The main theme of this piece is something I've been developing on piano for a while. When I played it with the Pocket Blakus Cello vst (believe it or not this cello is a free virtual instrument) it just seemed to immediately feel right. behind the cello I improvised some very loose and slightly discordant piano using the Noire piano vst from NI.

It bought to mind for me the flow of time represented by the cello, with our own all too fallible life experience stuttering along in the background, occasionally falling into harmony with the flow, before drifting away again. Or maybe that's just me day dreaming again.

Past Imperfect

A simple chord progression I stumbled on gradually evolved into this piece.

Umbriel

This ones For Hannah

Many years ago, shortly after sunset my fathers brother Stan (aged 20) climbed aboard an aircraft along with 4 other young men. After taking off they effectively vanished into the night sky, with no trace of the aircraft or its crew ever found. This piece is dedicated to Stan and all of the young men, of all nationalities, whose lives have been cut short by war. 

SoundCloud mastering utilised on this track.

Night Flight

When an artist you've been admiring from afar offers an open collaboration, there's only one thing for it, drop everything and say yes please. Thankyou  holy shitshow @user-649412648 for offering up this incredible vocal stream of consciousness.

holy shitshow: Original concept, lyrics and vocals
betterlate: re-orchestration and production based on original vocal stems

Working on it over a couple of days my imagination led me to a deep dark region of the Atlantic where sirens might lure unwary sailors to a watery grave (other interpretations are undoubtedly available).

The New World - wild sea shanty no:3 ft. holy shitshow

This piece was inspired by a short phrase that caught my attention in  Bach's Organ Sonata No.4, played by the prodigiously talented Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson. As is often the case for me, finding the notes in that short phrase started me on a journey, and after a number of miss steps and U-turns I ended up here.

Fallen

This one is a bit special, it's the first song written and performed by my wife Helen. Helen had wanted to sing since childhood, but never managed to find the right opportunity to get started, and so in keeping with the betterlate philosophy, here is Helen's first song Try.

I like many am shocked and appalled at what is unfolding before us. In the midst of this darkness I salute the people who are opening their hearts and offering assistance to the refugees from this disastrous conflict.

Here are some UK links to appeals providing humanitarian aid. I'm sure each country has equivalent appeals happening now.

https://www.dec.org.uk/appeal/ukraine-humanitarian-appeal
https://www.oxfam.org.uk/oxfam-in-action/current-emergencies/ukraine-crisis-appeal
https://www.unicef.org.uk/donate/donate-now-to-protect-children-in-ukraine/

Empathy For The Agony

The backing is a layered series of experiments in creating textures, primarily using the Noire piano. Helen then improvised a vocal performance we might describe as a dreamlike stream of ideas and motifs. After some initial hesitancy wondering what it was we were creating, we decided we rather liked the end result and thought we'd share it to the cloud.

Sparrow

An unconscious exploration of the conflict and growth at the birth of a season, also the conflict within myself as I explore this art form further. I had no idea what was going to be explored within the music until it happened.
Helen x

Our process started off with a simple repeating chord progression on the piano for Helen to improvise over. We gradually added more elements once the vocal parts were complete and the final element is a field recording of the dawn chorus, recorded at 5am in our back garden.
Andy

Words and Music: Helen
Music and production: Andy

Impatient awakenings

A musical meditation on a rainy day in May, a field recording as a backdrop (complete with passing train), the piano is a spontaneous improv recorded as the rain fell to the delight of the spring greenery.

May Rain

I opened one of my poetry anthologies randomly and stumbled on this short, heartfelt verse by Anne Brontë. I kept the singing quite simplistic as it seemed more important to sing/read it accurately than with any stylistic flare, and Andy accompanied me, and did all the technical stuff. We hope you enjoy our rendition of it.

“My soul is awakened, my spirit is soaring
And carried aloft on the wings of the breeze;
For above and around me the wild wind is roaring,
Arousing to rapture the earth and the seas.
The long withered grass in the sunshine is glancing,
The bare trees are tossing their branches on high;
The dead leaves, beneath them, are merrily dancing,
The white clouds are scudding across the blue sky.
I wish I could see how the ocean is lashing
The foam of its billows to whirlwinds of spray;
I wish I could see how its proud waves are dashing,
And hear the wild roar of their thunder today!”

Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day (Anne Brontë)

This track is my spontaneous improvised piano soundtrack to a 17 minute video of the earth viewed from the International Space Station. The footage starts in the mid Atlantic and ends over the Italian Alps.

https://youtu.be/z8FSyehprdc

NASA make available the imagery that the astronauts aboard the ISS shoot and one of their favourite things is creating timelapse sequences. Being timelapse the earth flies by about 20 times faster than real time which although spectacular is not particularly relaxing. I noticed that videos were available on youtube which were beautifully smooth and playing at near real time derived from these sequences using software incorporating AI motion extrapolation to slow down the original timelapse sequences. I decided to have a go at this myself and after a bit of experimentation the video sequence with the accompanying soundtrack linked above is the result.

The View From Above

Look at me tree
All my branches broken
Leaves all gone

Words: Helen
music: Andy

Tree

Here is the result of our first collaboration with @GrevusAnjl. What started off as a straightforward piano piece was passed to Justin who added a sprinkling of synth magic, upon which Helen then developed her vocals. 

So here it is released into the wild, we hope you enjoy it😁 

Vocals: Helen
Synths: Justin aka @GrevusAnjl 
Piano: Andy

Leopard image courtesy Patrick Bouquet

Predator | betterlate & GrevusAnjl

Noodling around with a little repeat phrase on a felt piano, it decided it wanted to be this.

Passage

This came out of a piece I'd been developing over a couple of weeks, searching for variations around a central theme on felt piano. After a couple of less than successful attempts at developing the track with a fixed bpm I ended up freestyling it as an improv with some subtle drones from Spitfire labs Foghorn, a unique and free library of sounds derived from recordings of the Sumburgh head Foghorn on Shetland. 
One of the options in the labs library is a selection of engine room noises from the two diesel engines that power the foghorn, I wondered whether the engine room could stand in for percussion on the track and here is the result. Thanks for taking time out to check it out.

the engine room

As  Christmas approaches, this feels like the right time to share this reworking of a traditional Sami Joik song (a form of chanted folk song from Lapland).
The vocalist is Inga Susanne Heatta, and the original unaccompanied chant was recorded in the early 1950's by Wolfgang Laade and Dieter Christensen . On hearing it for the first time I was struck by the beauty of the piece, which is described as "A welcome to the Lappish communities". I felt compelled to have a go at adding some accompaniment and hopefully it serves to enhance the soulful beauty of the original.
Like many indigenous populations, the Sami people have suffered hostility and discrimination from the wider communities of the countries where they live and we can only hope that appreciation and understanding will win out over prejudice in the long run.

A Sami welcome

This started off as an exercise in utilising all five fingers when playing right hand patterns on the keyboard. I devised a pattern with a simple bass progression and have been developing it over nearly two months of repetition and embellishment. The overall end result comes out somewhat differently every time I play it, but I thought todays version finally felt worthy of sharing with a wider audience. Thankyou for taking time out to listen.

Downstream

"The Second Coming" is a poem written by Irish poet W. B. Yeats in 1919, the poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse  to allegorically describe the atmosphere in the immediate aftermath of WW1. The poem was written in the weeks following Yeats's pregnant wife's recovery from the flu. The virus had apparently bought his wife close to death. 
These themes of senseless destruction and pandemic seem to echo the world in which we currently find ourselves and the work seems like a chillingly apt allegory for our present situation.

A further twist to this piece is that the dialogue was generated using AI Voice cloning, the AI was trained using a recording of the English actor David Warner, who passed away in July 2022. The text of the poem was then simply copied into a text dialogue and the audio was then created within a minute. I slightly slowed the audio, split some sections and added some subtle convolution reverb, but otherwise the voice you hear is generated entirely by the AI.  
While this has been an interesting exercise in discovering what is possible, it does concern me regarding the rate at which AI technologies have suddenly exploded into the public arena.

Should we be worried.... possibly?

Dialogue: AI txt to speech generated using Eleven labs speech synthesis
Accompaniment: Andy & Helen

The Second Coming - W.B. Yeats (A dark ai verse for dark days)

Video link https://youtu.be/jLB0zbM3dBw

Each winter here in the UK, small birds enact one of natures great spectacles. Each evening flocks ranging from a few hundred to over 100,000 individual Starlings form up into a single flowing entity swirling above their communal roosting sites. 
Why they do this is not fully understood, with theories ranging from a strategy to distract predators, to a grand display designed to draw more birds to the flock for the purpose of maximising the body heat being generated by the mass of the flock in the roost. 
Whatever the purpose of this behaviour it creates a unique and magical aerial display of great beauty.

The track began with the repeating mallet sequence, then the strings and lastly the piano. I'm finding myself increasingly drawn to improvising around basic chord progressions at the moment and this is another product of this approach. I'm  resisting the temptation to quantize or mess around with the midi in post, so it's all as played and of the moment. 

Thanks for listening, it's really appreciated. 

Murmuration

This was an unusual process by which this track came about and has ended up being something quite special for me, deserving of a bit of explanation. 
After creating the initial feel of the track with piano and strings and then adding a processed bass guitar, I was looking for something to add as I just felt it was incomplete. 
Earlier in the day I'd been helping out at the community allotments where we had spent several hours burning a large amount of old waste wood in what turned out to be quite an impressive fire. I had my field recorder with me, so decided to record the fire. When I imported the field recording into the project to see if it might fit, it obviously didn't. At this point Helen suggested I slow the clip down. Warping the fire clip in Ableton in Beats mode then created an unexpected effect that immediately transported me back to my childhood.
As a young kid, my dad, who was a telephone engineer, would regularly be called out to resolve problems in any one of about twenty local telephone exchanges, and if it wasn't a school day I'd get to tag along and wander round the telephone exchange watching the switches whirring and clicking and climbing up rack ladders (when my dad wasn't looking), while he fixed the problem. 
The mechanical Strowger switches in the older telephone exchanges made a very distinctive noise, so I was surprised and transported as I played back the slowed field recording of the fire which was now delivering a convincing imitation of a strowger telephone exchange. 
So here it is, a short piece, memories of childhood emerging from a fire.

The Elemental Strowger

Piano - Andy
Strings (vst)- Helen

Helen thought the repeating piano phrase reminded her of an old fashioned treadle weaving loom. So the track is a sort of homage to those who laboured at these devices to create fabric and clothing for the masses. The painting is "Weaver" by Vincent Van Gogh.

The Weaver

Video available on YouTube https://youtu.be/_Tm7ceEgr9A 

A collaboration with our amazing SoundCloud friend holy shitshow @user-649412648 the theme is based on the Island of the Lotus Eaters mythology where Odysseus's unwary crew are lured ashore to lose themselves in a dreamlike narcosis of blissful forgetfulness.

Vocals Helen
Lyrics holy shitshow @user-649412648
Reworked ambient soundscape and production Andy

The new sun moves up
It's rays heat on my skin
The shining river
Leave it calls and dive within
The solvent river
Flows down where I can't go
The shining faces
Of everyone I love
The clock is ticking
It's breath right on my brain
The heat is stifling
Makes me long for summer rain
I'll wake up new born
And raise my head to the morning sun
The cold night thickens
When Winter’s touch is on your mind
The plethoreeere…….t
A song tucks in to wave me awake
And when I'm on the ……. bank
I stand and look ……. down

Solvent River

Video: youtu.be/PKQDI_x-6xA

As Edgar Allan Poe was writing his famous poem "The Raven" , his young wife Virginia was severely ill with Tuberculosis (to which she would succumb 2 years later). The poems theme of a lonely man grieving for a lost love visited by a mysterious raven, invokes the grief that Poe experienced repeatedly during his life from the loss of close female figures, starting with his mother ( who died when he was aged two). Following the death of Virginia in 1847, Poe became increasingly unstable and died in mysterious circumstances only two years later, aged 40.

The video that accompanies this piece uses AI to animate Poe's photographic portrait while film clips show footage from a 1909 short film directed by D.W Griffith. The film is a non biographical re-imagining of events, that show Poe writing The Raven in order to buy medicines for his wife, who upon his return after successfully selling the poem to a publisher has tragically succumbed in his absence.

Edgar Allan Poe

A couple of years ago, while searching through Netflix for something to watch, we decided to try a Korean drama series. Since then we have spent many hours being entertained and moved by Korean tv and movies, often in genres that we would not normally go for (e.g. rom com's). The cover art and dialogue featured in this piece are from a Netflix trailer for Hometown Cha Cha Cha, a dreamy laid back romance set in a small seaside town. We won't spoil the plot by explaining the context or translating the dialogue, suffice to say it's very romantic.

Andy: Piano and additional strings
Helen: Korean (vst) Gayageum / Ajaeng / Daugeum

A Korean Romance 한국의 로맨스

An experiment in using a kick track with rhythmic percussion, Helen provided vocals  in a single take, after adding some vst based guitar, orchestral decoration and reverb this is what we finished up with.

Tripping The Light (holding on)

Video available on Youtube: https://youtu.be/JoTBI2fWpI4

The dialogue featured here is from an interview with Swiss Psychologist Carl Jung in 1959. The interviewer asks Jung whether he believes there will be a Third world war.

I find it fascinating when words spoken long ago resonate with the world today.

Jung 1959

This is my version of the wonderful Opening by Philip Glass from Glassworks. It largely follows the piece as written, but I've added a a few bits of my own and not followed the structure exactly, hence slight rework.

This is one of the first pieces that caught my imagination when I began learning to play piano and it's taken till now for me to get to a point where I'm ready to share my take on it. I'm still very much a late starting learner with the piano, but hopefully there's enough here to get across the beauty of this piece of music.

A slight rework of Opening

Stepalong

We're late starters, hence the name.  Andy started playing and learning how to use a DAW to keep distracted during the covid lockdown, while Helen finally realised a long held ambition to have a go at singing, and is now both writing and performing.
We love the community on Soundcloud, where we can share our music with like minded souls.

Andy & Helen

betterlate

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