Music

I let this page get quite out of date. Again. This is another attempt to correct that.

I began recording in 1987, making lo-fi attempts at ambient music using a Casio SK-1. After moving to Tokyo, I bought my first proper synthesizer in 1988; over the next couple of years, I expanded my palette, and was soon making more sophisticated music. This continued after I returned to the US; from 1993 to 1998, I released a series of DIY cassettes and one CD (most under the name Tinty Music), and appeared on four compilations released by other labels. My focus during this time shifted from ambient sounds and textures to various permutations of noise and improvised sounds.

Following a long period of inactivity (due to equipment theft, and then life stuff), I remastered most of my catalogue in 2014 and made it available on Bandcamp. As part of this burst of activity, I revised an album (Meditations on the Inescapable Self) that I had intended to release in 1999 but then changed my mind; released four EPs of previously unreleased material; and put together a compilation of all my pieces shorter than two minutes, Short Forms.

In 2016, I began releasing the occasional one off (also through Bandcamp), most of them assembled from recordings made in Propellerhead Figure.

In 2020, partly as a way to fill the void created by an extended case of writer’s block, I began to work on music more regularly. Nowadays, it is my main creative pursuit.

In the past, I used digital synthesizers and computer-based sequencing. These days, I mostly use analogue and modular synths, and have recently started recording to S-VHS; I record my explorations and then edit them down to create the finished pieces. The results vary according to which sound-generating devices I use; sometimes I get something more musical, and sometimes the result is something more abstract. For this reason, when people ask me what kind of music I make, I just say ‘sounds’.

The embedded players below will enable you to listen to selections from the currently available releases. All are available for purchase, but can be listened to in their entirety (except for bonus material) for free.

Selected Works

The currently available discography can be found at tintymusic.bandcamp.com.

The original Tinty Music catalogue reissued (2014)

Videos

Sometimes I make videos.

Screen recording of a piece I made in July 2022. The title is just a silly phrase that popped into my head one day, in the voice of a Japanese horror film commercial narrator (I lived in Tokyo for a few years in the late 80s/early 90s).

These screen recording videos essentially replicate what I see while I’m editing a recording. What I like about Audition’s spectral frequency display is that it gives the music a visual component that the standard waveform display does not.

In 2022, I finally figured out how to do screen recording. This is one of a series of screen recordings done with the featured piece playing in Adobe Audition.

This clip is the result of combining a new piece recorded in April 2022 with video I shot in October 2005.

The nature of silence video was made as a test run for a collaboration with my friend Vincent Booth, who was making what he intended to be the world’s first documentary filmed completely with a cell phone. The music is a piece of the same name I had recorded several years earlier; the video combines footage from Vincent’s cell phone with some of my leftover video feedback footage.

The documentary, which had the working title of Sky Doc (which Vincent intended to produce under the name V. Sky), was to function on numerous levels, from depicting his life during a difficult period to political commentary, reflections on the nature of art, and a host of other things I could not decipher from the voluminous notes he was giving me on a regular basis. Unfortunately, his deteriorating mental state and my status as a full-time student quickly made working together as intended impossible. We parted ways in early 2008; Vincent died two years later.

This is a video I put together for my friend Rhett Redelings’s R-Three project. When he asked me to consider doing something for this, I demurred at first, not being sure that I would be able to do justice to the material. Then I saw a set of fake candles in a chiropractor’s office one day, and I recorded a few minutes of video, which I purposely shot out of focus. I put the video together with the song, and it fit surprisingly well.

Sureru was an experiment with video feedback and editing. By hooking up my simple digital camera to the TV set and pointing it at the TV while recording, I was able to capture a variety of feedback. I overlaid some parts, edited out the bits that didn’t fit, and slowed everything down until my very short video ran to almost 50 minutes, creating a slow progression of indistinct images. (YouTube’s algorithms now identify the music as a piece that not only bears no resemblance to the soundtrack of this clip, but also was made seven years after I made this video.)

I made the video for Fluorescent lighting (version 2) in 2005, shortly after getting my first Mac. I had some footage of fluorescent lighting I’d shot with a digital camera, so putting it together with my piece of music of the same title made sense. The combination turned out to be less than exciting, however, until I applied one of the iMovie effects to the video, resulting in this clip, in which the kinetic motion matches that of the music.

(Updated 15 August 2022)