2004 – album as Benedict Roff-Marsh
This is where I decided that I was going wrong in my composing. I was working away but not getting the results I wanted. Hardware synthesizers, by their very nature, are limited by being physical and for all those years of using them we all felt annoyed that the limits of each instrument was what held us back. The instrument making industry knew this and kept selling us new toys with revised features, promising us greater creativity.
Software makers then lured us further by saying that software had no limits and we could make anything we could imagine. As artists we pretty well all fell for that hook, line and sinker. Sadly the Software Studio or Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) was little more than promises and barely working novelties. I was rapidly becoming part of the generation of musicians getting lost in this morass.
I had owned Propellerheads Reason 2.5, which was really the first fully functional studio in software, for years. It had its limits, they were deliberate, but it was hard for many of us to grasp the logic of that. I, like so many others felt that gratification should be more instant. I thought of early Kraftwerk and the limits they had yet how they created wonderful music and told myself to make an album solely in this software. Is the album good? Probably not but it laid the groundwork for a discipline that any artist must develop when their initial flush of youthful bluster wanes and they have to either fade away or become true craftsmen.
The software files for this album are still on the Propellerheads website for registered users to download.
The album after this I lost the plot again and went back to using other software with grander promises for many years (I even made instruments for sale myself). I wrote some good music but half my attention was always on the tools and not the craft.
Fly By Wire tries to combine Space Pop with a modern Acid House bassline and drums. I don’t really know if it works or not.
Intergalactic Empires is pretty typical of my composition style that another musician described as psychedelic spots of color flowing past the eyes.
In 2004 I re-rendered the tracks as one flow (with crossfades) and popped on YouTube as a whole album.
Pieces on Growings Benedict Roff-Marsh Sampler