Temporal Recidivist

Temporal Recidivist – Sketches in Proto-Techno or Works In Proto-Techno II – These pieces started with the same idea I had back in 1996 when Techno was all the rage. Today it is called EDM (Electronic Dance Music) but the result is the same, big drums and no melody. I still want to write purely electronic music with the same intent as people did back in the early 80’s, where there were new territories of feeling in sound to uncover. This era is deliberately echoed in this album so expect to hear shades of acts from that time.

Every sound you hear in here is pure synthesis, no exceptions.

Come dream with me…

1. Temporal Recidivist – Two essentially Latin words meaning “about time” and “a tendency to lapse into a previous pattern of behavior” (generally criminal). I yearn for music as a statement of art as it was back them and can’t help but to keep going back. Even though to many that seems a crime. The piece attempts to start with elements similar to modern EDM but swaps them back in time for their parallels in memory of history.
2. River of Souls – Art is about people. It is about dreaming. It is about communicating across time. Any human (and maybe some aliens) can understand the emotions of the composer of the image no matter the remove of time and place. Modern and & old-fashioned have no real value in art. It is a continuum of the joy of life. At least that is how I view art. I am currently listening to a record from 1982 I have never heard before (Christian Death “Only Theatre of Pain”) and it sounds wonderfully fresh to me.
3. To The Well Known Man – Vangelis wrote “To the Unknown Man”. I am writing back.
4. Come Dream With Me – My greatest hope with my music is to make people feel. To imagine scenes in their minds and find life, beauty and peace. It is a form of meditation, without the painful crossed legs. What do you see and feel?
5. Memories of Grandeur – The past is only memories and our memories edit. We remember only the beauty or the pain (in which we find beauty). I remember the music of the early 80’s through my fascinations.
6. The Weeping Modern – I wrote this tongue in cheek. A new soft-synth called “Zero Hybrid” was released and the marketing kept talking about how “modern” it sounded. Synths don’t sound like anything except what you make them do. I find most modern music very dreary so I wrote a sweet melodic piece that would not amuse any of the kids (or help me win the competition). Someone who heard the piece said it reminded them of weeping willow trees. I am happy.
7. The Falls – Is this about a waterfall or tumbling into another place? I’ll let you decide.
8. Rainforest Reverie – It may seem strange to write a piece about a rainforest setting using a drum machine so prominently but I think why not. I roughly emulated the sounds of the Roland CR-78 Rhythm Machine which was all over records for a decade and still has a power now. Oh and don’t forget everything you hear on this record is synthesized.
9. Water Strider Kingdom – I wrote a piece called “The Android Ice Skating” on “Utopian Societies” and I have never really lost the desire to write more like it. Imagine if you will a robotic water strider travelling around his pond domain.
10. The Airman – This is a group homage to several artists who were so influential on me. Their work in 1980-1982 was just so special. John Foxx, OMD and of course the airman himself Gary Numan.
11. Facets – Essentially four faces of the same piece. Sometimes we like one or two faces of a person but struggle with one or two of the others. The difference is subtle but the result not the same.
12. Domestic Process Engineering – The idea that technology and mechanization was changing our lives was rife in the early 80’s. Nowhere was this really better expressed than in the style called Electronic Body Music (or EBM). At the time people were worried that we may lose our humanity. Now it seems everyone has gladly given it over to Facebook. This piece deliberately keeps things very tense. I bend some musical rules by using only semitone shifts which are uncomfortable as they change Key unexpectedly. Once you accept that then I find there is a new beauty.
13. Esprit De Corps – For some reason this piece reminds me of the only part of the “Les Miserables” movie I liked, where at the end they all feel grand at the barricades.
14. 315 425 Interrupted – Sometimes things don’t go as planned and we have to step back, take a break and try again later.

Bonus tracks with album purchase:

1. Moskva – A simple one-idea piece that never really had any future, but I did like the choir.
2. Red for 70 (Dancing in the Lasers) – Definitely an odd name but it is a reference to “Red For Love” and the Red 70 synth I used. This was a competition entry. The synth name made me think of the Grant Miller song and that of course meant I had to write some Hi-NRG (or Laser Dance). This is deliberately a pastiche of the genre that I love to this day. No doubt I won’t win this competition either. The video has the initial version at 118 BPM. The album bonus is at the most common Hi-NRG tempo of 123 BPM – call it the dance mix.

3. 

   Dance of the Garden Robots – Initially they were garden gnomes but robots are more fitting. This was first written on an audio dock as I had packed my apartment up to move and had nothing to do. This was actually the first track written. I didn’t intend it to be anything except time-wasting writing trying to write Dance. It was interesting to work on such a limited speaker. It made me think a lot about the drum sounds and interplay with bass to get a punchy mix with no real ability to hear any of the details. This time-wasting experiment lead to the album theme.