New Beautiful Things

I had no idea what to call this piece.  The original recording was titled 'new beautiful thing' as I found it very soothing to play and listen back to so I thought I might has well call it that.  'Things' are very vague so it allows the listener to bring their own interpenetration to the piece!



I recorded a very rough version of this many years ago on my old Casio CTK-610 keyboard which was the first full sized keys keyboard I bought from the Argos catalogue back 1997 or 1998, not sure which.  It was also the first keyboard I had that was touch sensitive which I had wanted for a long time.  It was this keyboard on which I learnt to really play piano and keyboards by learning all of the chords.  The display had a handy option to show what chord was been played on the keys and I found this very helpful when working out how I would play things and understanding the signifier of each chord shape.  The poor Casio now has a couple of keys broken and taped back on by myself.  I think this reflects more on how much I used the keyboard and probably bashed it about than the quality of it.  It's a good keyboard and I still enjoy going back to it and playing those sounds again today.

But back to this piece!  Although quite a modestly priced keyboard, the Casio had some good synthesiser options allowed you to change things like the attack and release rates.  I was playing around with those settings on a lovely warm synthesiser string sound (If you listen to the album you will probably realise how much I like those kinds of textural sounds!).  Many of the pieces I had written at that point were very chord based and I wanted to try something with a more definitive melody from single notes.  I played some chords on a nice soft electronic piano sound and over the top created this simple melody that rises and falls just as the sound does itself.  I had this recording for years and finally got around to rerecording it with new sounds and adding some new elements to it as well.  This version goes into a third section were a distance synthesiser voice sound comes in to take over the melody duties before culminating with the return of the first string sounds to end the piece.  I thought it made a generated a good sense of relief and tenderness into the piece.