It’s been weird watching my aesthetic drift into techno, a music I neither listen to nor like very much. But my current working method is pretty much “take guitar solo, and throw random sounds at it until it somewhat approaches HYO-MAN MYOO-ZIK” and damned if techno beats and production don’t JUST WORK.

Which is a long roundabout way to tell the story of #6 and how it’s my third recent thing that could arguably be called a techo song with guitars.

I had an R&D #6 for a long time. (I was called #5 for a long time because of poor version conntrol, but that got better and it got #6’d.) It started from a totally atonal & arrhythmic track created with a Max application called Clouds. I added a bunch of other similarly non-musical elements, then created a beat in a weird time signature, then tried to record a guitar improvisation on my 12-string electric in a strange and unfamiliar tuning. That was thrwarted by the power going out and the unexpected surprise of my UPS being dead. I made another pass some time later, intending to comp together the best bits of both improvs into something good.

But the more I worked with it, the more I felt it wasn’t going anywhere. I liked little bits of both improvs, but there was no clear way to meld them together in any reasonable forms (although I just had an idea right this very minute - ed.), and I didn’t like any of it enough to justify all the time I was putting into it.

So I threw it away and started a new #6. Found a weird guitar solo recorded to a beat last December. I have no memory of the specific tone and effect combination. Don’t remember the tuning either, but I DID at least record each open string at the beginning so I could reverse engineer it if needed. And I started throwing tracks at it. It’s basically done now, but for a little bit of cleanup and experimentation.

And the end result is yet another technoish track, and one I like enough that I may just move it over from the R&D category into the ‘hey, let’s throw this on an album’ category under the title Filthy, Stinkin’ Boids.

So I’m still out an R&D #6.