This is one of the first songs I made where I only used sounds from my Casiotones, in this instance the MT-240 (which has been a favourite of mine to bring to live shows).

I remember being inspired by the ARG series Local58 at the time and I wanted to capture their perfect emulation of vintage local TV news stations. While a shorter song without much concept it is important in showing my first steps into designing the sound that would define my music for years to come.

This is another song that had visuals to accompany it, as I would post these on a music Instagram page.

latertonight2019

This is a song I'd started in the few days of March 2020 between self-isolating and the eventual lockdown that would set in a few days after. It takes from a composition I'd made for my GCSE Music coursework that I don't believe I ever completed. You can tell it comes from this time by its use of arpeggio and a Roland CR-78 drum machine.

I would go on to use this for a short 3D-animated video on my music Instagram.

stars2020

Weak Knees is another very early song from my library. It always had this 'little girl lost in the woods' vibe for me. A melancholic waltz surrounded by the trees.

Five years later in 2024 I would make a slower, more intimate arrangement of the song for a short film called 'Dragged Down' which I wrote the soundtrack for.

weakknees2019

Cosmo Ranger was one of the main things I worked on through June 2020. The concept comes from two things; the Yamaha PC-100 and my love for the Diddy Kong Racing N64 soundtrack. While most of my library from summer 2020 could be described as spacey, this one is all space.

A lot of songs I used to make centred around the 'auto-accompaniment' features many older synths would package in. You press a key over a drum beat and it plays a repeating chord pattern alongside it. I enjoyed the simple bass and chord pattern from the PC-100 and saw it used in Jack Stauber's 'Bubblegun' which led me to making my own song with it. The same concept is what would birth 'Mayday' the month prior, that instance using a Casiotone MT-205.

I mention Diddy Kong Racing specifically for the song 'Hot Top Volcano'. It starts with a modest percussion backing that leads into a full drum beat, giving the sense of things moving faster as is emulated in this song. I was playing a lot of N64 games over that summer.

The bridge borrows motifs from many of my other songs such as Sleeping Aloud, The Great Indoors and Dancer.

cosmoranger2020

An unused section that was intended for Cosmo Ranger. Its certainly not shy on downsampling (a phase of mine from the year before) and uses a melody from an extended version of the 2019 Sleeping Aloud demo.

It was originally inbetween the two last sections of the song but I felt it leaned too much on the motifs of Sleeping Aloud so I pulled in the reins with that idea.

cosmoranger2020 (unused refrain)

This is a fun one from my archives. To spoil the surprise, the song is a version of 'April Showers' in reverse. I'd made it during the early days of my first year at college.

At the time I didn't have Logic at home to work on so I would bounce whatever I had made at the end of the lesson into an mp3 or m4a file to keep safe and store in my files. I'd tried adding to the song by importing the mp3 into Garageband on my iPad but ended up reversing the audio, birthing this.

I don't often do reversed audio samples in my songs so this was and still is a fond experiment to listen back to.

spooker2020

I had to double take when I saw this was made in April 2020. I honestly thought it predated a lot of other songs but no. It uses a handful of instruments from 'Lemon' such as the bass and arp synth and is one of the earliest to feature these kinds of busy drums and high bell sounds that were common in my music at the time.

Also can't help but think of UNDERTALE's True Lab when I listen to this, maybe there was some inspiration there.

generator2020

It had only been a few months since I'd made the original 'The Great Indoors' song but I was struggling to come up with ideas to make a full song from it. The one that I had was way too long, rather boring and didn't make me feel anything noteworthy.

This was a go at changing the style of the song to something more energetic using a little square wave Yamaha synth and a 606 disco beat in the back (the recently completed MT-100 version of Mayday was also still fresh in my mind). I forgot about this until coming across it with every other project from 2019/2020 not long ago.

I think its neat!

thegreatindoorsagain2020

'November Night' is a song I always tend to come back to since its creation nearly 5 years ago. 2023 in particular was the year I became more involved within the local music scene and I was beginning to play shows with a looper and Casio setup. 

When deciding my set lists I would always spend a few days combing the back catalogues for songs that I could spruce up and use. This was a song I heavily considered until the end before deciding that without vocals it "wasn't quite ready yet." 

(Isn't that funny? It can take me years working on a song but I STILL don't think its ready.)

The sound direction in this version is even more stripped back compared to the original, very minimalist but warm and a little mysterious. I enjoy it a lot.

novembernight2023

'My House' is a newer arrangement of 'November Night' from 2020, carrying over the motifs into my newer 2024-onwards sound. Going from pumping out songs daily in my most active years to the odd ditty every couple of months often feels like a step down, but its very nice to hear the growth compared to my older work.

I've been trying out guitars in my music recently. I've attempted before with MIDI but the results were never anything big. Since I dumped 6 strings for 49 keys very early on into doing music I've been relying on chopping up some Apple loops kindly included in Logic Pro.

I went full cheese for this one. The DX7 bass with familiar 80s bells compliment my custom drum machine here. The machine itself takes from LinnDrums, 707s and a snare sampled from Tears For Fears' "Everybody Wants To Rule The World".

myhouse2025

i'm on the brink of visual epiphany!
october 2020

Mirror Man

I used to write a lot of music between 2018 and 2023. A look back into 80s Casiotone and wailing saw waves, into minimalistic CR78s between hard-hitting LinnDrums.


Hi if I know you.

[𝙖𝙣𝙙𝙧𝙚𝙬 𝙛𝙖𝙧𝙡𝙚𝙮]

Popular tracks