My old SoundCloud page is a time capsule
Twenty years of songs, field recordings, and one very awkward job interview.
I hadn't opened SoundCloud in years, but earlier this week I fell down one of those late-night internet rabbit holes, the type where you go looking for one thing and end up somewhere else entirely, and I landed back on my old SoundCloud profile. I meant to stay for five minutes but stayed for most of the evening.
It turns out my page is becoming a bit of a time capsule now. Tracks I wrote and field recordings I made almost twenty years ago, still sitting there exactly where I left them. Listening back all these years later, I can hear how much my music has changed. Some of it made me wince a bit(!), but a lot of it made me smile.
I was a heavy user back in the early days, when SoundCloud still felt like the internet's best-kept secret for people who made music. A lot of those early tracks have long gone but there's still plenty left. I loved it enough that I once applied for a job there. I wanted it so badly that I got all nervous in the interview and completely fumbled it. No second round. Fair enough I guess, that was past me!
I've lost access to most of my old internet accounts now. Myspace, a couple of popular Tumblr blogs I had, accounts on old forums, all gone. So I'm genuinely relieved that this one is still around. It's the only place left where I can trace how my music has actually changed over the years.
Here are a few of the tracks I enjoyed listening to.
Shame
The final track from my debut EP, Anthem released in 2009. I wrote this with my good friend Sebastian Aker, aka Basti Moon. We sent the stems back and forth to each other for a while, each of us adding something new each time. That baritone guitar line running through it, the one that gives the track its texture, is all Basti.
Vinyl Drag
This is the same track as Shame, but I had it cut onto vinyl and then spent months intentionally abusing the record. Each week I recorded the state it was in, then edited the whole collection together so the track fades from a perfectly fresh pressing to something almost unplayable. You can hear the music degrade slowly across the track's length.
Long Portrait
While at university I got fascinated with the idea of a "long portrait." A portrait, but filmed rather than photographed, held for minutes rather than caught in an instant. Close in spirit to what Andy Warhol did with his Screen Tests in the sixties, sitting people in front of a static camera for a few minutes. I made one of my friend Clare Higley, and the video's still up on Vimeo. This is the soundtrack; dark and a bit ominous, matching the feeling of the video itself.
Church Bells in Berlin
To be honest, this is still one of the best field recordings I've ever made. I was staying in a small hostel in Berlin, behind a church, and caught this one morning by hanging out the window with my Edirol R-09 recorder. The buildings were quite close together, so the sound waves kept on bouncing between them. That's my favourite part of the recording. Oh, and the birds too!
Borneo Dawn Chorus
Another one I got super lucky with. I was up at 5am in the jungles of Borneo and the wildlife was having what sounded like a rave. Recorded on an iPhone. Pure proof that you don't need much gear to catch something great.
DERIVE Tokyo
Recorded just after I first met Cody Ellingham, who I've now been collaborating with for the last eight years. Before that I was deep in a creative drought, and couldn't finish anything I started. He invited me to his studio one night and we watched Night on the Galactic Railroad (still one of my favourite films, watch it if you get the chance) and I was up until 3am afterwards writing this. It was the first thing I'd finished in years, and it opened the floodgates of creativity for me.
The Cloud Nocturnes, Movement III
In 2019 I started a series called The Cloud Nocturnes; music inspired by the feeling of the night. This was the third and final movement of the opening piece in that series.
Further
Another piece from the same series. I remember feeling a real shift in my composing around this time, I was finally able to get the music I was hearing in my head down onto paper, more or less as I heard it.
I'm going to keep the page updated from now on and add a few newer things so it actually reflects what my music sounds like now. But mostly I think I'll just let it keep doing what it's apparently been doing all this time: archiving how my sound, and some of my favourite field recordings, have changed over the years.
Thank you, SoundCloud.
SJF
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