Last night at about 2am I recorded a quick and dirty (but with a little bit of multitracking!) cover of my favourite Magnetic Fields song on an Omnichord. Here's the audio.

I did it in Photobooth (the video is here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ0ipKFRMOI) so it's pretty lo-fi! 

Omnichord (OM-84) cover - 100000 Fireflies by the Magnetic Fields

This song is available to download, pay what you want, at https://deerful.bandcamp.com/track/city-bells (with an exclusive b-side if you pay £1 or more), or from iTunes, from 15th December 2015.

A festive single, if not an absolute Christmas one. 

I used to live and study in Cambridge, the most festive city I've ever been to, but terms were short and celebration started early, and by the time it was really Christmas we'd all travelled home to our families. 

Deerful is very much a solitary project, and because my friends, who I rarely see, were so important to the subject matter of City Bells, I really wanted to involve them in making the video (viewable here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4TA0K5U43A). Amazingly, we all managed to get together, and travelled back to Cambridge to spend a wintry day having fun and filming one another. It was so much fun to spend time together again, and made the song feel like it tells its own story.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Septavox and OP-1 synthesisers, vocals, music, lyrics: Emma Winston. 
Mixing: Darren Hayman.

Lyrics:
We walk the icy pavements in the morning 
The wind burns cold against our skin 
We part, another day begins 
The lines of ancient spires on the horizon 
Meet with the sky's December mist 
Between the two a frozen kiss 

The lights this year were early in the market 
And you and I'll be gone before it's time 
It's funny still to think they call it it Michaelmas 
We're happy just to watch the city shine 

And some day this will all be done 
And some day we'll be older 
And some day this will all be ours to tell 
And sooner still we'll all be gone 
Before the air gets colder 
But 'til that day we'll dream of city bells 

That night, I hear a tap upon my window 
I look outside, the world is white 
The snow has cast the dark sky bright 

We laugh and dig through handfuls of the crystals 
We build a fort on frosted grass 
The ice as thick and smooth as glass 

At midnight we drink whisky in your room 
And we toast the winter present and to come 
We tell each other stories of traditions held at home 
And we stay awake until we see the sun 

And some day this will all be done 
And some day we'll be older 
And soon we'll all be far away from here 
And even though we'll be apart 
Our steps are somehow bolder 
We'll find a way to draw each other near 

Yes some day this will all be done 
And some day we'll be older 
And some day this will all be ours to tell 
And sooner still we'll all be gone 
Before the air gets colder 
But 'til that day we'll dream of city bells

City Bells

Sound journal, 30th January 2016, Daylight Music at the Union Chapel. The Leaf Library, the Wave Pictures, Samplr for iOS.

leaves/waves

My contribution to the Cities and Memory Dada Sounds project: http://citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds/

For Ssa-ha-la, I chose to use an existing sound from the Cities and Memory database (https://audioboom.com/boos/4078583-the-crying-gulls-of-margate), since I felt this was more in keeping with the spirit of the Dada readymade than procuring my own field recording would have been (although I ultimately manipulated the recording far more than perhaps Marcel Duchamp would have approved of!). 

Listening closely to the sound of the waves and seagulls at low tide, I decided to write a sound poem, in the 'Bruitist' (or phonetic) form invented by Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck, which would reflect and exaggerate the natural sounds accompanying it, replacing semantic logic with sonic logic. The result is a kind of 'sound song' which intertwines with the cries of the gulls and sibilant waves.

Vocals, field recording, Ableton Live, Borderlands, Bastl Microgranny. 

Buy compilation

Ssa-Ha-La - Cities and Memory Dada Sounds project

Also available at https://deerful.bandcamp.com/track/before-us-comes-the-flood-pocket-operator-arcade-demo

Written and played entirely on a Teenage Engineering Pocket Operator PO-20 and mixed badly by me in Ableton. If you like this enough to tip me for it, it is pay-what-you-want on bandcamp: https://deerful.bandcamp.com/track/before-us-comes-the-flood-pocket-operator-arcade-demo

PAY WHAT YOU WANT LINK

Before Us Comes The Flood - Pocket Operator Arcade version

Also available pay-what-you-want at https://deerful.bandcamp.com/album/demos. A cover of Joanna Newsom's Peach Plum Pear, rough-mixed and mastered in the OP-1, vocals added in Ableton. Posted because I played it live at my last show and a couple of people asked for it, but especially because @hieroglyphixs did and I <3 her. 


Peach Plum Pear - Joanna Newsom cover

UPDATE: This is now available as part of a charity release for the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants here: https://deerful.bandcamp.com/album/without-borders

This is my contribution to Squarepusher's MIDI Sans Frontières collaborative project, detailed here: http://www.squarepusher.net/.

I want to explain a little about this piece here. I spent the 19th to the 23rd of June this year at Stanford CCRMA, learning to begin to program music in SuperCollider. That's not a very long time, and the sum total of what I've learnt is used here; I could perhaps have done something more ambitious using another method, but I didn't want to, and here's why. The night of the referendum vote was the last full day of my classes at Stanford, and unlike my friends at home, and my partner who had dutifully acted as my proxy voter earlier in the day, I wasn't able to sleep through the counts; as my lecturers spoke I kept the BBC website open behind SuperCollider on my laptop, refreshing and refreshing until all the counts were done and I knew 52% of the population had voted to leave the EU. 

I've never stayed up to the end of a count before and never want to again. There is a powerlessness to it I couldn't have anticipated. As the only UK-based student in my class it was hard to make my American classmates and lecturers understand my distraction and upset at the referendum result, but their kindness even in the face of something comparatively unknown to them will stick with me for a long time. I worry about my friends who are people of colour in the wake of the reported rise in racist attacks; I worry about being unable to visit Germany, where my entire maternal family live without dual citizenship; I worry about a return to the depths of austerity; I worry about friends who are unemployed and my own employment prospects when I graduate; I worry about the NHS. There's a lot to worry about. It piles up like the phrases of this piece.

It's hard not to feel, now, like the country is more in ruins as a result of this referendum than any other vote in the course of my lifetime so far. As I write this we are essentially in governmental stasis with little we can do to change the situation except to exercise our democratic right when we can by voting, joining parties and unions and demonstrating if we are able, but in a smaller sense, to look out for one another, extend hands and say, I will stand with you and work with you and support you regardless of borders or government or where we are from or how we identify. In a very small way this is one attempt at doing the latter. 

Code (and vague instructions for live performance) available at http://pastebin.com/rhHAexVh. 

Special thanks to @christa_lee for making me aware of this project and for her own inspiring contribution to it, and to @brunoruviaro for his wonderful teaching.

MIDI Sans Frontières

Staying Still was written in the summer of 2015, mostly from my bed, sometimes from a friend's sofa or under a tree in the park at the end of my road, when I was very ill with what turned out to be severe depression. It's a record about stasis and feeling stuck, failed attempts at escape and at being heard, intrusive thoughts and stuffing them down. 

It's also a record about recovery although I didn't know that at the time. 

I'm releasing it on cassette because I love cassettes, even though I know nobody has the means to play them. 

I hope you enjoy it.

All music, lyrics, and artwork by Emma Winston. 
Mixed by Darren Hayman. 
Mastered by Ian Button.

TAPE/DIGITAL DOWNLOAD

Some Nights

The Home EP is out! It features all-chiptune, 8-bit video game-style versions of my songs (two old ones and a new one), and a Mountain Goats cover. You can buy it either digitally or as a special USB drive edition at https://wiaiwya.bandcamp.com/album/home-ep.

The USB edition includes a papercraft model of me(!), some desktop and phone wallpapers, and a PICO-8 mini-game, which you can also play online at http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=27879.

Before Us Comes The Flood (8-bit)

The Home EP is out! It features versions of three of my songs in the style of old-school 8-bit video game music, and a Mountain Goats cover. You can get it either digitally or on a USB drive at https://wiaiwya.bandcamp.com/album/home-ep.

The USB edition includes a papercraft model of me(!), some desktop and phone wallpapers, and a PICO-8 mini-game, which you can also play online at http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=27879.

Riches And Wonders (8-bit Mountain Goats cover)

Moon Maps (8-bit)

I feel kind of out of practise but here's a found-sound journal after a long break. All sounds taken from the main block at King's College London in the final week of term before Christmas 2016.

skate

Staying Still

The Waves

Two Thousand One Hundred and Sixty

Better

BUY THIS HERE 
https://forthesakeoftapes.bandcamp.com/album/hang-in-there-a-diy-covers-compilation
https://forthesakeoftapes.bandcamp.com/album/hang-in-there-a-diy-covers-compilation
https://forthesakeoftapes.bandcamp.com/album/hang-in-there-a-diy-covers-compilation
it's on a charity compilation for Mind with a bunch of other amazing artists.

Hang In There - A DIY Covers Compilation

BUY COMPILATION

Damn These Vampires (originally by The Mountain Goats)

Chronostasis

Peach

The Ice Fishers

Peach (Redux)

Take Care

FULL ALBUM

Subjects Of Our Love

Down

Before Us Comes The Flood

The Wider Sky, So Far From Land

Solar Phenomena

Conceptual Art

Peach Rose Tea

Reasons this needed to happen: 

1. It's got my name in the title
2. There are no other ukulele covers of it online
3. It's EMMA'S HOUSE by THE FIELD MICE. 

With apologies to the Field Mice.

Emma's House - The Field Mice (ukulele cover)

this is literally just the audio from this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-ipC5QszRA

If you would like a high-quality version and/or stems, consider joining my Patreon, if that's your sort of thing? https://www.patreon.com/deerful

Just Like We Never Said Goodbye (SOPHIE cover)

Five tracks in total, toy piano and voice. I struggled a bit with the vocals (it sits in a rocky part of my voice but I didn't realise until I'd already recorded most of the tracks...) but I'm not sure how obvious it is - pretty sure the accompaniment is one of my better efforts though!

Peach, Plum, Pear - Joanna Newsom (toy piano cover)

Alpha Rats Nest - The Mountain Goats (ukulele cover)

Tell Me I Can Fix This On My Own

The Seaside Town

Sunset Drive

Tell Me I Can Fix This On My Own is a mini-album of peculiar pop songs, coded in the music programming language ixi lang (www.ixi-audio.net) between July and August 2018. 

I learned ixi lang in an academic creative practice workshop in 2016, then subsequently forgot all about it. Late one night in July, alone in my living room, something prompted me to reopen it and I fell in love. Before I knew it, I'd been booked for a laptop music festival, on the grounds that I'd written enough material to play a full live set. This was the result. 

It's mostly a record about friendship. It's also a record about loss. It’s about the visceral connections that bind you to other people and refuse to let go even when they’re physically absent, but it’s also about the realisation that you are the only person who can steer your own life, and the terror and grief and joy and liberation that affords. I’ve written and released it so quickly because it felt like I had to, like there were too many stories I needed to tell to keep them inside any longer.
credits
releases September 1, 2018 

Music, code, lyrics, artwork, mixing and mastering by Emma Winston.

A million thanks to Thor Magnusson for the creation of ixi lang.

Bloom

This is a love song about other people, and also about me, but it isn't a love song about me.

Lyrics in the final chorus don't make sense because I messed them up, and the vocal/uke balance is really bad, but maybe I'll do something better with this later.

Where You Used To Wait - rough demo

This is a love song about other people, and also about me, but it isn't a love song about me.

Where You Used To Wait (demo)

this has no right whatsoever to work as well as it does

camp jams

Owen Pallett - Lewis Gets Fucked Into Space (ukulele cover)

Deerful. I do sad pop music on tiny synthesisers.

In other people's bands I do or have done:
Keys/backing vocals in Owl & Mouse
Keys/backing vocals with Darren Hayman
Harmonium/accordion/vocals in Enderby's Room
Synth/electronics in free-improv duo Brute Love
Backing vocals/synth in Papernut Cambridge
Backing vocals with Citizen Helene

Deerful

Popular tracks