Sean Ongley

Category: Composed

  • F Drone for Philly

    F Drone for Philly

    F Drone for Philly by Yours Truly

    I dedicate this piece of ambient music to Philadelphia. It is in F minor.

    This is also my first piece of music produce from my new bedroom studio. When my last tenant left, I took over the room as an office and post production room. Every “post production” room works great for electronic production.

    I am using my usual ax, the Arp Odyssey, record in Ableton with a single soft synth track in midi. Mastered in Logic and posted as a single here and SoundCloud.

    When I have enough of these drone to release a volume I will. Also the vision for short films, very simple ambient films, should also be produced for these. Let it happen. Let it come.

  • New Electro Album: Sonny’s Plan

    New Electro Album: Sonny’s Plan

    Without fanfare, I present to you a collection of songs one decade in the making, featuring just one song produced within the last five years, which I made the title track to: Sonny’s Plan.

    Had this music been the exclusive focus of my creative life through these years, then this would deserve tremendous fanfare. Throughout that period however, I ran three more music festivals, played and recorded many hours of improvisational music, got deep into stand-up comedy, launched and disbanded a magazine and podcast, worked madly in a haunted house, while adapting a new life in Philadelphia.

    The music that I hear is deeply connected to whatever was happening in my life at that time. Usually it is positive, because I tend to compose music when I have the extra time and space to work. However, there are plenty of sad stories in here.

    “On the Rails” for me is pure heartbreak. While there is something triumphant about the peak of the song, it rises out of what sounds to me like the welling of tears in my eyes that I had while producing it.

    Only the title track was recorded at my home studio in Philadelphia. This music space is not quite what I’ve always dreamed of, but it is the most professional music space that I have put together for myself yet.

    Every one of these tracks were previously posted to a number of music hosting sites including my blog. All of these scattered songs with no context or proper mastering, something had to be done about them. It started with taking all of my old work offline. Now, it is up to me to package my old work in a cohesive way.

    It took a little time to select these tracks, lay them in order, remix when possible, and finally remaster the whole lot.

    These sessions were all archived in my hard drive, but I don’t have access any longer to the digital audio workstation (DAW) software involved. I was able to resurrect some sessions in a new version of Reason, which I ended up paying for on a monthly basis, to complete the project.

    I’ll break it down briefly how I produced each of these.

    “On the Rails” was produced inside Propellerhead’s Reason 7. The only analog instrument is the ARP Odyssey. This instrument threads across almost each track. It was summer 2015 and my studio was my living room at Penthouse 3 in the Lafayette Building, Portland.

    “Santa Crux” was fully formed in a single day, fall of 2013, in a studio apartment in Santa Cruz using Ableton Lite. I was traveling with a complete mobile production system. My friend had an empty apartment with a range of instruments, giving me the banjo and electric bass tracks herein.

    “Sonny’s Plan” is totally within Apple’s Logic X. The drums were recorded in my studio, clipped and looped. It was composed in 2020 but revisited to replace midi guitar sounds with live electric guitar. It is the first time I have owned a guitar in many years. I missed it.

    “Long House” was a cornerstone for me in early 2011, produced at the InterArts office/studio. Today, it would be a serious undertaking to remix this track, as it was produced with Logic 9 as the master DAW, rewired with Reason 4 and Ableton Lite, plus MOTU Symphonic Instrument.

    “She’s Back But I’m Gone” was produced in my penthouse studio in 2015, entirely in Reason 7.

    “Clap Trap” was produced around the same time as Long House in 2011, entirely using Logic 9.

    “Simple Structures” helped me snap out of a long music break in the spring of 2014. It reminds me of “Structures from Silence” by Steve Roach but I structured it with a simple house beat. Entirely made in Reason 7, in my Kenton neighborhood bedroom.

    “Autonomia” was produced at the same time as the previous track using Reason, but this time I took advantage of the new DAW features in the software. It is the only song on this album that includes live vocals, however, they are disguised under a vocoder.

    Naturally, I have had a variety of midi keyboards throughout all of this, however, none of them are noteworthy.

    Today, I look forward to what feels like a new life of creative work, and in many respects I put this music behind me. All put together for the first time, it follows a single thread of intention in a chaotic life. Even as so many things change, I can’t help but come back to music, and if it takes another ten years to generate an album of highly produced music, so be it, because I love the process.

  • A Sunrise by Imra

    A Sunrise by Imra

    That was me and songwriter Kelly Slusher. She since changed her name to Avaleya Kelly. We were in love so we produced a love album together. The EP entitled A Sunrise is now available here to stream via Bandcamp, but it turns out that it has been available on Spotify and Apple Music for, I don’t know, a long time. 

    Originally, we published with CD Baby and sold CD’s. That was how you heard this album: You bought a CD. We sold maybe 50 of them. CD Baby helps with digital distribution, and they put it on Spotify, years after the fact.

    Within a few months of becoming steady partners, fall of 2008, Kelly and I produced this EP and set up a west coast tour. Kelly came up with the name, Imra. It sounds like an esoteric deity and we liked it for some reason. It was very common to post a few songs on MySpace, contact local venue bookers directly on the social network, print a CD-R album in conjunction with CD Baby, and hit the road just like that. That’s what we did.

    “Sweet Love” opens the album, and I think it’s the best track on it. It was Kelly’s song, but I totally transformed it from her acoustic guitar version. Although I maintained her chord changes, everything is built on the Arp Odyssey and her electric bass. When we finished this song, it seemed more like a band than a Kelly Slusher song.

    “On and On” is a beautiful tune, I think, and it was also a Kelly song. We kept the guitar version, recording it in a room with natural reverb, adding the synthesizer later, it is my second favorite cut on the record. Then we wrote three songs strictly together, and those are the three in the middle of the album.

    This album contains valuable ideas and vibrations meant for opening space for a relationship. On the other hand, it can be of benefit to one’s relationship to the whole world, not just romance. The truth is that in the two years Kelly and I were together, we slipped into the dark side and never recovered. We fell prey to our own fears and all that junk that challenges those initial impulses of mutual love and respect.

    Our love and determination carried us a long way. As with anything on this blog, I’m not running away from the things that went wrong. I won’t tell you all the stories, but I’ll admit that I’ve brought problems into relationships that a more mature, more secure version of myself today would not bring.

    Not all relationships are meant to last either. The pain can just be in the attachments that we feel for it and our egoistic clashes to hang on or make the other person wrong to justify leaving the relationship.

    This blog post is just to get the album up in here. We put a lot of work into Imra. When I have more content from us put together, then I’ll write a memoire piece and compile a portfolio page for Imra. For now, I just want to make sure this album is available to stream. I still think its a pretty good EP.

    A Sunrise Photo Shoot
    In the Bunkhouse Studio
    Kelly practiced Mudra
    Sadly I’ve lost the photographer information for all of these photos. I am sorry.
  • A Drone for Adam Curtis

    A Drone for Adam Curtis

    “A Drone for Adam Curtis” in A.

    This is a drone in the key of A, for Adam Curtis, the genius storyteller, journalist filmmaker. There are few truth bearers embraced by the mainstream. There are few that step right onto the conspiracy, exposing it, while saying nothing about it. The facts around it are given and you are left to piece together your shattered reality. He is ruthless and becoming more relevant by the decade, as the fake world that he turned over in his documentaries has become more transparent than ever.

    This ambient drone music was improvised on guidelines, in the key of A (for Adam), entirely generated from the ARP Odyssey. The guideline was that wanted to spell out his name. The first tone is A, the second is D, the next is A but the octave up, then I continue spelling out the keyboard, so that the letter m lands on F, in the octave up. Finally, I broaden the harmony with a C at the top and bottom octave. The resulting harmony is A minor. It could be performed in a thousand different ways following this direction.

    Usually I just improvise and then get annoyed that I have to come up with a name. It was nice having a concept in mind for this. And I wanted an excuse to share my appreciation for Adam Curtis.

    His documentaries almost always leave me scratching my head, reevaluating history. The Century of Self and Hypernormalization should be watched by everyone. I don’t believe you can live in this world and interpret media and politicians accurately without seeing these films, or at least taking in the information contained in them.

    I am a conspiracy theorist. But Curtis is not. He is exposing the crest of the wave but doesn’t speculate at all. He will make bold claims, like al-Qaida wasn’t real before 9-11. He lays it out in The Power of Nightmares and backs it up. It is fact. As much as I knew about 9-11, I always believed at least that al-Qaida was real. But then Curtis avoids every trapping of suggesting that the attacks on that day were somehow not real, or as folks say, an inside job. His ability to discriminate fake from reality is what I love about him. So I continue to seek out every film he has ever made.

    It is notoriously difficult to get good copies of his films because they air on BBC and you need access to that network. You can only bypass that with a VPN or piracy. I am including a YouTube account that has several decent free copies to stream, but the quality is definitely all over the place.

    For more free Adam Curtis documentaries, subscribe this YouTube profile.
  • Drone for Rudy

    Drone for Rudy

    Published July 4, 2020

    Above you can hear my latest ambient piece. Inspired recently by a 15-hour Tidal playlist called Autopilot, I realized that I have always loved the ambient genre and particularly find drones to be of utmost value in terms of intellectual concentration. I meditate in silence, but if there is a genre suited to help with that, then it is Drone.

    This is my second piece driven by the Arp Odyssey this year. I plan to make it central to most of the drone pieces forthcoming. There is this ongoing line noise problem within the synthesizer that I hope to resolve the next time around. It is noise music, anyway.

    Typically, I associate the music I make in improvised sessions with activities surrounding that event. I was repairing my new Volkswagen at this time, and I had recently published stories about my old V-dub.

    I bought a non-starting Passat. It is the same model vehicle that I owned before, only this one is 37 years newer than that one. My first was a 1977 Dasher, which was the Americanized version of the Passat. They dashed that marketing differentiation and stuck with the Passat name across international markets. It is also the first Audi and the original modern design from VW. These are now and have always been sweet rides.

    This drone is for Rudy the Dasher, which I sold and have lost touch with long ago. The new Passat kicked ass on a recent trip across Pennsylvania. I took it down the shore yesterday as well. I waited until the car agreed with the name before declaring it, and that name came to me as Sonny. It’s a smooth vehicle, son of the Dasher, but aggressive and rough around the edges, like Sonny Sharrock and Sonny Rollins, two of my favorite musicians.

    Sometimes I think of where I was when something else happened. For example, in 2003, when this vehicle was manufactured, I had just moved to Portland, Oregon, with my 1990 Toyota Truck. By the time this vehicle was taken possession of, I was enrolling in community college. This car has put on a lot of miles and so have I.