A few weeks ago, I was being interviewed about my audio project “An Early Morning Letter, Displaced” and some questions came up around process. Specifically whether the process of creating had changed much for me over the last decade in regard to music composition. I’ve thought about this quite a bit since the interview and decided to make an attempt at emulating that old free-flow creative style I started with.

For some background, when I originally began writing “music” back in 1999, I did so in a very matter of fact and destructive manner in that I simply recorded whatever came to mind and performed a lot of additive overlay edits to the sound bed until it was what I wanted. The entire first album “August” was composed in this way. Since then, I’ve been using multi-track sequencers and a full production software suite to compose, record, and produce my music. It’s a more intellectual approach- generally a smarter approach- and certainly a less destructive method of working. However, you do lose quite a  lot of spontaneity and flow in regard to the creative process. Almost as though your mind gets in the way of the emergent expressive flow coming out of you.

The video embedded below is a short film called “Furnace”. Both the video and audio portions of the work were conceived, recorded, and produced with this free-flow method in mind. What has emerged is something rather dreamlike in its structure – but not lacking in essential elements, for all that it is.

A statement in free-flow expression: Furnace.

Equipment used:

• Adobe After Effects CS5
• Adobe Premier Pro CS5
• Adobe Soundbooth CS5
• Cakewalk Sonar Producer 8.5
• Native Instruments Kontakt 4
• Alesis QS7
• M-Audio Audiophile 2496
• Behringer EURORACK MX 602A Mixer
• Behringer XM2000S Cardoid Microphone
• Flip UltraHD
• Windows 7
• Dell XPS420