The
Assessment (2006)
The
Assessment
Roswell
Alienation
Thirty Metres Across
Area 51
Reverse Engineering
Intron
Cosmic Top Secret
Sacred Geometry
Conclusions
Human Origins
Featuring the voice of Robert Dean
Read a track by track breakdown
Intention:
My initial intention for this album was fairly undefined – I knew I wanted to
make a record that fused modern beats and drum loops with my textural sounds,
but beyond that I didn’t really have a theme for it. Roswell was the first tune
that I recorded and it had a different title, but then I stumbled across some
sound files of Robert Dean talking about The Assessment and I realised that I
could perhaps use them to tie all the tracks together and create a “concept”
album that used the ideas expressed by Robert Dean to fuel the creative process.
Realisation:
This was the first full album I had recorded with Logic Audio, so I was still on
a learning curve, but I had recorded enough tunes previous to this to feel
comfortable doing it. I had a large number of drum loops on my hard drive which
I sifted through and selected the ones I liked and these formed the foundation
of each piece of music. With the luxury of being able to “re-groove” and alter
these loops with Phatmatic Pro, I was able to create interesting backdrops to my
textural noodlings and also humanise the beats enough to prevent them becoming
too repetitive or machine-like. Some tunes came together very quickly (Cosmic
Top Secret and Area 51), but others had to be re-versioned a few times until
they came together (Intron and Conclusions). Roswell was recorded in November
2002 and the album was completed in February 2003 with the recording of Area 51.
Favourite tunes:
It’s quite hard to choose from this album, I like them all, but I think Intron
is a very strong tune, Alienation has a wicked groove and I think Sacred
Geometry is one of my better soundscapes…
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this album