When my wifes cousin, Sammy, gave birth my wife and I had decided to write a three movement musical work celebrating her daughters birth. We spent weeks jotting down ideas and sketching images that were to become a graphic score. In the midst of that things got sideways for Sammy - her partner asked her to move out and she suddenly found herself a single mum - composing for that situation, we knew, would have to change. Instead of a three movement work of Womb, Birth and New Life we focused on one 3 minute-ish composition about flying free and flying high, and the beauty and noise of life that must and will frame that. musique concrete was the first form of electronic music. In MC we take sounds from the real world, record them, edit and process them and turn them into music. For this composition we chose to focus on 3 sound sources: my son Bodhi laughing, a walk in the park (ducks, geese, honking horns) and 2 minutes standing under a willow tree (rustling branches, ducks, whoosing cars, water fountain). While the sounds are much more subtle than my last, 'ugly sound' heavy compositions I sought to place them in a thick, tectured layer of sound, almost like clouds. The result is a composition that is thick with subtle sounds, some are messy (a gust of wind shows up throughout) and others are beautiful (Bodhi babbling, the birds) all of which are life - the beautiful mess of it all. Listen to it through some headphones to get the full effect and tell me what you think! A technical note: The mix is not perfect. ProTools for some reason does not want me to hear out of the right channel and this has been the case on 3 pairs of headphones (all of which work, both channels, with iTunes). I think it turned out OK but that was a factor in figuring things out.

Soundscape recorded at my recording studio in Hamburg in 2012. This is the first musical interpretation of Siria 02, a painting from Rud Witt, a german painter. Her paintings are interpretations of fantasy landscapes of Syria. I transform her canvas into pitch and time digitally through different computer programmes as well as the color values, and then add different digital audio effects to finish the piece.