Does anyone read this? Oh well, I'll blather anyway.

The most recent excitement is that I did five weeks in Europe and Japan and came back with a swag of field recordings. So far I've made two proper tracks from what I collated.

The first features field recordings from the Takayama spring festival. Takayama is a small town in the centre of Japan and twice a year they hold festivals featuring music, dance, giant 200 year old floats, exotic costumes and general festiveness.

Naturally this event provided plenty of opportunity for capturing interesting sounds, and I made several hours (!) of recordings the day we were there.

The assemblage of the Takayama track (the title isn't finalised, but I doubt it will be anything more elaborate than 'Takayama') was in contrast to the four tracks I did in 2007 after a jaunt to Japan and China. I wrestled mightily for a good two months to create those. Part of the problem there was that I didn't have quite enough good material to flesh the tracks out, so I had to improvise with effects on parts that weren't that interesting.

With Takayama, however, I had numerous interesting bits, and a structure suggested itself pretty early on. Four separate recordings are basically merged with each other at different points, with interesting sound events leading "logically" into others. The intended effect was of a strange dream (which is how that day feels to me), and I think it works on that level.

From a technical perspective I didn't do much fancy pants stuff, other than using a VST plugin that takes sound and spits it back out in reverse, just to heighten the hallucinatory quality of the recordings.

As with the 2007 tracks I have an instinctive interest in presenting sounds much as is rather than processing them too much. I also have an aversion to using microphone bumps for percussion and other cutup shenanigans. This isn't to say that this can't be used to great affect - my mate Dan (Panoramica) and mates Shanan and Michael (as Montano) certainly demonstrate that this can be done with great aplomb. It's just that my interest is more about making surreal soundscapes of field recordings as is - juggling them into new contexts, yes, but preserving the temporal flow* of the original recordings - rather than using them as a palette for assembling something wholly new.

Also, there's an added bonus in that taking this approach allows me to hide my lack of technical ability!

Because I generally do these sort of tracks from recordings made on holiday, I've decided to call this style postcard musique concrete. A sort of aural equivalent of holiday snaps.

The second track was more problematic. The sounds were recorded from a trip on a particularly harmonious Swiss mountain train - the squeals of its brakes were pitched in a very pure harmonic series, and the sine wave 'bing bong' of the recorded station announcement was obviously also musical. There was also doppler effects of train alarm bells, the sounds of cars passing us (this wasn't a very fast train) and the noise of my partner taking photos.

Because the train moved at different speeds during the recording there was no way I could get everything together at a regular tempo, so instead I chose an arbitrary tempo (80bpm I think), and used two copies of the 'bing bong' sample slightly out of phase with each other (the old Steve Reich trick) to provide rhythm and variety. If I was keeping to the spirit of the Takayama track I probably would have left it at that, but instead I decided to make it a bit more accessible by piling on a drumbeat and the odd synth wibble.

The track came out pretty well, and the character of the original train sounds shines through. However, playing it at a Malty Media show Michael observed that "our styles are merging together"! He certainly has a point, although I think he damned himself somewhat if he saw something of his own music in my hamfisted drum patterns.

But I got good feedback about the track from Shanan, so why do I consider it problematic? Well, to me there's not a lot of tie-in between the rhythms, synths and train sounds other than key. It's basically just the best idea I had at the time. There are potentially better ideas to be had. Indeed, it's only this year that I finally got definitive use out of a recording I made in 2007 - on my third attempt. Sadly, this other track shares numerous similarities with the train track, which makes me wonder if I'm falling back to the tried and true rather than making a track that suggests itself from the source samples.

But you know, remix culture being what it is, there's never a definitive version of anything, so the train track (called 'Train to Lauterbrunnen') is merely the first iteration (even, dear I say, it an "exploration"*) of those sounds, rather than a mistake. I just hope people don't get sick of hearing the same samples in different contexts (not those trains again!).

* Wank, wank.