#8Bars

I’ve been mucking about with electronic music since my teens. The infamous Smooly Batrash and our one finished track Sandpit. The infamous Sebastian Dangerfield in the 1990s. Infamy, infamy…

These days I never really get past fragments. 8-bar loops created on various tools – Reason, Ableton, Korg Gadget, the Akai MPC app and other bits and bobs I pick up along the way. Occasionally I even pick up my saxophone.

They’re never complete. I don’t have the time or the patience to take them beyond short sketches, but they’re not there for that. Working with music helps me to unwind, detach myself. Meditate, I guess, to an extent.

But I’d like to get into making music again. Particularly, making music with other people. I sort of thought that this year would be a year of getting a band together, but that feels not quite right…

Yesterday I caught up with the quite wonderful Steve Chapman. His approach to art is utterly inspirational. And it made me think that maybe I should turn around the concept of making music in fragments to make those fragments the whole. Create short, eight-bar compositions which are, as Steve has just suggested to me, “like Twitter for music. But bars instead of the character limit.”

There are a few folk who I’d like to get to work with on this: my original collaborator in the 1980s Alex, the remarkably talented Jah Shabby, and the also remarkably talented Gary Dunne. And I’m sure there are more who will maybe be up for it.

I need a limit (this is also something I learned yesterday from my chat with Steve. 8 bars long, and only 8 compositions in total. Which is actually quite a lot really. All by the end of 2019. I have a sneaking suspicion that an eight bar composition might actually be quite a lot of hard work to do well…

Here goes… If you’d like to join in, give me a shout.