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Welcome to the laboratory of Strange Technician, electronic musician and bedroom producer. This site features downloads of music from the forthcoming album RIVERSRAIN, plus other tracks.

DISTANT CLOUDS

A long, long time ago, I heard a radio interview with Joe Strummer, when, in response to a question about the political nature of his songs, he said that he didn't want to write songs about the clouds rolling by. It struck me then that I did. Not literally perhaps, but the music I produce is an attempt to capture meanings and moods as transient as clouds. For instance, I remember as a kid, on many occasions, just walking, or cycling, for miles and miles, looking at suburbs and buildings that were unfamiliar to me, and getting the feeling that there was somewhere beyond all this, beyond the horizon, other vistas and views. Days like that inspire the music of Strange Technician.

WHEREVER WE ARE IS LOCAL

Another motive for the music is a celebration of the mundane. Our humdrum lives are very strange and exotic to other people from other cultures and continents, just as their lives seem strange to us. This everyday monotony we should try to look at with fresh eyes. Be a tourist in your own town.

FIG HOOKS

Surrealism is an over-used word, nowadays merely taken as a synonym for "weird". To me, it's about putting together ideas in a poetic, rather than a logical way, to create a new, strange, and unique reality. Ever since seeing René Magritte's painting, The Red Model, as a child, I gave up on 'real' reality as over-rated. Things we instinctively understand as children, we struggle to explain as adults.

TAPE SPOOLS FOR EYES

As for the actual music itself, electronic sounds are key. When you hear a guitar or piano, the image that often comes to mind is that of the instrument itself. With the synthesiser, the unnatural purity of the sound can bring to mind more abstract pictures. It's the wide palette of colours and timbres that can be produced electronically that interest me. Which is not to say that 'proper' instruments won't appear from time to time. Another big component of the music are the field recordings that are incorporated. All part of the sound world of Strange Technician.

INFLUENCES

Ancient ruins, automatic writing, autumn, birdsong, botanical gardens, building blocks, cafes, canals, castles, chapels and churches, chance encounters, chance remarks, childhood memories, clocks, cloud formations, coastlines, columnar order, cul-de-sacs, day trips, derelict buildings, details on paintings, dreams, ecstatic happiness, escalators, factories, follies, footpaths, forests, fossils, found objects, fountains, getting lost, graveyards, hagiographies, harmless irrational acts, holidays, horizons, industrial cities, ironwork, ivy, loneliness, Kafka, long-gone buildings, long walks, machines, maps, motorways, nostalgia, office blocks, ornamental gardens, piers, postcards, power stations, promenades, psychogeography, quiet reflection, rain, roads, science, shadows, shopping centres, shop window displays, spiral staircases, spring, squares, stained-glass windows, street atlases, statues, suburbia, suits and skirts, summer, surrealism, toys, train timetables, underground, undergrowth, vantage points, Victorian civic pride, voyeurism, war memorials, waterfalls, weeds, winter, yacht sails, yuletide, zoos.

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