English avant-garde musician Colin Robinson bought himself a generative music program and and loaded it with his own sound and musings to record an album of ambient tunes that could be labeled as zany Zen music for his one-man project Jumble Hole Clough. He used synthesisers (real and imaginary), guitars and his trusty 6-string bass to create wordless short stories about walking around in English cities, visiting deserted places of worship, and observing decay in general.
While it may seem easy to let the software take care of making art, it's still the human being who has to do the heavy lifting. The old "garbage in, garbage out" out" is a given that can't be avoided. If a musician runs out of ideas it's just another useless piece of equipment. But when you are a creator like Robinson who can bang any tool into submission to create something worthwhile and memorable, it becomes a powerful gizmo to conjure up with something fresh and slightly haunting. Who would have thought that the chore of daily shopping could become an adventure with aliens lurking behind the shelves (Chance Is The Gateway To The Supernatural - Or The Supermarket)? And washing your hands can be an embarrassing experience when the whole world appears to watching (The Ritual Humiliation Of The Public Ablution).
Robinson's quest to explore all the niches of guitar loops possibilities has turned into a never ending journey, with each album serving as another chapter of in the big book documenting his travels, both musically as well as in real life. Long may he roam.
Chair Envy is a self-released album. Buy it (pay-what-you-want) from his website.
Tracks:- Prometheus, Dreaming Of Empty Cathedrals
- 454 Angell Street, Providence, Rhode Island
- Chance Is The Gateway To The Supernatural - Or The Supermarket
- Former Water Feature
- Finding A Mass Of Corrosion
- Tom Waits For No Man
- 133 Lower Seedley Road, Salford
- Please Tend My Sacred Obelisk
- Flowers On A Railing By A Bus-stop In Bolton
- The Ritual Humiliation Of The Public Ablution
- My Father Lost The Horse, But Not The Saddle
- 304 Holloway Road, Islington
- Viols Mourn Liberia
- Her Worn Goal-tender
» Jumble Hole Clough on Facebook
HCTF review of Bats Tidied Up Heliport.