When mixing a track it can be incredibly useful to use a reference track. This simply means using another track which you admire and which shares similarities with your own track as a reference to how the mix could sound within your own music. Using a reference track helps to avoid ear fatigue, which will…

For our final blog we were asked to provide a summary of an assigned chapter from Ocean of Sound by David Toop. The chapter I have covered is Altered States 2 and the chapter mostly focuses on a musician named Jon Hassell’s musical practice and work, and the nature of music as a fantasy made…

Burial is a British music producer and has been a pioneer in the dubstep music genre, being a very influential figure for his use of interesting production techniques, such as pitch shifting and time stretching vocal samples, within his music. ‘Untrue’ was his second album and was met to great critical acclaim; this was a…

Throbbing Gristle were a musical group formed in the 1970’s, they were pioneers of industrial music and their aesthetics and themes were incredibly controversial and divisive, touching on subjects such as extreme political ideologies, sexuality and other underground aspects of society at the time. Within their music they made fascinating use of groundbreaking technological techniques…

For the task of researching a techno artist I have chosen to look into Amelie Lens, who is a Belgian producer, artist and DJ. She had an interest in electronic music from a young age and was influenced by an eclectic music taste even then; it was in 2014 that she began to DJ, playing…

Trevor Horn is a very well known music producer, most well known for the work he did in the 1980’s, producing for artists such as Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Seal and Paul McCartney. Known for his dynamic and technically interesting tracks, he has always experimented with music production in fascinating and unexpected ways. He has…

For this exercise we were tasked with finding keywords referring to the music production in Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd within a particular article, and then to research the concepts behind these keywords and gain further understanding of the technology employed. The key pieces of equipment and musical concepts which captured my…

For my analysis of a specific piece of music I have chosen to investigate and analyse ‘HELLBOY’ by Lil Peep. This mixtape came out in September of 2016 and was promoted with two singles, ‘girls’ and ‘move on, be strong’; it is composed in the style of emo rap with clear pop punk, alternative rock,…

Luc Ferrari was a French composer and a founding member of RTF’s Groupe de Recherches Musicales or GRMC alongside Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. Ferrari was a pioneer of electroacoustic music and musique concrete; he studied music from an incredibly young age and even his first works were freely atonal. The use of ambient recordings…

For the task of analysing a new music genre I have chosen the musical genre of digital hardcore, which is a fusion genre that meshes hardcore punk with myriad electronic dance music genres including breakbeat, drum and bass and techno and also incorporates elements of noise music and heavy metal. Common features within this genre…