My Hands Over Your Ears is a collection of experimental digital recordings made in 2007. This represents my first foray into digital music. Inspiration for the recordings came from having listened to Brian Eno and Harold Budd’s 1980 album Ambient 2: Plateaux of Mirror. I started creating digital music almost immediately after hearing it.
Methodology
I built these recordings using a software synthesizer, an audio editor, and my own vocal tracks (that I later distorted). Unlike most users of soft–synths, I took samples without using a midi controller. This was mostly just because I was making drones or simple 3 note melodies. Using a sound editor (Adobe Audition) I created digital sounds from scratch, so a lot of what you’ll hear in these recordings was not produced by a traditional instrument.
I owe a lot to artists like Aphex Twin, Autechre and Steve Reich. I employed many ambient and process music techniques learned from them. Like Steve Reich, I created loops of simple melodies and let them slowly go out of synchronization. The overlapping melodies create contrasts of rich complexity and near bareness. Making each loop in a different BPS scale keeps them from repeating often (often being sooner than an hour). Eno made some of his first pieces this way, so it seemed like a good baby step into what is generative music.
Recordings
To hear the files you will need the Adobe Flash 9 browser plug–in. The files are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncomercial-Share Alike 3.0 License for the United States.