I collected my favourite tracks that I uploaded last year together and made them into a CD, called another time (the cover is above). I'll try to make it available here for British and European people, but it's already available on CD Baby, and they claim that it should be on iTunes and other such services soon (perhaps even Spotify, who knows), which means that those of you who downloaded the tracks last year should be quids in.

The tracks on the album are:

• Another Time
• Unison
• Logodaedalus
• Pure
• Gravity
• Nothing But Green Grass
• Care
• Mufti Day
• Reprise
• River Rise

... not only have I not uploaded anything for a couple of weeks, but I won't be uploading anything for a while as there's nothing finished, and I'm really busy at the moment.

There is the Jeays gig on Wednesday (I should put an entry for that, actually...) and a new CD of my favourite of this years uploads around the same time. Check back for details.

I uploaded one loop-based instrumental before (called Ridgeway) and this is another one. It was over six months ago, so it's acceptable, isn't it?

This is less uneventful than the other one, but is also considerably longer (so expect downloading to take longer, if that's what you go for). As before, it was written to go with a guided meditation, with definite sections to it that I tried to follow.

Background rather than foreground music.

As of this morning I had nothing to upload, and I thought I might have my first failure. This came together in the afternoon - I already had the chords and what I took to be the title, and filled everything else in as I went along, including the lyrics, which sort of emerged during the process like a Polaroid photograph.

One idiosyncrasy is that I took it as an opportunity to sync the MIDI clock to a freely-played guitar part. Rather too freely played, as it turns out. When I tried to add drums the tempo lurches made them sound drunken, so this is beat-free.

Meaning? No idea.

I think this was basically an excuse to use my new SansAmp, which I bought as soon as they appeared in the UK (£180, which was a colossal investment for me at that time). One of the few bits of technology in the early 90s that didn't disappoint me. But that only comes in for the guitar solo at the end (actually, I think that's double-tracked, but I may be wrong). The piano is a Yamaha CX5 (which only had a teeny little keyboard, and I was a clumsy person with big fingers). As for the lyrics... at the time I knew nothing about birds, trees or anything, really. It was supposed to be kind of folky, but that's quite difficult to achieve with a drum machine.

I think it was later my model for the recording strategy I used on It's Amazing - drum / bass / rhythm guitar bounced onto track four, then two vocals on track three, then one thing each on tracks one and two bounced stereo - except on that I used two guitars, on this I used piano sounds.

This is another very old one - one of the first ones I wrote specifically to be played on the nylon string guitar, I think, which must make it 1997. -Ish.

Very much influenced by the Ted Greene chord books that I was working through at the time - I was at someones house, working on an abortive recording of Jimmy, around 1995 (I was abortive, he was completely professional), and the conversation turned to mad chords. "You want mad chords?" he said, "Take a butchers at this!" and thrust a copy of Chord Chemistry into my hands. Which slightly blew my mind - I bought most of Mr Greene's books over the next couple of years (I'd especially recommend Modern Chord Progressions, which is exactly what it says on the cover). Many of those progressions made their way into my songs around that time, sometimes transposed from smooth-jazzy to accompanist-style.

The original, un-enhanced version is on Plucked

Not sure why I decided to re-record it, though I'm glad I did, or I'd not have found the horn section or the vocal harmonies. I used computer trickery on the vocals, by the way - thought I'd warn anyone who is offended by suchness.

Also note the cheesiest available synth setting.

Finally I've made a recording that I would without any equivocation have despised when I was 18.

Well, I promised a track every week, and had intended to upload a song this week, but have been down with a lurgi that's negatively impacted my ability to either (a) sing or (b) do anything else. Well, not quite anything - this track started to happen a few days ago as I was propped up at the computer looking at my copy of Henri Mancini's book on arranging, noting what he said about doubling flute with marimba. Everything else sort of happened by itself.

It's called Trailing because it makes me think of a spy film, with one agent trailing another. I might be completely deranged in this image, though, I'm not sure.

It was a useful thing to do, though, to remind me that I have a lot of other sounds available - I must admit, I've been settling down to the same settings recently, and it was good to rediscover electronic drums and rumbly bass and other such things.

This is actually quite an old tune - I think I wrote it between Christmas and New Year 1999-2000. Wow. Very old then. Perhaps a year younger, now I come to think of it. I've performed it a few times, but usually reached a point where it all fell to pieces, provoking that cold-sweat-terror thing that I realised I wasn't going to get to the end. And usually didn't, or not without speeding up precipitously.

But that's not to say I didn't like it. There's also the fact that inside my head it sounded a lot more like this - drums, bass, piano, even (though not included here) a jazzy flute, perhaps rather than one lone guitar.

Also, there was the problem that it didn't have a name, which I've half-solved with the help of an online English-Portugese dictionary.

Special mention for the ultra-cheesy 70s string synth patch. I'm very glad I found that.

Lovely evening, everybody on top form - Caroline Dexter (with Lyall on mandolin), Leonard Ng, Mette Bille (with Jez on harmonica), Spekki Chris (with classic Electro-Harmonix pedal) and me. I played Deja Vu and Care in the first half and Gravity and Iodine in the second. General hurrahs, then.