I’ve been making music every Monday. Little snippets. Bits and bobs. No rhyme or reason. Just simply music for the sake of making sounds. I’ve been uploading these snippets to Google Drive and sharing them with my wonderful friend Danling (a.k.a Mundane Matters) for her to use or ignore as the mood takes. Here’s the first bit of my Mundane Music she’s used.

Volume up. On the way home today, I was so excited about this spice grinder I bought and already seeing the finest powder grinded from the orange peels I have been collecting and drying in the past week. • But DIY and electronic appliances always don’t go my way. As the dried orange peels started hitting the walls of the grinder, my peaceful little world was also becoming chaotic. Big noise from the grinder, cat scared away, Anett annoyed, smoke coming out from the bottom, along with an unpleasant smell of a mix of orange frangeance, burnt plastic and motor. • Still better than the days when I burnt my T-shirt while cooking, chestnuts exploding in the oven, or trying to make bioplastic from corn startch and turned out to be a dangling snotty thing Anett threw to our compost. If you have any good ideas on how to dry these orange peels in a peaceful way, please share. I read many articles on Google and it seemed to be an easy thing, but DIY always fails in my hand. • Music made by my dearest friend @cammackellar. #mundanematters #waronwaste

A post shared by Mundane Matters (@mundane_matters) on Jul 5, 2017 at 5:29am PDT

I made this piece by playing a guitar figure on my Telecaster. I played a melody that’s been marinating in my melody orphanage for years. I plugged the Telecaster straight into the computer and simulated the sound of an old amp from the 1950s with a bit of software I have. Then I used some more software to place this amp in a virtual room. I made a simple drum machine beat to play the melody with. It sounded good, I thought. I got on with other work and then had lunch and listened again. It sounded crap. This happens a lot. You think something is good and then, it’s not.

What to do? I added a pitch shifter to make the melody more interesting (add an octave up!) and then I added some reverb and delay to that sound. It felt a little better, but still not right. I left it for an hour or so. Then I started playing around with an old delay unit I have that has a really bad sampler. You press a blue button and it captures a grainy loop of sound. I made a mistake sent the wrong bit of audio to the delay unit, looped it and listened back. Boring. I pitched it down two octaves and it sounded good and earthy and mesmerising to me. That loop, and the drum machine is what you hear here.

If you read Danling’s description above you can see that what we have here is a wonderful exercise in mistakes. Honour thy error as a (not so) hidden intention.

//CM