Who's the Bear on the Harp

This track started life as a copy of the opening theme from Marillion's Grendel, of which I was a massive fan when I was a boy (and let's be honest, I still rather like it and I think it's unfair to dismiss it as a rip-off of Genesis' Supper's Ready).

I played around with the tune; inverted it, adjusted the timings a bit etc, and it started to take on this sweet soft Christmas Lullaby sound.

It's is now really too bold and brassy to pick out the original Grendel theme, but I think it's interesting to record where inspiration starts.

This is the first of a new collection of pieces which haven't yet been published on Band-camp. I will post the links when they are ready.

Happy Easter (which is, by the way, a pagan celebration of spring: Nothing to do with Jesus at all until the Christians usurped it).

Six Nations Disaster

While watching the 6 nations rugby this year, I was playing with the melodies to "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" (for the England fans), and "Flower of Scotland" (yup, that's for the Scots). Trying to combine the two, I came up with this. It's very short, so go on take a listen. You could take it as a symbol of Scottish/English union in the light of the up-coming referendum on Scottish independence, if you wanted to, or you could equally see it as an example of how the two just don't fit together... I'll leave it up to you!

I was going to post this for last weekend's show-down for the title. Let's just say neither England's nor Scotland's playing left me feeling very inspired. Maybe next year...

Here's the tune.

The 4th Dominion

In Clive Barker's Book, this is the first (recently) 'foreign' dominion that Gentle travels to with the mystif Pie. I don't want to get bogged down with the details of the book, which can be found here if you are interested, but it's important in that this the first time I have tried to actually get the music I'm writing to tell the story, as opposed to just letting the composition grow organically.

OK sure, most of this piece also just grew in the writing, except for two  areas where I did deliberately try to make the music say something.

Firstly, the piece starts with a simple theme played simply on a scratchy sounding violin. It sounds amateurish, and is meant to. The theme repeats and develops and becomes more sophisticated: more accomplished, perhaps. I intended this to reflect Gentle's rapid relearning of magic as he travels into and through the 4th Dominion.

Secondly, towards the end of the journey through the 4th, Gentle and Pie encounter the bodies of the old priestesses frozen deep in the Jokalaylu glacier, imprisoned there by the old god Hepaxamendios. Enraged at  the cruelty delivered on the Priestesses, and empowered by his newly re-learned magic, Gentle frees them with a serious of fist smashes through the ice. This episode is reflected towards the end of the piece            (at 10:10)

Personally I think this is the best thing I've written to date: I'm actually rather proud of it! This is it in its first draft. A slightly more polished version but with a wackier ending (which I'm still not too sure about) is available on bandcamp here for either free listening or small fee downloading (let me know which version you prefer).