Firstly, I am making virb my primary location for music ponderings. I have another blog, but I've decided for keep that separate for personal, off-message rantings. Just to confuse things, now that I'm in partnership with Michael Upton (aka Jet Jaguar) through our Malty Media collaboration, I blog on the Malty Media site too. The unique feature of this blog is that it is restricted to Aquaboogie-only stuff.

So, 2007. I ended up doing 6 performances, which doesn't sound like much, but is much more than usual. Getting out more has been good. Because Malty Media has a fortnightly turnaround, I've given up on my old neurosis of painstakingly orchestrating my tracks before a gig, and now just push sliders instead. It's good.

The highlight for this year was releasing Malty Media's Bracken Bed EP on Monotonik, or more precisely having lots of people laugh a lot at a drum and bass tune featuring the old flake ad. The biggest satisfaction was in building a good set of personal material for the gig I did with Michael in Tokyo in February, and for the 'New Science' gig in October, even if, at the latter event, I accidentally switched my PC mid performance.

Over the Christmas/Summer break I've been working on some new pieces. One is a typically stuck-in-the-mid-90s thing involving sub-100bpm beats, Tui song and synth chords through echo. It's quite nice. I did another track. This one's quite funny. Near Te Papa, Wellington's museum for the masses, there are these metal windbreaks for protecting trees from our ferocious Northerlies. There's a lot of wind, so they do their job a lot. Now the metal sheets are studded with thousands of identical holes, and when Wellington's perennial gales reach sufficient fury the wind causes the sheets to vibrate in an harmonic series, creating this eerie shrieking. Now multiply this sound over two dozen screens in the general area and you have this kind of howling orchestra, all played by the wind. I'm not sure whether this sound was an intended by-product of the screens - they certainly have no obvious signs of artyness about them. Regardless, the screens are easily the best sound installation ever constructed in Wellington. Naturally when the sound was first discovered, people complained about them.

Anway, I was walking home from work on Christmas Eve and happened upon the screens in full chorus. I had never heard them like this before, and thought they'd sound great in a track. Having my iRiver H320 (running Rockbox!) with its built-in microphone on me at the time, I made a recording. (Audiophiles will perhaps be horrified that I didn't use a proper microphone or purpose-built recorder, but to be honest with all the wind fidelity was a never a possibility - indeed I ended up making the recording with the iRiver wrapped in my jacket, because the wind noise was causing havoc.) So I sat down and endured ear damage and sunburn to get a decent recording. Perhaps the best moment, unfortunately too distorted to use, was when a group of teenage girls walked past and attempted to emulate the screaming by warbling away in a Ligeti stylee.

In the day or two after the recording I proceeded to construct a track using the recording. I added a drone, a quote from a Vincent O'Sullivan poem, a recording I made at Wellington Zoo of a child getting excited about seeing a magpie in a cage (and his mother's amusement at this), a loop of a windfarm turbine's blade swish (seemed thematically relevant) and a recording of a tui call timestretched to 16 times its normal length (using the Linux 'stretch' utility - comes with the pvoc library). Sounds sort of avant garde, and also a bit like the sort of thing I used to do ten years ago on my cassette fourtrack; oddly enough said antiquated device is still doing duty as Malty Media's mixer.

Still with me? We're coming to the punchline gradually... Now recently an exhibition of paintings by the New Zealand artist Bill Hammond opened at Wellington's City Gallery. He's good, kind of weird. As both Michael and I were keen on Hammond's works, we were interested in performing music in the gallery during the exhibition. Sounds farfetched, but the gallery does regularly hold "Late Night Sessions", and indeed I did perform at one of these gigs in 2005. However Michael investigated and found that the spot had gone to Chris Knox (boring!) months back. Indeed, Knox was personally requested by Hammond himself.

Anyway, when constructing this wind track I felt it had an aural resemblence to Hammond's paintings, and I resolved to go back to the gallery and name the track for the title of a painting that it (sonically) most resembled.

For reference, Hammond's paintings principally concern eerie human-bird hybrid figures placed within perspectiveless water colour washes. In the track I'd constructed I felt the sheet metal feedback was the bird figures' chatter, and the wind, artificial phasing and general reverberation placed the track within the same sort of vast spaces that Hammond's canvasses seemed to imply.

The first problem I found looking at the paintings was that the titles were all sort of witty pop culture references, or were otherwise jokey, and didn't have an obvious relationship with the subject of the painting. By way of example, the exhibition is called "Jingle Jangle Morning" (Bob Dylan, Mr Tambourine Man) after one of the paintings (in which little obvious jingling or jangling appeared to be going on, although I must concede it may well have been morning). Effectively Hammond had already done the trick I was intending to do, and there seemed no point in me naming a track after an irrelevant painting title; if the title had little context before, it would be doubly meaningless as a name for my track.

The second and much worse problem was that on inspecting the paintings more closely, I realised that Hammond's work was too orderly and focussed to really match the essentially random wind howls I'd recorded. The same eerieness might be there, but that was about the only similarity. In fact, thinking about it, an avant garde string quartet, or perhaps even a weird jazz combo would have been a more appropriate musical accompaniment.

In any event I came out of the gallery kind of amused that I had on my hands a piece of music inspired by Bill Hammond's paintings that had in fact nothing to do with them.

I recount this shaggy dog story by way of demonstrating that a lot of what's interesting about making music isn't so much the end result (which I must confess doesn't sound as interesting as I make it out to be), as the creative twists and turns in getting there.