I have put together a track with those cicada recordings I mentioned earlier. It's what you'd call 'classic ambient' - basically an augmented major chord sustained for about 80 bars with various phasing and reverb effects to make the chord shimmer and fill up space. I then added a bass pedal tone and an occasional high end sonar 'pip' noise thru echoes that sounds at different notes in the same key. Then come the cicadas, munged through various granular filters and panned vigorously. Slapped on a dangerously non-sequiteurial sample of the Byrds talking about their song 'Mr Spaceman' from their album 'The Fifth Dimension' (1966, the one with Eight Miles High on it). They sound acutely dumb, but David Crosby's enthusiasm is engaging. Anyway, the whole thing bubbles away for a bit and eventually I fade in a recording of the radio signals generated by the earth's ionosphere as the track is generally fading out.

Pure ambient, and having played it live at last week's Malty Media gig I can report it fills up the venue appealingly. However, it's not really a good track.

The problem begins with the initial chord. It sounds great, but it's just too easy. It's a stylistic cliche - like the metaller's power chord, and too easy to construct to make it rewarding.

The harmonic elements that augment the chord are also a mistake. Hearing the chord I thought 'hey, this could sound like a Brian Eno track... so let's make it sound like a Brian Eno track!' And I did. It could be something off Music for Films or On Land. But in doing this I followed the 'retro instinct', grounding the track in a style I was familiar with. I could have done something more interesting. Quite possibly emulating Eno wasn't a bad choice - that guy knows his stuff. But in doing so I diminish the overall value of the track. It could have been its own beast, but now it's an Eno knockoff. Of course, just by starting with the idea of a sustained chord was a cliche, so it's perhaps to be expected that numerous other cliches just tumbled out as a consequence.

Then there's the vocal samples and field recordings. They're not essential to the track; I could use have used any number of other samples to serve the same purpose. The only reason I used these particular sounds is that I obtained them both recently and remembered to try them out here. And the ionospheric sample I used simply because I wanted a pitch shifting element in the high end.

What a true artist should try to do is build a piece where all its components are thematically united, and there are no arbitrary elements in there. Or, if they are kind of arbitrary, this should be a central intention of the piece, not something that got tossed in because it worked well enough. I could argue that perhaps the combination of the Byrds talking about being taken into space by aliens, the ionospheric samples, the distorted, 'alien-sounding' cicada noises, and that bloody great big chord could be considered as thematically united. But I know they're not, really.

Something I have noticed is that my compositional process is pretty limited. I play with a few ideas, if I see a way forward I follow it through. The result is that I can probably get things through to the other side safely enough, with a sense that I made the best of what I had, but there's always the nagging feeling that if I'd had a bit more creative imagination at the get-go I might have come up with something that sounded 'killer' rather than merely adequate.

This ability is what separates Rembrandt from 50somethings who like drawing water colour landscapes.

So as it is, I'm stuck with a vaguely New Agey track. Not that there's anything wrong with that. In fact, until the second ambient wave of the early 1990s, there was precious little separating the ambient of Eno and his descendants from Wyndham Hill style New Age music. One album I really love that is distinctly on the New Age side of the divide is the Harmonic Choir's Hearing Solar Winds, and extraordinary work of overtonal chanting recorded in a French church in 1983. It's entirely New Age, but it floats through space like a primeval motherfucker. Highly recommended.

Sorry to sound so self-critical, but I'm outlining here the real challenge, and its one that inspires me. I want some day to be able to write some music that avoids the cliches, that doesn't start out good and then hit a dead end, only to be cleaned up in some piecemeal and unsatisfactory way. I want to actually be good.

May take a while! ;-)