It should be a song this week, but I realised that the one I was going to upload wasn't ready yet.
I waited around for the longest time to see if this would turn into a song. Eventually I realised that it was probably supposed to be a sort of indie rock instrumental.

This is a track that I've uploaded a couple of times before - though this is the latest version, a new mix with an organ track in there somewhere. Hopefully I won't feel it necessary to do it again. Anyway, the title is a nod to a certain dub melodica player, whose records used to scare me in the night when they were played on the John Peel programme. For some reason I found pretty much everything scary when Peel played it.

I wrote this in 1990, and recorded it several times, each time bewildered that I couldn't make a four-track tape recorder sound like a 24-track studio. I realise the Beatles did remarkable things with a four-track, but equally I realise that I'm not George Martin.
I'm not sure which version this is: not the first version, I think, although I remember that as being quite good (though beset with hiss, on account of my forgetting to turn on the noise reduction, although that might have been a different song), probably the second, so 1991 or 1992.
This is a song about n-dimensional geometry, believe it or not. Or at least that's what I thought at the time. I suppose I liked to comfort myself with the thought that it might be about something.
As I said, it was recorded on a four-track in about 1992, so there is a certain limitation to the audio quality.

This was written during a Guitar Craft course in 2003 during a European heatwave so intense that when I came back to the UK everyone else had better tans than me because in Barcelona it was simply to hot to go outside most of the time. I played it a few times in various GC dining rooms, usually at breakfast. The last time was at Sassoferrato in 2010, and I don't think I'll do it again in that sort of place.
I recorded this after one of the Passport radio shows I was recording sessions on during 2009 - after the show, before I took down all the equipment I quickly recorded this, with a handful of the remaining guests as an audience. The sounds in the background are workmen doing something... workmanlike, I suppose. They only started when I began to record, so I was stuck with them.

Although the date here is the fifteenth of April, and I have called this the track a week project, I wasn't able to activate this last week, so here it is slightly delayed.

Another string quartet. This one is very, very short. Possibly linking music from a 19th Century Russian play about people standing around in drawing rooms in sadly bewildered ways. So short that you could probably play it twice in the time it takes to read this paragraph.

Another song from the sessions I recorded with Oscar and Juan last July. Ever-so-slightly-miserablist. I should have thought of a joke, considering it's April Fool's Day, but didn't.

To be honest, I have no idea what this is about. It started as an instrumental noodle, then the chorus impressed itself on me, then I wrote the words down without really thinking about it, and now I'm supposed to take responsibility for it. It's entirely possible that I gave it the title when it was still an instrumental noodle. I do like it, it's just that I have no idea what it's about. Corrupt old men coming to an unspecified sticky end. So surprisingly upbeat for one of my things.
It has a spoken rather than sung verse, because... because I couldn't think of a tune, I suppose. It reminds me of the very fine Danish/Scottish duo Livingstone's Kabinet, who I'd recommend very highly.
It was also uploaded as part of the 2009 Upload Splurge, though obviously has been remixed for this time.

Metafilter (MeFi) is a sort of mass-blog site - people post links to interesting things they've found on the internet, and then argue endlessly about them. There's a sub-site called Metafilter Music (MeFiMu), to which members can upload tracks, and they do monthly challenges. On one occasion the challenge was to set a John Cooper Clarke poem to music.
Curiously, when I started writing songs, I used to use JCC poems for lyrics as I really couldn't write them for myself, so this particular challenge attracted me. I didn't use any of the music I'd written all those years ago (as it wasn't very good, if I could remember it at all, which I mostly couldn't), but the challenge coincided with me playing around with a particular set of chords, so a song was engendered.
This is completely remixed from the version I uploaded to MeFi. As I've decided that I can't just give away other people's words, if you do download it and pay for it, I'll send the money to JCC. Not entirely sure how - send him a postal order or something, I suppose - but as it will be available for streaming anyway, my apparent moral stand is rather undermined by the harsh realities of web distribution. Or something.
Please note, there are several swear words in it, mostly towards the beginning. Also a lot of terms of art that sex workers use, that went completely over my head when I was fifteen.

A short (very short) piece in which I'm trying out combinations of brass instruments in Logic. Possibly come in useful to anyone who needs a short fanfare, for grand entrances and so forth. And who doesn't, eh?