Lee Barry Composition Diary

A "cinematic" mix with a radio playing in the room, switching between the 1938 World Series broadcast and an astrology program.

Music For Places III: Thorne Rooms by Lee Barry Layered piano parts in D Dorian.

And now for something cloying and sentimental--a sea chantey arranged as a wind quintet, based on an equally cloying pop song written in the early 90s "Ship of Love" . This is typically how I recycle music. All have the same harmonic progression.  "Ironic Blue" was the piano arrangement . The original song version:

Solo piano improvisations in the Lydian mode for all 12 keys, following the circle of fifths. (Side A is flat keys, Side B, sharp keys, progressing from the outside to inside of the disc.) The purpose of the exercise was to see what I could do manually as an improvisation using a constraint (the Lydian Mode), then create an algorithm to do the same thing. The characteristic sonority of Lydian is a chord in 4ths built on the #4, and all the pieces start and/or end on it. Rifts by Lee Barry

Ancient AI by Lee Barry Alux (Duende) with some "place" added around it. Towards the end, an EDM groove is added with a short bass interlude based on the main tetrachord (G-Ab-B-C), then fades.

Side A A1: Mxines The sound of trains has always inspired pop music. But now machines are silent algorithms. The closest corollary to machines inspiring music is the random buzzes and clicks from electronics and things like the read/write head on a disk drive. That's what inspired the static-y rhythms on this track. The glitched sound is from the random "scrubbing" of the timeline. A2: Ancient AI  A generative work based on one small looped MIDI file playing various synth patches and samples, and three gapped scales to be used for improvisation (its "DNA"). The tempo can be set at multiples of itself (e.g. 46/92/184) and played as layered polyrhythms. (For example, the MIDI file can loop at 92 on another sample running at 184, against another one running at 46.) Chord Changes: G# min / A / G#min / F#min / E / C#min The melodic layer uses four scales simultaneously, an E minor pentatonic against a C#minor, F#minor or G#minor, whic...

I like to refer to these as a "cluster changes" rather than chord changes. Sometimes you want to construct chords simply by stacking notes without consideration of what the chord symbols are. Chord "symbolization" can corrupt the thinking about harmony. These clusters are essentially a ii-V in C minor, but have nothing to do with C minor as a tonality. Ancient AI by Lee Barry

3/4 with 2 and 4 polyrhythmic overlays. Ancient AI by Lee Barry

Working title. Other possibility: "Digient Dreams" Changes, sounding like something Zawinul would come up with:

Melange by Lee Barry From "Music For Places", an unreleased track, essentially a repeating bass part in whole notes, under voicings of a Cmin7 chord. Everything else is space and texture. There's very little musical material here, and has been "deskilled." The scraping noise is Foley, a stainless steel cup being dragged across a smooth piece of stone. To some people this indeterminate pitch might create somewhat of an earworm after listening to the piece a few times, indicating that even textural elements can be stored in the brain as musical pattern. When I'm working abstractly, using metaphors, I don't necessarily care what the chords are, or what is theoretically correct, and focus on the cinematic qualities. This is all ambient atmosphere, although it could work as a jazz piece, with an improvised sax part. At one point while thinking about titles, I considered geology metaphors, and several lines in lyric from something else having to do with ...

The 9th in a series of 15, 25 bars in 6/4, Tempo=150, a minute long, done in the style of Satie's Gnosiennes. The final version will be as EDM.