I was sad to hear on Christmas Day that Matt Cogger, aka Neuropolitique, had passed away from cancer. He was a Brit who was closely involved in the first wave of Detroit techno, even living and working in the city for a while, but his own music retained a unique, distinctive personality. His work on Irdial in particular was outstanding.

Over at Bleep43, this extended anecdote from Matt about an incident while he was working for Transmat in Detroit is an entertaining read.

And here’s one of Matt’s tracks from 1993:

If you’re into electronic or ambient music in any way whatsoever, you should pick up a copy of Jo Johnson’s outstanding album “Weaving”. I’m lucky enough to count Jo as a friend, but if that makes you question my impartiality just read this review over at Pitchfork for corroboration.

Getting you to buy Weaving isn’t really the main point of this post, though. Instead I wanted to share this piece that Jo wrote about the album’s genesis.

“Weaving” started out as a working track title. It originally described the way two arpeggios interplay but it took on more meaning over time and stuck. The word isn’t exactly cool or poetic but for me, now, “weaving” evokes a legacy of women’s work, art and activism, and conjures up a scrapbook of extraordinary images: women working together at colossal machines in a Lancashire cotton mill in the 19th century; Dora Thewlis, the young mill worker and suffragette, who was famously photographed being arrested after breaking into the Houses of Parliament – one of many working class women who nurtured the early suffrage and the labour movements; the art of Bauhaus weavers like Gunta Stolzl and Anni Albers, and the stunning photos of Michiko Yamawaki and Leonore Tawney at their looms, looking like they’re controlling some kind of retro-futurist synthesiser.

This is not your typical techno-utopian ambient fare. Buy it here.

Here’s another track I made recently, called Lake Manitou. I’ve been told it sounds like a cross between Bobby Konders and the Aphex Twin. Worse things could have been said.

I thought I’d write about the origins of this track, for my own benefit, and because I think electronic musicians should talk more about their creative process and less about technology and gadgets. Be warned: you almost certainly have better things to do than to read the next 700 words.

“Lake Manitou” started life on a Sunday evening in late October. I was playing around with some new melodies but the process was closer to musical doodling than to serious or even semi-serious composition. A pentatonic scale stopped everything sounding like a mess, but even still the different melodies just weren’t connecting, they sounded like they came from different pieces of music. This doodle, I felt, would go no further than the margin of my metaphorical notebook.

Later on I isolated each of the melodies, wondering if any might be spared oblivion before I moved the whole thing to the trash. Most were forgettable and insipid but one stood out, a two-bar descending riff that had a lot more character than anything else in the doodle. That riff ended up becoming the backbone of Lake Manitou.

The riff’s journey from its doodle origins to Lake Manitou was not a straightforward one, however. At first it was meant to be a background part of a faster electro track, which was what the original doodle had sounded like. But I couldn’t really come up with an idea for what that track would do, or for other sounds that might complement the two-bar descending riff. I had reached a creative impasse.

A week later, while walking through Bermondsey to a friend’s housewarming party, the riff was playing in my head. It suddenly struck me that it should be part of a much slower house- or disco-oriented track, and that, instead of being in the background, it should take centre stage. I thought about how it might sound: dreamy, languid, tropical, subtly euphoric. I thought about post-disco tracks like “Adventures in Success“, about “Sweet Harmony” by The Beloved. It was a big change in direction from the uptempo electro track I’d been planning, and from anything else I’d done before. But the more I thought about this new track, the more determined I became to make it.

When I sat down to work on it, most pieces fell into place quite neatly. Slowing it down, backing up the main melody with some warm chords, adding some space to the sound with delay and reverb: these things didn’t take long and I was happy with the results. The choral pad sound was a challenge, however. I’ve often tried to use a sound like that in a track—Kraftwerk’s “Radioactivity” being a kind of exemplar for me—but always got it wrong. Would Lake Manitou be undone by yet another botched choir pad? Trying the preset choir sounds on various synths just made me even more downhearted. In the end I spent about an hour making that sound, using a combination of synth pads, reverb, filter and actual samples of a choir.

With everything in place the next job was to arrange the track. Arrangement is stressful. Sometimes you uncover major problems with your composition, with everything else sounding awful when the one strong element is taken away. Sometimes your mistake is to reveal the key idea too early, or too late. Lake Manitou ended up being quite hard to arrange, going through two major iterations over several days before it was eventually finished.

One thing that might be worth mentioning is the fade out. I always like it when bands start to do different things while a track is fading out. You can hear that on happen on some Parliament songs. It leaves you wondering what else the band went on to do after you left the room. In Lake Manitou there’s a subtle nod to that gimmick, when the flute changes tack right at the end and starts jamming along with the main melody. I like the idea that the flautist was just embarking on an epic, self-indulgent jam session which the producer had to kill before it all went a bit Jethro Tull.

Anyway, that’s the origin story of Lake Manitou. I’m not going to write stuff like this about every track I make, you’ll be pleased to hear, but if you make music yourself I’d be interested in reading similar notes about your own creative process. It’s a lot more interesting to me than gadgets and VSTs at any rate.

(Oh yes, I nearly forgot: the title is a reference to an internet thing)

If you read this blog or follow me on Twitter you might have noticed me making a lot of music recently.

And if you’ve known me for a long time, you’ll know this is less of a recently discovered hobby than a case of normal service being resumed.

I’ve been making electronic music for a long time, since I booted up NoiseTracker on my Amiga as a precocious 16-year-old, and it used to be a major part of my life until the twin pressures of work and parenthood conspired to crowd out almost everything else.

My recent resurgence in music-making motivation dates back to March this year when, after leaving my job at Tobias & Tobias, I was presented with an an extremely generous leaving gift—a Maschine Mikro. According to Chris Tobias, the idea was that it would get me composing music again, and on that score it was a raging success. I scrounged the internet to get the best music theory app so I could start recording. After that, I’ve recorded around 10 tracks which I’m reasonably happy with, along with lots of throwaway experiments that are best left gathering digital dust on my hard drive. And it’s been really good fun: in fact I’ve been quite surprised to find how much I enjoy it.

I always did enjoy making music, of course, so why am I surprised to find that I enjoy it now?

One possible reason for this is that, these days, I’m approaching music from a different direction than in the past. I don’t really think about musical genres or styles or “playability”—the degree to which a DJ might want to use your music in a performance—as much as I used to. In the past I thought too much about things like that, about how closely the music I was making adhered to a specific genre’s set of rules, or how it would sound on a club system. That would often get in the way of enjoying the creative act in its own right.

Sometimes I was able to step away from that production-line mentality, and it always felt liberating and fun to do so. But more often than not I would slip back into it, laboriously building tracks up from genre-friendly templates and rejecting anything that took me too far from the beaten path.

Today, I have no ambitions to release music or play it in nightclubs, and am not making it for any other purpose than my own enjoyment. That’s why I’m enjoying it a lot more. And it’s probably the reason why the new music I’m making seems to be a lot better than the music I made in the past. It’s more like play than work—the way it should be.