I’ll try and keep this short.
Call it the modern attention span, call it busy lives, call it what you like, but maybe sometimes you good people don’t have 4 minutes odd to listen to a new piece of music.
Don’t worry, I don’t take it personally if you skip over. But, it does present a challenge for us modern musicians and composers - how can we show off our work in short and long form?
This came up when I was speaking to my good friend and mentor Ashley Bates the other week - we decided we both like a nice ‘build’ into a piece and for it to develop over a period of time, but then we’re both of a certain vintage so maybe it’s us?
Anyway, I had a bit of a muse and a ta-da moment: start a little series of ‘Shorts’ - 90-second condensed pieces, which could easily be TV intros or longer advertisement pieces, but stood on their own as proper tracks of music that I could share with you guys here and on those dang Instagram Reels, where the top end is that 1 min 30.
So, here’s the first one. Wonky out of tune piano, wheezy Thom Yorke style synths and some Mezzanine style strings veering into a blaxploitation film ending. Complete with a slightly late-for-Halloween creepy video. Brrrrr. Scary ladies.
I’ll be doing some of these - perhaps 30 seconds and 60 seconds too - and sprinkling them liberally around the longer-form pieces as we go along, with the prospect of possibly releasing them as a collection if it makes sense.
What do you think? Long or short? What would you prefer to hear? Let us know!
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