pocket symphony for mobile phone

pocket symphony for mobile phone

Pocket symphony to be performed by mobile phone, oscillator, glockenspiel and acoustic guitar.

action painting guitar

action painting guitar

This is my guitar collage. It was made using a grid of rules that operate more along a visual schema than a musical one, really. The point was to create something like an action painting, using different ‘colours’ of guitar. There’s no beginning and there is no end to this piece, it’s this purely circular, whirling hell of music. There are a series of different ‘movements’ in the piece, and they each have their own rules and logic, but these motivations have been deliberately concealed from the listener. Like in action paintings, what initially seem like random ’splats’ upon closer inspection often turn out to be repeated motifs or patterns, and this is very patterned sound. It’s just patterned under a patina of chaos. I guess I try and think of it more as an audio painting than a piece of music – I just don’t know how to paint, so I made an educated guess about how it is done, using guitar.

All sounds came from one guitar and were all wrenched out of the air by me.

tiny failures

The Taxi (rough demo version)

scrapped song (The Taxi sessions)

So TYMO ultimately failed. We failed to seduce any potential collaborators to form an alternating choir of frontpeople for our imaginary band. Well, apart from those two guys who got in touch who we never heard from again, and HerEverlong was last seen scampering around the snowy vistas of Iceland.

To make up for the lack of new content, I’m throwing up a measley ‘rarities’ compilation. This consists of the original rough demo version of The Taxi (probably better than the imaginary single version, it’s certainly less weirdly quiet), and the Other Song.

Remember in the original post when I said that I’d generate three tracks from any vocal that you send in? The point being that one will be an a-side, one will be a b-side, and one will be an inevitable mistake that will get scrapped. The Other Song is the one that got scrapped. Additional synths on this are courtesy of Matt W.

Fishing through my iPod on a deep sea trawler of a train home last night, I rediscoverd a bunch of music that I recorded a year ago. This music was mostly formless, fragmented, experimental but only in the sense that I was naive enough to not actually know what I was doing. The point of TYMO was to get away from all that, do something with structure, with purpose, and by association with the vocal, at least, meaning.

Well, since we have no new TYMO material, I thought I’d throw some of this up. The next post will be an album (!) called action painting guitar. The post after that will be an album called pocket symphony for mobile phone.

I don’t expect any of you to like it.

But I do.

The Taxi

a-side: The Taxi

b-side: A Moment’s Breath

words&voice: HerEverlong

sounds&shapes: xeroxboy

This is an imaginary band.

Thank You, Merciless Onlookers is the start of a new musical project. A mindgame with randomness, an obsession with Flickr and a curiosity about seeing if its possible to make new sound by letting images and words psychically shunt into each other.

Pretentious? Oh god, probably. But there’s more to it than that.

I love music and I want to learn how to make it, but there’s so much, and I don’t know where to start, so I set myself a series of intricate, oblique strategy-style rules and restrictions. Using a Flickr picture, a found phrase, and a fuckload of OCD, I used these rules to generate three sound collages. At the same time, without hearing the music, my musical partner (HerEverlong) wrote and recorded the words. The results were combined and from those three weird, jarring pieces, an A-side and a B-side were selected.

An imaginary single for an imaginary band.

The first pieces of music I’ve ever made.

This is partly an experiment in demystifying the process of music-making. This, the first imaginary release from the imaginary band Thank You, Merciless Onlookers, might sound pretty shoddy to your ears – it was recorded on dictaphones and iPod mics and sequenced in uber-simplistic shareware software – but maybe by the time we’ve done ten singles we might have something. And if you don’t like it then don’t just snipe – do something about it.

TYMO is an imaginary band, it doesn’t have any members. So, if you record any kind of audio – whether its you singing in the shower, reading aloud your shopping list, or reciting your great, unfinished novel – and send it to me, then I will release it on this blog as our next imaginary single.

• You record audio
• I create three tracks based around your contribution
• You pick the A-side, and which song gets dumped
• You will receive full credit – whatever that’s worth

At the end of it you can tell all your mates you’re in a band (if it never existed in the first place how can they disprove it?) or disown it entirely, walk away, forget.

This is partly an experiment to see if strangers can make music blindfolded, but it’s not just an academic game. As scrappy and wrong as the results of this first single – The Taxi – are, I love it. It’s a sound made purely out of love. Music made for no other reason than a want to understand.