Oddities
Music,  Featured,  Solo

Oddities

OdditiesI had no plan to produce two instrumental albums within the space of this year, yet only five months after the release of ‘Obscurities‘, I’m delighted to announce the release of ‘Oddities’.

This can be viewed as a direct sequel to Obscurities, comprised as it is of an eclectic range of instrumental music in numerous different styles and with all sorts of different instrumentation featured. Both were the product of challenges of different sorts. In this case, Oddities mutated out of an online photographic challenge (FMS Photo-a-day) to become a fairly intense challenge to me of writing a piece of music every day for a month. Each piece was inspired by a single prompt and accompanied with a related photograph.

For example, day one’s challenge was “‘N’ is for…” – my response was to take a photograph of my collection of fire engine Nozzles and create a musical piece using only the nozzles (resulting in some wonderful bell-like sounds). This process repeated every day for 31 days in total, with prompts that had me reaching for guitar and ukulele, bass and keyboards, zither and harmonica amongst many others. I tried my hand at writing Austrian and Scottish styled folk tunes, improvising a guitar solo in 7/8 time, turning the Vienna skyline into music and various other challenges. Every day I posted the photos to Flickr and the music to Soundcloud.

Of course, some of the pieces ended up being a little rushed, due to squeezing most of them in to working days, so once the month was over, I spent more time tidying up the ones that had loose ends, re-mixing some and adding some more suitable treatments to others. I pulled all the photographs together, along with a description of the process and some old-fashioned sleeve notes, which you can find in a 60+ page, full-colour PDF booklet (included with the download).

The result is ‘Oddities’ – 31 brand new pieces of instrumental music joined together by a common thread and a set of photographs, but each quite unique in its own way. As with ‘Obscurities’, you’ll find something to like here, even if it isn’t all to your taste. Give it time, though, let the tracks run together and you’ll find they do become a cohesive whole. I have again released this under a ‘Creative Commons’ licence, so podcasters, video bloggers, radio stations and musicians can use it in their own works, so long as they link back to this website.

So, without further fanfare, here it is. Listen to it right here as often as you like and, if you want a copy, download it for a few measly quid/dollars with the ‘Buy’ link below. Please share it with any friends you think might like it, too!