New music: A long time ago + Happiness Formula
... and a small granular study.
A long time ago
Update: Phew! Finished in march 2023. This project was insane (:
In my teens I made a song called Tomorrow. By now, the Tomorrow from back then is, of course, A long time ago. There was a Trance version and a calm "Chillout" version. The latter has been in my rework-rotation for years now. As usually, I tend to find a lot of uncertainty in my old music, too many things playing at the same time, the melodies getting lost in a chaos which is difficult to listen to. In several attempts of rework, the file seems to contain all the bad ideas + settings I ever came up with. Nevertheless it's also great to work with the old concept again, evolving around pads and chord progressions which my adult brain would not come up with anymore. While throwing out, cleaning up and adjusting I seem to rediscover my deep, old amazement with this activity. I'm thinking of Frank Steiner and feeling grateful for the inspiration I find his music. You find the finished song in the playlist on the main page. Here are some samples of the old versions:
Tomorrow (2007 Chillout Version) sample
Tomorrow (2008 Trance Version)
(the Trance version was inspired by Lolo - Poem)
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Happiness formula
The first semester of university in Trondheim is done and I'm enjoying to work on my music again. I'm really happy and inspired these days, watching the dancing swirls of snow flakes from the window and enjoying long walks in the silence of the snow-covered forest. Winter is just beautiful in Norway.
I've been thinking about how everyone, during their life, creates and adjusts their personal happiness formula. How do we want to live our life? How can we balance society expectations with what we really truly want inside? How can we make space for what matters to us - and what decisions do we need to take to progress?
The song is based on a handpan improvisation again, accompanying my partner at their guitar practice. Exploring + elaborating a simple motif, like a snapshot in the time we're spending together. It's one of the stainless handpans with a pentatonic scale (played in E major). Much positive energy here :)
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Granular study
Small Ambient piece made for university in Digital Composition course, together with my fellow student Suki. Learning / experimenting with granular synthesis in csound - and, in our project, how it can be used in Ambient music. The task was to use given csound code to granulate sound samples, and to make a composition based on these samples. I had a hard time with the project (quite hard to make the jump from coding to music), but in the moment I gave up on it, things started to fall into place.