by I love music. I love to listen to music, I love dancing to music, but that’s where my knowledge ended. I had never studied it but I knew what I liked to hear. It was, perhaps somewhere deep within me, a dream of hitting it big with a jingle on an advert that would keep me going for such a long time.
It’s the journey that matters and I like making noises
Convincing myself it’s ok to do it for the love of it
Below are links to the “music” I have produced over the years. I hope you can hear a progression in my work as I created, learned and collaborated:
Utopian Fool on Soundcloud >> https://soundcloud.com/philip-porter
Antisoft on Reverb Nation >> https://www.reverbnation.com/antisoft
Beginings
The seed was planted in my brain by a close friend. “Why don’t we make some tunes?” That sounded like a great idea. At that moment I was not working due to a cronic long term illness so I could dedicate some time to it. I plundered the net in search of how to go about it, the best programmes to use, what the process is.
I was so enthusiastic that I just fell head long into making noises with no regard for production, music theory or even what other artists used or did. Obviously this raw noise is quite different to the classy dance records of the charts, but I had found a program I could get on with (Propellerheads Reason) and was really enjoying the emmersive effect of headphones and wonderous plinky vibrations. It was music therapy.
It was later that I began to discover more about how to add depth to the sound and little things like chord progressions would go a long way to making the sounds much more appealing to the ear, but everything I produced (loose use of the word) had a resonance with me. I felt it.
The Act of Creating
I started to find that naming the songs was very enjoyable, and then when they were sort of finished (in my eyes) I started to design covers for the songs as if they were all individual entities in there own right. It gave them more validity. Now they had a place in the world. A name, a picture, a place in an album.
I went on to make 3 albums with friends under the title of Antisoft Productions. We would meet on occasion and try to record what we could, later mashing the stuff together in the attempt to create something we all liked the sound of.
The journey continues, only at a much slower pace. Now I do not have the space to have all the equipment out, like keyboards and drum pads, and it take ages to set up, by the time its all connected the inspiration can pass and I sit there in silence just staring at screens. I have countless half made tunes, files with just a quality noise, an amazing beat from a group holiday in Amsterdamage and songs on my phone that I keep listening to because it makes me feel good, but no one else has ever heard. I still need to learn how to master the music and one day I will return to all the old stuff and maybe give it a polish.
