Second night with the ukulele. Wrote another tune, a bit more abstract than the first.

Ukulele Sketch B

The combination of a new guitar and yet another cold Beijing winter lead to 11 new songs being written and practiced to the point of giving myself sports injuries. This is the first batch. Sound quality isn't great, but it's enough to let people hear what I'm writing and hopefully want to collaborate. I don't really have an end sound in mind for the music, but I wouldn't want other musicians to "play along with" what I have, but instead grab hold of the music and take it in a more leftfield direction. Would be looking for drums first, then bass, then synth, then vocals (or I can try to do vocals ?). 

Bad Light, demo part A

I wanted to amplify the uke using a normal acoustic guitar pickup, but the pickup was too big, so i just threw it inside the uke and turned up all the dials on my amp and created a distorted contact mic effect through the amp, a kind of rumbling percussive element as a field recorder picked up the raw sound of playing plus the amp. Not sure it works that well...

May 2014 ukulele demo

Scratchy lo-fi bedroom recordings from 2002, recorded under the name WIPE CLEAN MUSIC in Edinburgh and Fife, overdubbing tracks onto a minidisc and cassette recorder to end up with 3 or 4 tracks. Instruments & vocals by Graeme Nicol. Backing loops sampled from my record collection...

01 - ascent into madness
02 - melt
03 - honey coat
04 - leave nothing but footsteps
05 - number 33
06 - every time i'm cruel
07 - a wiser man 
08 - the leith police dismisseth us
09 - world of opportunity
10 - brave face ugly heart
11 - smiling sigh

Leave Nothing But Footsteps

Leave Nothing But Footsteps (2002) Full Album

My first attempts at trying to write songs back when I was at university in Edinburgh... acoustic sketches recorded by overdubbing onto a minidisc & cassette recorder. The original "album" was an hour long, but I've edited down to a mini-album.

01 - Electric Brae
02 - Newcomer to the Parroting Scene
03 - Alien Nation
04 - Death by Lack of Haste
05 - High Class/Dundonian Rain
06 - Dear Distant World
07 - Don't Believe in Destiny

All music by Graeme Nicol, 2001

Wipe Clean Thoughts (2001) Mini Album

Songs written on an acoustic guitar while living in Dalian, China. Unlike previous projects, these were recorded "live" as one-track with no overdubbing. They were recorded into the microphone of a Chinese proto-smartphone as 500 KB AMR files (which butchered the sound), then turned into 20 MB WAV files on computer. Caution: sound quality is so harsh that it may cause headaches.

01 - life not known
02 - drop in the ocean
03 - pastures new (to you)
04 - dianhua
05 - tapping rubber
06 - idle momentum
07 - pull of the peripheral
08 - permafrost
09 - a cold breeze

Songs and music by Graeme Nicol, 2006

Silver Business (2006) Full Album

Batter Drone Punk. A proper mess, seven minutes of insanity.
Graeme Nicol scratching around on guitar and Servaas Maesen twiddling synths. Recorded in a Shanghai kitchen in 2010.

09april2010

Batter Drone - Batter Drone Punk

Acoustic Guitar - Graeme Nicol
Electric Guitar - Mich Arsenault
Synth - Servaas Maesen

Batter Drone - Flying Forwards (2010)

Rough demo recorded in my house in January 2013. 
Still getting to know a bunch of new equipment I bought.


WD-40 (demo)

Half a song: the background, the matrix on which to hang the melody and inject some kind of spontaneity. I plan to record another track with vocals, bassline, and add some more guitar, oscillator, and no-input mixer. But basically I'm trying to only add parts that I think I can play live by myself using loopers, which also limits the kind of music I'm writing, i.e simple, groove-based, cyclical, texture-based. Some loops bear repetition without getting stale. Some don't and begin to sound rubbish, or annoying. For a 4-minute piece of music, it's important to get that matrix right. This I think works.

GraemeNicol