I’ve started releasing an EP series called “Transitions” inspired by this time of year, when the birds prepare to migrate from wintery Ireland to sunnier countries. Each EP will have several short transitional pieces linking the main ones. I enjoy playing around with structure so this idea gives a nice excuse to indulge this 🙂

This track is called “Yay!” and came together very quickly. Around the time I finished it, a flock of swallows were gathering on our houses. Then the buzzards came along, for their breakfast. This was great because I’d been trying to photograph them all summer, out on the bike following them. They are quite timid and tend to fly off when you reach for the camera. So imagine my joy when I could just stand in the studio window and get great close ups! At one point she looked right at me. They also played around with each other, pouncing in mid-air. Spectacular. This video is made with my own photos.

My wife helped me with this one. The synth groove had been sitting around since 2012. The Pro Tools session fell out of the big pile of Pro Tools sessions of ideas, and she came up with a great orchestral line (violins, cellos and a touch of English horn) a piano part and the reversed bridging parts. The drums are from a Minnie Driver record. We tried to keep the mood of the synth groove while adding a cinematic build to the piece. We hope you like it 🙂

I played guitar on the other tracks, a Gibson Humming Bird. The final track “Sun Groove” came out of doing a cover version of Mike Oldfield’s version of Francisco Tárrega’s “Étude”. WIth the way Pro Tools works, I was able to keep all of the sounds of the original, and do a completely new piece of music. So this has some of the original old Fairlight percussion that Mike Oldfield used, taken directly from the original 8″ floppy disks. I also used a few Emulator II sounds in the same way. I love the atmosphere on this old sounds. The people that made them had to take great care in the recording to get them to sound so good with such limited sound quality. It’s nice to stand on the shoulders of giants!

Download the EPs here.