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10-Feb-12: The End (Again)
Some time ago, I decided to resurrect the T-Bass concept through a project I christened Revive. I thought T-Bass still had some mileage left in it and that certain ideas were worth following to their logical conclusion.
However, that project has sat on the back-burner and quite literally festered for the better part of three years. One or two tracks were written but they didn't break any new ground or lead to any particularly mind-expanding insights either, and the old band members quite clearly didn't want anything to do with the project anymore. Hell, even the Christmas Cards stopped.
And with Ion moving from strength to strength as a proper band and with SkinMechanix still available as a solo venture, I've decided to end the whole T-Bass Revive project for good. I'll replace the place-holder with the old project directory over the weekend and return the project status to officially dead.
Years and years ago, a wise man told me that it's the stuff that you hang on to, that you're attached to emotionally, that holds you back. I knew he was right then and he is right now. It's time to let go of the past and embrace the future.
20-Oct-08: The End
A few people have commented that our recent Ion gig for Awakenings featured several T-Bass tracks and wondered if this was a coincidence. Well, no. It wasn't. We played two T-Bass tracks, 10000 Maniacs from the album The Fabulous Neutrinos and The Infection of Time from the (debut) album of the same name. Both went down very well and seemed to mesh in perfectly with the whole Ion vibe.
So, this begs the question Is Ion really T-Bass in another guise?
T-Bass stopped being fun for all sorts of reasons, many of which are detailed elsewhere on these pages, and they eventually led the group to disband. There were some false starts last year and we thought that we might be able to resurrect the whole adventure again but, alas, they went nowhere.
When Ion was invited to play at the Awakenings gig, there were two major problems. Firstly, much of the Ion material was never written down. It was composed quickly and recorded directly to the hard disc. There are minimal notes in my studio journal but nothing of any great value. Only in one or two instances did we use Cubase to record ideas and so we knew that recreating the majority of the Ion tracks from Future Forever would be difficult if not impossible. This, in turn, led us to problem number 2 - a lack of suitable material for live performance.
We were encouraged to improvise a couple of pieces on the fly but that's not a direction I want to explore anymore and so, to extend the set, we added a couple of T-Bass pieces that we felt would work together with the Ion material. SkinMechanix has been a big part of my life for the last 10 years and so we added one track from that camp to see what energy it would bring to the proceedings. Furthermore, we also found some unreleased T-Bass tracks which we felt could work as Ion pieces.
Better still, Jules agreed to join Ion for this gig, to see if the arrangement would work out and to see if we could restore some of the sense of fun that used to be a major part of the whole adventure. We quickly discovered that it was very successful arrangement indeed. The reviews were extremely positive and loudly declared a major return to form. Many fans commented that this was easily our most relaxed and together performance ever. We certainly enjoyed ourselves even though the photos make me look like a right miserable git. I've since learned that the whole set will be streamed via ARFm because they were highly impressed with the noise we made, which pretty much confirms that we're back in business.
After the gig, Jules and I felt that we wanted to hold onto the whole Ion vibe for as long as we possible, to freeze it even though previous attempts have been a bit like trying to bottle lightning. We decided that we wouldn't recruit anyone else into the band, even for live work, and agreed to sacrifice complexity for a simpler working arrangement. We also decided that we didn't want to resurrect T-Bass again. We both felt that it's had it's time in the sun and now we have to move on.
So, is Ion really T-Bass in another guise?
Yes, it is.
This means that T-Bass is now, sadly, officially dead. However, it has moved on to another life.
Long live T-Bass.
27-Feb-08: General Update
Although these web pages have not been fully updated since last year, there has actually been a great deal of activity on the T-Bass front.
One of the comments below, "The future starts here...", (dated 17-Dec-08) has generated some interest. Let me explain.
I've talked about resurrecting T-Bass many times in the past but I have not really progressed the whole idea much beyond the initial concept. Other projects demanded my time and energy and T-Bass seemed to be something of a throwback, a legacy from another age, perhaps an experiment that had failed somewhere down the line.
T-Bass was always about writing melodic, energetic music that was, above all, highly accessible, enjoyable and just plain fun. We were, I like to think, the acceptable face of electronic music. You could play our stuff in front of your friends and family and not have to explain all of the weird, bleepy noises. It sounded good, sort of conventional, and had dynamics, flow and a kind of passion that speaks volumes, the kind of passion that seems to be wholly missing from the scene at the moment.
To me, a lot of electronica these days wears a large and pompous frock coat and this large and pompous frock coat has the words "serious music" written across the shoulders in equally large and pompous letters. The proponents of this kind of music take it all very seriously indeed. This is music for the head, rather than for the heart. It is music for the intellect rather than the soul. In truth, it seems to be more about small men operating large and complex machines, interconnected by long lengths of wire running strange and obscure protocols that mere mortals such you and I do not have the arcane knowledge to fathom out.
Just before Christmas 2007, I performed a one-off gig at Newcastle University as part of the on-going Music and Machines seminars. The event was organised by the University's Culture Lab and the 20 minute concert was intended to demonstrate techniques for musical improvisation. The plan was that I would take along a ZEIT sequencer and a stack of synths and just try improvising to some sequencer parts against a set of pre-recorded backing tracks. Fair enough. No biggie.
However, on the morning of the gig, I set my gear up in the living room and began rehearsing for the upteenth time, all the while enjoying the enormous irony that here I was reheasing for an improvised gig. Sick, ain't I? But, the more I rehearsed, the more I started to hate the process. When I say I started to hate the process, I actually mean I detested everything about the performance and in the strongest possible terms too.
Truthfully, I couldn't bear it for another minute.
With 2 hours to go before I was due to strip the gear down and stick it all in the back of the car ready for shipping to the gig, I came to the sudden and terrible realisation I'd moved just about as far as I possibly could away from the original tenet of T-Bass and SkinMechanix. The whole ethos of those bands was about writing music that, more than anything else in the world, truly moved me and inspired me, truly gave me a huge buzz, lifting both my spirits and my soul.
And I began to truly hate and despise myself for going down this redundant, irrelevant and just plain moribund path towards certain musical death.
With 2 hours to go, I changed the running order of the gig. I knew I was in danger of committing musical suicide but I was prepared to take a chance. I dropped the last piece I'd spent 2 hours developing and arranging and, in its place, added the SkinMechanix track, Waving at Mono, a piece I hadn't rehearsed in months.
At first, it sounded dreadful and I wondered if this was a good idea. I decided that I had a safety net and that I could always fall back to the improvised piece I'd been working on and so I persisted. 2 hours later, I stripped the rig, stuffed it into the back of the car and drove into Newcastle.
The gig went off okay. It wasn't a massive success and, in the main, I didn't enjoy it. Apart from, of course, the last track.
Afterwards, I stripped the gear, stuffed it away and sat back to watch the other performers.
And in the deathly silence of that half-remembered, post-gig nightmare, I vowed that I would never, ever walk this path again. I have ignored my own instincts for too long. I've been listening to the wrong people and for far too long. I've been wandering down the wrong paths, towards a dangerous and musically obscure territory under the notion that intellectual music is better than music for the soul. It isn't. Never will be. Never can be. End of story.
It took a few days to recover but, just before Christmas, I did something positive. I made a solemn promise to myself that I was not going to repeat this mistake again. As a sign of that committment, I bought a rather large and impressive bass guitar - a Yamaha RBX170, which is sitting behind me now. And I have to say this - hand on heart - I have loved every single minute spent with this wonderful instrument. I have written piece after piece with his machine. Every time I pick it up, I find something new to say with it. Jules remarked last week that I seem far more comfortable with it, that it seemed a more natural instrument than, say the keyboards or my electric guitar. It is, frankly, somewhat scary and more than a little frightenng to realise that I've maybe spent 28 years learning to play the wrong instrument.
Back to the real world.
I'm working on a new T-Bass project. It will follow on from the point where The Infection of Time left off because, whilst Neutrinos was a good album, it suffers from too many influences, too many distractions. It lacks a purity of vision and a lack of control, self discipline if you want. There's too much of too many people in that album. And, simply put, not enough of me.
So that's the state of the T-Bass project at the moment. I'm writing again but not in the same way that I have in the past. I've gone back to my roots, to re-explore some of the ideas that I abandoned all those years before. The synths and sequencers are still there. They're just being applied in a different way. We'll see where the path leads.
D.
17-Dec-07: Year Zero
The Future starts here...
13-Nov-07 : What happened to T-Bass?
Contrary to some of the idle gossip currently circulating around the net, T-Bass has not been shelved, disbanded or otherwise put out to grass. The band is, in fact, very much alive and kicking with projects moving forward as I type. The new tunes are different and borrow from SKinMechanix and Ion in both style and content but that doesn't mean to say that we're going down the route towards the Dark Side.
Don't believe what you read on the net... Most of it isn't true...
11-Aug-07 : Major facelift
As you might be able to tell, the web site has undergone a major facelift. Some bits are missing, some bits don't work and some bits look completely bolloxed up beyong belief but, we're getting there. Please let us know if something looks a bit kack.
30-Jul-07 New label, new future
It's funny how history has a habit of coming full circle and, in many instances, simply repeating itself. I guess this is one reason why I never remember to tax the car on time or why, every night, I stub my toe on the bottom of the bed or, indeed, why the planet is in such a crappy state but, well, here we are back on our original record label, Thinking Metal, which I thought had died the death in 1999.
Our former label, Infection Music, will continue to do its thing with the instruments and we'll do our own thing over here. In reality, the two companies will still be joined at the hip, so to speak, and this move is almost certainly something to do with the Tax Man so... we'll see what happens.
18-Jun-07 Secret Music 20th Anniversary Show
Secret Music is one of the best and certainly the most popular electronic music programmes in the US and regular visitors to this site will know that T-Bass, Skinmechanix and, most recently, Ion tend to feature in their playlists fairly frequently. Secret Music celebrated its 20th anniversary this weekend and so I offered to put together a living room concert for the show's presenter, Scott Raymond. That wasn't practical and so I sent him a set of tracks representing the state of the current bands. Scott was good enough to air 4 of them.
Ion Eternal Flame Voyager Ion Voyager Voyager Ion Silent Scream Pt.2 Voyager T-Bass Dacota Plains Unreleased The only track which didn't air was The Faraway Piano by SkinMechanix, which was probably just a little too ambient/floaty for broadcast at the moment. The Ion tracks were grouped under a collective sub-project of Voyager, just as a reference. Voyager won't be commercially available.
27-May-07: Progress
Dave Wilson and I have been working on a couple of tracks via the net in recent weeks and I'm pleased to say that, at long last, the new T-Bass project is moving forward. Dave kicked off by sending me an MP3 of one of his tracks, Powerball, and it's been shuttling back and forth in one version or another since then. We now have an FTP area so we can share the raw files rather than cooked and shrunk data and the next step is to start assembling finished pieces in Reaper.
After that, we'll have a few minutes on Scott Raymond's show, Secret Music coming up soon plus there is the possibility of a gig in Newcastle in July though we're not sure if this will be a T-Bass or a SkinMechanix gig. Whatever happens, it's good to be moving forward again.
10-Apr-07: Do you have a damaged copy of Connexion?
Over the weekend, we discovered that our master copy of Connexion has a series of defects and these will almost certainly have been replicated in any copy produced in the last few years. If you do have a defective copy then please get in touch via the Contact form and we'll either replace the disc itself or re-direct you to the download area where you can copy a repaired version of the track. You can also download the accompanying bonus tracks and album artwork which have only just been made available.
23-Mar-07: New Ion album (Latest News)
I've added clips from the new Ion album, Future Forever to the player on the front page. They're about a minute each and should give you a flavour for the album.
19-Mar-07: New Ion album (Latest News)
Last week's news that Future Forever has been completed proved to be a tad premature. I decided over the weekend that I couldn't live with the bumps and clicks present in Minerva and I really didn't like the fade-outs in both Tangents and Flying and so set about remastering the disc. I found a fix for the poor fade-outs - don't use Audacity's fade-out function, use the envelope tool instead - and I re-recorded the backing for Minerva to remove the two really obvious clicks caused by the iffy mixing desk problem discussed earlier. I decided that there was no way I could re-create the original solo in Minerva and so opted instead to edit out the clicks in this track at the sample level. Using a crude mixture of the cut tool and the low-pass filter effect, I was able to eliminate nearly all of the nastiness. Will anyone notice? Probably, but I reasoned that if you're trying to pick faults with my recording technique - which are, incidentally, too numerous to mention - then you're not listening to music and therefore a geek. Like me.
Jules proofed the artwork yesterday and asked me to change her credit from Jules C to simply Jules because she feels that Jules C is a bit pretentious. Huh? Sometimes, people leave me mystified. :)
So, with Ion disc number 1 almost done, what's next? Well, Ion disc number 2 is under way and progressing well, as is my ambient experimental disc, which has a working title of Unchained. This is an attempt to further explore some atmospheric techniques I came across last year whilst digging around in Audacity and Cell Synth. This disc almost certainly won't be released - it's a way of developing new techniques and existing ideas which can then be applied to future projects.
Last week I was sent an unpublished review of the SkinMechanix disc, Fallen Angel and the reviewer appeared to be very definitely yearning for a return to the days when T-Bass wasn't afraid to play loud and play hard. That's encouraging and might indicate that the tide is kind of turning back in our favour. I keep putting off any efforts to return our former stomping grounds where we were probably the only band that would (or even could) play that style of energetic, rock-driven synth music. So maybe it is time to dust off a few ideas.
15-Mar-07: New Ion album
Future Forever is now finished and a limited number of advance copies have been released to reviewers and dealers to get the ball rolling. The final step is to iron out a few of the technical problems that I have (casually) swept under the digital carpet over the last couple of weeks. We noticed a couple of clicks and buzzy noises during the listen-throughs and the root cause turned out to be a defective input on the mixing desk. A quick swab with some industrial alcohol fixed the problem but not before it had ruined two of the tracks. I guess that this is the problem with live improvised music - your head is so far into the sounds that you don't hear the problems until you listen to the end result. I've been able to edit the click out of the first track but Minerva will have to be redone from scratch, which is a pain in the backside but won't take long to resolve. I just have to remember what I played on the day and hope I kept good notes on which patches were used. Oh. Bummer.
The best news is that the artwork was finished last weekend and just needs to be proof-read to make sure I haven't made any spolling wristaches.
With luck, the new album should be available by the end of March. There are currently no plans to gig with this material live and, frankly, I would resist any offers right now because I feel that it's too complex for just one or two musicians to play without resorting to backing tapes. However, if we received a good offer to play in front of a decent audience then we would certainly consider the possibility of a gig. Or two.
18-Feb-07: New projects Part iii
The new album, Future Forever is pretty much finished. I added a new piece over the weekend and was able to modify an existing piece so that it's now longer and has more going on. There are still some rough edges and I feel that, at 48 minutes, it's just a couple of minutes too short, something that I can remedy over the next couple of days.
I've also added a new Ion section to the web site and, for the moment, the new album will be released on the Infection Music label.
14-Feb-07: New projects Part ii
The new album is proceeding well. I have 6 tracks finished and the first 30 minutes of the disc fully arranged and compiled. The listen-through last night went very well indeed and I'm confident that the album is working as a project. I have one track left to finish and, once that has been resolved, the album is pretty much done. Even the artwork, usually the most troublesome aspect of a project, was completed in less than a day.
The title of the new album will almost certainly be "Future Forever" and will be released under the band name of Ion, which in case you were wondering, is actually an old family name.
Needless to say, I am tremendously excited by this whole project. Two weeks ago, very little of this music existed and, today, I'm looking at an album that is very nearly finished. What's more, I think it's good. It feels right and, unless I've completely lost the bloody plot, I'm confident that finishing the album and releasing it will be a good move.
31-Jan-07: New projects
About a week ago, I rediscovered a technique that I've ignored for too long. Whilst noodling at the keyboard, I wondered what would happen if I simply recorded a passage directly into the VAIO with no metronome, no guides, nothing except my own sense of timing, a rudimentary knowledge of keys and scales and my somewhat iffy keyboard skills, though skills is probably not the right word.
The first passage worked well, even on the first take. I added a second, and then a third. The end result was, to me, astonishing. I had a 5 minute piece of music that had a start, a middle and an end. It evolved, it breathed, it actually sounded human, like it had been played by a real musician.
I persisted and, to my astonishment, added another piece and then another. By close of play on Friday night, I had 30 minutes of music recorded, most of it improvised on the fly and most of it sounding pretty darned good, if I may be so bold.
I followed the same technique last night, begining with an old T-Bass keyboard arrangement and added new parts by hand and with no quantisation and then layering further parts over the original clunky arrangement to help hide its mechanical, static nature.
In short, I have a big fat grin on my face this morning because I now have roughly 35 minutes worth of new music. This is a different kind of music. It's not me in the usual sense. It doesn't have that in ya face, pedal to the metal energy about it but it does feel like something good, something special.
I'm tremendously excited about this and keen to follow the ideas through to a suitable conclusion. I have no idea if I'll ever release this music. I almost certainly will because I feel that's it's too good just to leave lying around on a shelf. However, it almost certainly won't be released under the T-Bass or SkinMechanix banner because it's in a totally different style.
Wait and see...
25-Jan-07: More airplay
Every now and again, we receive e-mails like this one from Jorge over at http://www.articmist.org, a radio station which broadcasts an eclectic mix of music over most of Spain ranging from Berlin School noodling through to progessive rock thrash-a-thons. This is the playlist for his programme, which went out last night, 24th January 2007. Yet again, it's nice to see a T-Bass track receiving another spin. This sort of thing really does put a big smile on my face. Are the Gods trying to tell us something? Maybe it really is time we got together again and came up with a new album.
PROGRAM 041 (24 January 2007)
- Mychael Danna: Finale (The Ice Storm)
- Andreja Malir: Geantrai (Through The Mirror Of Sound)
- Frank Van Bogaert: Ouverture (Nomads)
- Frank Van Bogaert: Crack the Blue Sky (Nomads)
- Honest Touch: A Promise Forever (Memories From A Dream)
- Honest Touch: Epilogue: Lay All Your Love On Me (Memories From A Dream)
- K’la: Grand Hotel (Luna Park)
- Ran: Anatomy (Ran)
- T-Bass UK: A Question of Time (The Fabulous Neutrinos)
- Vangelis: To the Unknown Man (Spiral)
- Jean Michel Jarre: Oxygene (Part 5) (Cities In Concert)
- Michel Jarre: Ethnicolor (Cities In Concert)
- Klaus Schulze: The Art of Sequencing (Dosburg Online)
- Klaus Schulze: Up, up and away (Dosburg Online)
- Jorge Sergio: Equinoxe VII (Unreleased)
- Catherine Duc: One Autumn Day (Visions And Dreams)
23-Jan-07: Voltage Terrace
The new demo disc, Voltage Terrace, seems to be generating some excellent feedback, which is very encouraging. The ambient, semi-improvised approach does seem to be going down well, even amongst the hard=core fans who were perhaps expecting another thrash-a-thon.
But then Voltage Terrace isn't really a T-Bass album. It's a curious hybrid between T-Bass and SkinMechanix and represents a deliberate attempt to get away from the sonic fireworks that people have come to semi-expect from this camp.
Frankly, a lot of pleasure came from just feeling free to listen to the details within the simplest of drone tracks, or playing around with rhythms and beats that were not my own, or adding layer upon layer of washes just to see what would happen next. It's an approach I enjoyed and it's an experiment I'm likely to continue in the future.
Though this disc won't be a formal release, I may consider releasing a limited number of copies, maybe 10 or so, just to get something out there and to get a feeling for where to go next. If you want a copy, get in touch via the Contact form and I'll add your name to the list. When we have enough names for a small-scale release then we'll let you know what to do next. Cost? Small, probably less than a fiver, including postage. No dealers please. This is just for fans.
News from 2006
To read the news from 2006 click here.