Vanishing Point by Andy Pickford

VERSION 2 rl. 29/042022 as 5056495 050292 on gen rel.
This has been significantly ground-up overhauled and given more objective consideration to the mix/mastering. Uploaded as 24bit wavs. Previously 24bit flac.
Note from AP: this one has grown on me a lot since I first released it. I liked it but there were some rough edges which I'd have liked to work more on. So a lot got resolved in the remix, the mastering is more solid and overall I like these improvements. I've kept the original write-up although it's a bit meh in hindsight!

Yo! Well now what can I say about this album? I suppose it’s equivalent to a 6am visit to Grimsby Docks inasmuch as it’s a good old deep sea trawl and ya gets what ya gets! Ah how typical of me to be the eternal self-deprecating bastard I am and infer that my album is a fishy one! Not the case, as I shall explain….

After all those RadioSilence tracks I finally found myself not wanting to do anymore superlong knob-box soirees at the moment. Nor did I really want to sound much like my recent AP stuff. I think a bit of Terraformer got in this time in fact. I had been working on that album in-depth and remember feeling more impressed with it than I usually am, which ain’t as much I should. Except this time I felt that all those containerised little track arrangements like that made it feel punchy and exciting at times. I guess that’s what I was aiming at, but it’s a far cry from typical Electronica. But I enjoyed that difference more this time because of the longer tracks I have been doing.

Now couple the above with a compulsive desire I had, to create my own loop library from the plethora of unfinished ideas I’ve had over the years, and the results came out rather unlike anything I can remember doing. I created a little over a Gigabyte of my own samples ranging from the early 2000s up until 2011 and challenged myself to use it to create the basis of new tracks. Obviously I then added new bits too. In the trade I believe it’s called “dressing”, although I prefer putting that on my salad.

Of course all this bunkum was jolly good fun and I managed to surprise myself at the outcome. See, if there’s one thing I do know about my own style, it’s that I love huge walls of sound and often add a few more tracks than maybe I really need. I didn’t go for that this time and felt simple combinations in short tracks often resulted in a better final sound. I know for sure one of those tracks is literally little more than drums, bass and a Rhodes sound, to which I layered FX onto the Rhodes to make it sound like a separate accompaniment. But it’s not, it’s just that one line only. 
Sometimes less is better. Like piles or anthrax.

Oh, I’m trying to figure out a way I can flog you my sample library, plus others I’m likely to make from now on. Not sorted it yet but I’ll let you know.

Don't Look Now
The 8th piece of the session starts the album. I haven’t kept exact details of from when component material was actually created. Suffice to say the main loop around which it grows is pre-2009. I can hear an old Korg ESX drum loop in there too. Everything else here is likely pre-2009 and I don’t recall adding a lot to the mix. It has an overall ominous, slightly sinister feel about it, it’s quite electronic sounding overall and I think it’s Kim’s favourite track.


Holistic Summer
2nd piece done in the session. The orchestral sounding loop here is fairly typical of the kind of things I’ve left lying around in folders, in profuse numbers. I’d often just lay down a basic idea and then leave it, especially if I couldn’t figure out immediately what to do next with it. So I find a ton of these really gorgeous sounding short passages, which all told don’t need a vast amount of embellishment in order to become lovely tracks. The bass sequence on this is nicked from my track “Phoenix”. In fact everything’s nicked from something else and that’s the point :-D I think some of ”What You Leave Behind”. I’m not where the remainder comes from but bits of it may be recognisable to some.

Vanishing Point
10th piece in the session. There’s no particular reason why this is the album title track, except that I liked the title and it kinda means something which I’ll get round to explaining later. What we have here is another pre-2009 loop, with a bunch of other stuff added. A fair bit of new was added to this piece ie: the trons and bass line.

Pocket of Dreams
3rd piece of the session. Singy bits incoming! I laid down these vocals sometime around 15 years ago. That’s all I’ve used on this, with the rest being new. The vocals sounded ethereal and so I thought I could mould them into something of an atmospheric BladeRunner-ish bridging piece.

The Lie Remains The Same
The 4th session piece. The spine of this piece was a whole improvisation I’d done and left. If I were to take an educated guess it’s a Roland JP-8080. Definitely a Roland! As per the process, a bunch of other stuff has been added, some old and some new. Oh and then there’s this passage from over 70yrs ago featuring the same BS about UFOs/UAPs they’re repeating right now. Just so you know your military peeps are truly looking after your best interests. Sadly I can’t trust them. My take is that if you’ve got unknown stuff spying on/harassing your defences, coupled with an uptick in unknown cryptid encounters (which I presume to be ET seeing if its own zoology can live here), their bizarre preoccupation with experimenting on peoples’ buttholes, and a glaringly obvious refusal to simply land here and declare themselves accountable, then I suspect ET’s intentions are not friendly and we ought to be wearing our Walking Dead shitting pants just in case.

Unidentified Aerial Pißenfürze

7th Session piece. And from this you may assume that I have a rather low opinion of our UAP stalkers. It is possible to be so advanced, so superior and clever that you come across as completely stupid. This is also part of the problem I fear. Well it will eventually resolve itself because I believe we’re heading towards the vanishing point of the process now. Hence the album title. I say vanishing point because we need full accountability in our global airspace. With the amount of traffic up there you cannot simply allow some offworld dick-splat joyriders from feck knows where, to scare airline passengers, arse with your local friendly missile silo or, in fact, arse with your arse! So eventually we’ll have to enforce that and this is when things will kick off. Tons to be happy about there, eh?! But what’s with the track? Ah yes… pretty sure the pad is From What You Leave Behind, some Phoenix sequence and the rest is from… ehh… I don’t know. But it’s a bloomin’ quick piece.

Shimmer
5th session piece. I took for this, a tron loop and a couple of unrelated Rhodes loops. After a few mere tweaks they sounded great together, so I went for the whole piece. Bassline’s using a loop from Gardenia. Tune’s new. Other stuff in there I think might be from Gardenia too, not sure. I know the non-shimmery Rhodes chords aren’t, they’re an individual item.

Phoenix Rising
1st Piece from the session. Okay then so this started the idea off. I’ve taken the opening string phrase from Phoenix and turned it into something else. After careful consideration I’ve decided not to take myself to court over it.

Sublime Mutation
11th piece in session. It’s amazing how many Rhodes phrases I’ve got lying around innit?! Anyway, for this one I decided to see how simple I could make it. A lot of the tracks for this album are atypically simple productions anyway, from which the overall sound benefits greatly I think. This Rhodes phrase gets fed into a gater and a harmonic reverb to fill it out. Apart from a girly vocal sound, the drums and bass, that’s literally it. Takes some thinking out, sure, and a fair bit of tweaking afterwards to get it all right, but it’s rather pretty.

Long Time Gone
9th session piece. Got a special affection for this track. It uses this fabulous acoustic guitar style solo which I did, along with its accompanying orchestral line. From 2007 I think. Then I tried another vocal phrase I have and found it fitted brilliantly. Some other samples are from Meltwater I think. Well, I did grow up listening to ELO, so eventually something of that had to reach the surface ;-)

Shine
6th session piece. There’s this vocal line I used on Meltwater where I just go “Shine”. So I pilfered it and decided to use it to help make this nice bouncy happy track. I stole several other lines from myself and this is what ya get! I’ve sent myself a cease & desist warning but decided to ignore it.

Horizon
12th session piece. I thought the last session piece also had the right feel for ending the done album. I’m sure some of it’s nicked from a track on the Objects & Expression series but can’t recall which one. The strings are from Vapour. 

Overall I’ve only used 3rd party loops for drums previously. And especially since about 2015 even those have been limited to supporting my own drum lines. All other phrases, be they sequences, basses, pads, tunes, you name it, are my own initial creations.

There's also a 16bit lossless file of the entire album. You can use the label track included in the download to create a CD. But but but... that means it's a THIRTEEN TRACK album.... OH NOOOOOOOO! Nobody does 13 track albums... Okay well it's not really the 13th album track anyway and besides, do I sound like give a toss anyway? ;-)

Taken on the whole then, I suppose some would call this a clever album in terms of what it uses in order to create new music. As far as I’m concerned I’m just keeping myself sane by giving myself work to do. And with me, of course the issue is finding new processes and techniques to keep music an exciting thing to make and to hear. To me, this is something quite new and engaging, and you can bet I’ve got a load more material from which to base new works.

I make immersive synth music, create my own art, eat, drink, shit and exist. Having been doing this for 40 years has got me into Wikipedia. Whoopee!

en.wikipedia.org