and I put together for E-Bru, back in 2001, but which we never finished. At the time it had some fast break-beat drums going on under the verse and went in a totally different direction, and there was also a second verse that was never recorded.

I think we played it live with Georgie a couple of times, but again it wasn't recorded.

However, it's such a beautiful song that I've decided it's high-time it was finished off. I've ditched the frantic drums, which I think were one of the sticking points that stopped us finishing it - they never really worked - and went for a much more toned-down, stripped-back vibe which brings out the lyric and captures the mood of the song a lot better, and I'm really happy with the end result.

I've also taken this opportunity to bring the site into the 21st century (a bit) so we now include an embedded music player. No more having to download a track to listen to it! Completely co-incidentally, and wholly appropriately, the player that I am using is called Flowplayer!

It's a wedding mash-up! A couple of friends, Joe and Jude, are getting married today and it inspired me to put together a little present for them. The picture might give you a little clue...

Congratulations, guys! Happy zeroth wedding anniversary!

It also happens to be the 50th track I've uploaded to this site, so Happy Anniversary to me, too!

As Slade would annoyingly shout: "It's Christmas"! And as pedants would annoyingly correct them, "No - it's still advent - Christmas doesn't start until 25th December".

Amazingly, I've found another Christmas-themed song at the bottom of my song barrel, which is an arrangement of 'Little Drummer Boy' that I did for A-level music. I have absolutely no idea why I chose this piece for my arrangement. I think I just liked the tune.

The recording comes from an old cassette tape, so apologies for the quality. It is a simple MIDI recording of the parts, which were transcribed for printing purposes, not for performing purposes, so overall it's not the most inspiring recording I've produced. However, the arrangement is pretty good, I think, so hopefully there'll be some Christmas cheer to be squeezed out of it!

Happy Christmas!

After last week's posting, I thought it might be a good idea to put up some of that early E-Bru jungle that I was talking about, as all the E-Bru stuff that's currently available in the web is a lot more recent (and a lot less jungle).

This track is called simply 'Drums', and rather than putting up the album version, I've dug out a live recording from 1998, which comes complete with all the excitement of the live crowd. Whistles at the ready!

In the Autumn term of my third year of uni, I was casting around for a new musical project to further distract me from my studies. My previous band, Whizzers Of Waz, had drawn to a close the previous term and I knew it would be a hard act to follow (to quote Fraser Smith, who we were supporting at the time, "Whizzers Of Waz - what the fuck were they on about?").

I had decided I wanted to do 'live dance music' but hadn't yet figured how that would work. Of course, the eventual result was E-Bru, which in the early days went down a very definite drum 'n' bass route, but there were various other experiments along the way. They culminated in a live jam with about 8 people - keyboards, guitars, drums (live and programmed), percussion, bass, samples and tape loops. The session was a lot of fun, but made me realise I really didn't want to go down the massive line-up route again. So Bob and I locked ourselves in a room, drank some strong coffee and went looking for a mad singer/dancer to complete the three-piece.

Unfortunately, no recording of the mega-jam exists (to my knowledge), but I do have recordings of some of the earlier experiments, and this is one of them. It was a collaboration between me and a first-year called JD (I'm not sure if I ever new what the initials stood for), and is basically a live jam - JD on drum machine and me on keyboards.

The track is heavily and obviously influenced by Baroque music, which is something I have had a great affinity with since A-level music, where we harmonised Bach corales on a weekly basis. In my second year of uni, I had even toyed with a new style of music I had invented, called Barock, but couldn't drum up enough other interested parties to realise my grand plans.

This track draws from those same influences, and marks the tiny part of the Venn diagram where 18th century fugal counterpoint and 1990s house music intersect. However, as I said, my focus subsequently moved towards a more computer-based approach - proof that the old adage is true; my Bach is worse than my byte!

Following on from my last update, here is the second of two remixes I did for The Last Army, back in 2008. This one is a remix of Submit To The Chemical.

As I mentioned in my last post, my computer died a smoky death in the middle of the project, before I'd even begun this second remix. I had big plans for this track, all of which had to go out of the window. Without my main computer, I was stuck with my laptop. I had no way of recording any additional live tracks and wasn't even able to plug in my MIDI keyboard to record anything that way. All I had was the source material, my sample library and whatever software I had got round to installing on the laptop (which wasn't as much as I'd hoped). I had to scale back my ideas quite a bit, so it ended up being a bit of a hatchet job, alas.

I did a couple of versions of the track - the first was a bit of a jungle remix, which I quite liked, but which they felt was a bit heavy for the target audience. So, with time running out, I did a more club-tempo version, which is what I've uploaded here.

It wasn't what I'd planned, thanks to the world conspiring against me, but all in all it ended up pretty good, considering!

This is a remix I did in 2008 for a band called The Last Army. They were preparing to launch themselves in the US, and were after club-friendly remixes of two of their tracks, a la Hot Chip or Crystal Castles. (Apparently, that's what was big in the New York club scene at the time.)

This first one is called Dead - you can hear the original here. My remix was slated as a B-Side (or whatever you call it in this digital age) for the US single release, but I'm not sure whether that happened or not. The band, alas, is no more, but lead singer Rebekah Delgado is still going strong as a solo artist.

Unfortunately, my computer died a smoky death in the middle of the project, so I lost a lot of time (thankfully no data!) and was unable to extend this track to the length I had planned. However, at least this remix was broadly finished... the second one hadn't even been started!

I'll pick up the story next time, when I upload my remix of Submit To The Chemical.

Well, it's been a long time, hasn't it! To make up for things, let's re-open the proceedings with a biggie. It is called, appropriately enough, The Awakening, and was the first 'feature-length' piece that I wrote, running in at over 24 minutes. It was written in 1999, with Julie, and is the first of what turned out to be a trilogy of pieces that we wrote together for InterFiction dance company, all of which meshed live performance, video wall and an immersive Clements/Nwankwo soundtrack.

The mood is gothic-horror, with plenty of dark organs, church bells and gregorian chanting, and a vampire-heavy story-line. The piece also features some of the most complicated rhythms I think I've ever written. The middle section is two bars of 11/16 followed by two of 10/16 (though with occasional variations), with an additional 4/4 snare pattern running underneath it all. Not for the faint-hearted!

Now that I'm back, I hope to continue with regular music updates (fingers crossed!). I'm going to be focussing on old material, digging things up and giving them a bit of polish, rather than new stuff, as my current musical projects are a bit more long-term, and are not recording-focussed.

See also: Soundscape - an excerpt from The House On The Hill, the third piece in the trilogy.

Dave and Steve^* discover an unmarked bottle, and poor old Pedro finds out that it isn't quite as tasty as he was led to believe...

^*Let's make it absoLUTEly clear Dave and Steve were definitely 'not there' - this song proves it once and for all and anyway I told Dave we shouldn't of and I'm really sorry, honest, and we never forced him to drink it or nuffink so it's all Pedro's fault, and anyway, who's Pedro?

This track was written for On The Blog, the Radio 2 sitcom by Kris Dyer & Dave Marks, and was featured in the first episode of Series 2, broadcast last Saturday.

The song is by Cagouls - a Levellers-style band - and was featured on their EP Civil Britain, a concept-EP based on the English Civil War. The song tells the story of Boye, the poodle belonging to Prince Rupert, who was believed to have super-natural powers which protected his owner from being harmed in battle. At Marston Moor, Boye was killed and (not to spoil the ending or anything...) Rupert was, for the first time, defeated.

I thought it would be funny if the band had a folk-rock cellist instead of the standard fiddle. Plus I can play the cello... even if it has been about 10 years since I last opened the case!

This track came out of an experiment that involved myself, a certain Mr. Steve Haines and one or two boozes. The resulting nonsense was given to Steve's erstwhile companion (and now good lady wife), Kate, who managed to take the disjointed craziness and add a lyric that somehow tied it all together.

Several more sessions were needed to make it actually work (during one of which we 'accidentally' wrote another song whilst playing around with an old Casio keyboard) but eventually it was mixed to our satisfaction, and so, almost a year-and-a-half later, here it finally is!

The lyrics were inspired by the novel Hotel World by Ali Smith. As I didn't write them, I won't comment any further, but I will say that the book itself is well worth a read!

This was one of the early pieces of music that I wrote with Julie (circa 1998, I think). To be honest, I can't remember whether it was for a dance piece that she was working on, or whether it was just written for its own sake. It is based on the Philip Larkin poem "This Be The Verse" and involved some early sampler/4-track experimentation... and a fair bit of musical experimentation to boot!

The more observant above you may also notice a slight similarity between this and a certain E-Bru tune...

I met up with an old friend last week, who was telling me about his fear of hospitals. He told me he can happily sit through a gory horror movie, but he immediately feels queasy if a news report shows even a glimpse of a hospital corridor.

This is a mister badman track that I wrote with another friend with a similar phobia (though you'd never guess from the title...)

This latest mister badman is the highest tune I've ever written. It was composed, recorded and initially mixed in the French Alps, at about 3,500ft. Vocals were recorded via headphones and the original mix done on my laptop speakers. It sounded shit, and languished on my hard drive as a 'lost cause' for over 2 years.

I recently rediscovered it whilst doing a bit of computer house-keeping and decided it wasn't all that bad after all. I fixed up the vocals as best I can, and completely remixed the music, and this is the result. If you've been paying attention, you might recognise the piece of music that fades in towards the end of the track...

This song is a simple acoustic affair (guitar & voice - and yes, that is me singing!).

It was inspired by (but not about) a girl I met at a gig. We had a long chat about lyrics and poetry, and somehow concluded that I don't write enough serious songs. I went home and wrote and recorded this in about an hour (it's only a rough demo) just to show that I could... before going back to the stupidity that is mister badman.

There is ruin and decay
In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.

   - The House On The Hill
     Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1894

This is an excerpt from a longer piece that I wrote with Julie, called House On The Hill. It was the third of a trilogy of moody Gothic pieces we wrote for dance company Inter-fiction, each between 20-25 minutes long and performed with live dancers in front of wall-to-ceiling video projections. This third effort was undeniably the most successful, and created a very unsettling feeling which was particularly present in the synergy between the video and the music, which was written to picture.

This section is a sound-scape from around the middle of the piece and depicts the separation of two of the characters as they are drawn hypnotically towards the source of the evil energy that has taken hold of them.

I've been in the process of archiving some old E-Bru stuff, and I was listening back to some old tracks - some of them very old (1998!). This one isn't quite so ancient - it's a version of Bedroom Life that we recorded with Zoe in 2002. It's a very early version of a track that we played at most of our gigs, heard here without guitar or drums - a very different sound!

The song is about being out of work and having nothing to do. I'd like to say we wrote it when we were out of work and had nothing to do, but as I am (and was) self-employed, it's more likely that I was 'between clients' (which is freelancer speak for being out of work and having nothing to do).

This is a song that Julie wrote in 1996, and which we recorded via what could charitably be referred to as "lo-fi hi-fi" onto my 4-track... and then promptly forgot about.

Early this year Julie approached me about getting some of her stuff into mp3 format for use on a website (which as far as I know it has not yet appeared on...). Whilst investigating the available recordings, we discovered that, as part of my archiving process the previous year, I had transferred these raw tracks from the knackered C60 on which they lay, into a sparkling digital format that will last forever. There were 2 each of the piano and vocal parts (all performed by Julie), which were possibly meant as harmonies, although they may have just been alternate takes, I don't remember. Nevertheless, they all seemed usable, so I loaded it up and got to work.

Having removed the MASSIVE amount of hiss from the tracks and edited out the bits that didn't fit together (and, to be fair, may never have been meant to go together) I managed to produce something that, I hope, does justice, to what is a great song and a very beautiful piece of music.

Another "mister badman - Live In 3D!" extravaganza. Here is the spectacular live version of 'What's Your Noun', the original of which is available at the mister badman website*. It's a kind of white middle-class version of 8-Mile. You don't quite get the full effect without being able to see the visual chaos that accompanied it, but hopefully the audio chaos gives you some idea of what the night was like...

* site is perhaps too grand a word...