Forgery League

I tidied up the studio today, hung a couple of pictures and found a new spot for the bodhran, put all the guitars in a corner where they won’t get toasted by the sun, and tended to the plants (the landlady’s money tree, which had been quietly dying on a dark landing since long before we moved in, is making a comeback).

I was also delighted to discover that the Immersion Composition Society web site is back up - when it vanished a while back I was worried that they’d packed it in - but they’re back, they’ve added a MySpace page, and they have a book, which I’m hoping to pick up or order at my local independent bookseller tomorrow.

The ICS consists of several autonomous “lodges”, each essentially a group of musicians who hold songwriting days on a somewhat regular basis. Each member gets up in the morning and independently composes as many pieces of music as humanly possible, records them, and brings them all to a listening party in the evening. It’s a crazy task that’s yielded some brilliant results.

We actually held such a songwriting day, almost two years back now, and I picked the preliminary name “Forgery Lodge”, which I went on to steal and change for the name of this site. It was all pretty cool, and though we haven’t done it again since then, it did inspire me to start the Song-a-day project - the less frenzied, solitaire version, if you will.

introspect (1’38”)

Speaking of which, here’s tonight’s endeavour. It’s very 1980, all analoguey synths and such, all of them Logic instruments again. The strings here use the ES1 plugin, which has pulse width modulation on it - a sound that takes me right back to the Commodore 64 days. And the whistly melody harkens back to a certain sort of pastoral synth wispiness that I think I imprinted on big time as a kid. There was one Shadowfax piece in particular that I’ll have to track down some day…

I always like to figure out my own built-in rules and prejudices and subvert them, and this week it was my “no pads” rule - hence those strings. I think partly it’s because I’m becoming a bit more comfortable playing keyboards (I got to play an actual Hammond organ last night, and it was a blast).