Sean Ongley

Tag: Synthesizer

  • 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.
  • New Synth Jam

    New Synth Jam

    HEAR AUDIO IN NEW TAB.

    Please enjoy the dusty electronic noise produced herein. Dusty from sitting inside its case for five years, and performed by a dusty player. I could not remember how to do things I used to readily perform. Additionally, I cut myself off from music during this time that I’ve been writing about lately, moving to Philadelphia and squaring off my financial basis for the first time in my adult life.

    I think this track proves that I haven’t gone soft. I still got the guts of the experimental, improvising musician in me. And it feels so good to just produce something. I don’t care how many mistakes I made in the process — the piece is kind about that.

    At this point, I have a secure home music studio that I can use 24/7. I can afford at least an hour per day on average to work on music. I still have work to do in the studio, to make it a functional studio. This piece is just the maiden voyage. It’s going to get so much better.

    Performed with an ARP Odyssey mk2 vintage, and Logic Studio instruments.