I love BBC 6 Music (and dishwashers)

Chuffed to be played on BBC 6 Music, cheers Gid! That made my day.

(Track was Rain Chime by Alpha Seven) – You can hear the show here for a few days.

I plan to write some blog posts about the tracks on the Greenwich Light Vessel EP, probably over Xmas. But here’s a quick one about the dishwasher.

In 2006 I used to rent a dodgy cottage in Walthamstow with a kitchen the size of a shoe box. The only bit of work surface was occupied by a particularly useless dishwasher which didn’t seem to do any actual washing but it made a great noise. So I recorded it, like you do. In fact I wrote a bit of music around it and then forgot about it.

I stumbled across an mp3 of it in November and thought I should add it on to the EP – but needed to re-record it. Unfortunately I’d lost most of the bits of it except the dishwasher recording, one of a Sinclair pocket calculator interfering with a radio and the ‘chimes tune’. But come to think of it – they’re the best bits.

I’ll clean these weird samples up a bit and put them online at some point in case anyone fancies using them – but basically I used the calculator interference sound to modulate a string sound through a vocoder. The dishwasher sound was filtered to give the rain sound.

The re-recorded end result I think is much better than the 2006 version. I quite like the way there’s a bit of a twee chime thing going on – combined with some harsh distorted stuff.

Anyway – it’s released 7th Jan 2013 (online only). If there’s enough interest I’ll go back to releasing physical products. Quite fancy releasing a cassette….