January in Vancouver never really cooperates with my desire to stroll around aimlessly with a camera in-hand and a spring in my step. On most days, the skies are belching rain — except on those rare occasions otherwise, when the air turns frigid and my fingers ache to hold a camera. So, my January’s are usually spent struggling with taxes, trimming my closets of unnecessary content, and feeling sorry for myself that I’ve seemingly ‘lost it’ as a photographer.
But this year, I tried something different to while away the January doldrums: music composition. Truth of the matter is, I’m pretty much always noodling around on some synthesizer or another — sometimes working out actual song ideas, and sometimes simply exploring new sound design avenues. Rarely, if ever, do I bother to take any of it to completion; much less publish it. But this month, perhaps spurred on by my new “who cares” attitude for the website, the thought hit me: why NOT publish some of these musical sketches? My photos are nothing if not sketches, as are the articles I pen for this blog — articles which I plan to make even sketchier now. So why do I balk at the idea of publishing my musical sketches? It’s not like I’m going to wreck my musical reputation or anything — I have none.
So here are two sound esquisses, both of which I developed in the past couple of weeks. They follow a similar theme (in that each incorporates some segment of sonic degradation), but not necessarily a similar sound.
If the titles seem a little opaque, that’s because they’re not really titles, but dates. Specifically, each song gets a working YY.MM.DD title, which corresponds to the day I began working on it. However, a song’s start date doesn’t necessarily correspond to when it gets finished. For example, in spite of 26.01.22 being the first song I started working on, I actually completed and mastered 26.01.28 before it. Songs gestate at different rates, meaning they may well be published seemingly ‘out of order.’ So don’t be surprised if, at some point, a new song drops with a title indicating a start date of last year.
I suppose, once a song is finished, I could give it a proper title. After all, that’s what I do with my photos. And it’s what I’ve historically done with my music. Doing this made more sense back when I was composing actual songs for actual albums that contained actual lyrics — but that’s not what these are. These are just little cosmic sketches.
I’m trying to think of them like I think about my photos — that each is merely part of a greater whole, and not necessarily a stand-alone product. Each is but a snapshot of a fleeting moment or idea; captured for anyone who cares look or listen.
©2026 grEGORy simpson
ABOUT THE MUSIC/PHOTOS :
26.01.28 : This song began life as a 15 second snippet of bespoke horror music, which I wrote as a joke to accompany my girlfriend’s 15 second video of a BBQ duck swinging in a Chinatown storefront. Curiously, I rather liked those 15 seconds, so I decided to expand it into an entire song that no longer had anything to do with BBQ duck. Midway through the composition, and no longer sure where to take it, I asked myself “what would Jaki Liebezeit play if he were still alive?” So I wrote the central Can-like drum groove as my mythical answer. It gets initially obfuscated by some rather cavemanesque drumming I added when the rhythm first kicks in, but it shines through nicely by the end.
The photo selected to represent the song (and be cropped into the necessary square) is called “Lo-Fi” (since it looks like a dirty waveform) and was photographed with an Olympus OM-3Ti and an F.Zuiko 50mm f/1.8 lens, on HP5+ pushed to ISO 800 and developed in Rodinal (Blazinal) 1:50.
26.01.22 : This was supposed to be a jaunty little Buchla Music Easel piece and consist ONLY of sounds generated by the Buchla Music Easel. But after recording the little blippy pattern that begins the song, I accidentally noodled a piano part over top of it, thus hijacking the intended direction entirely.
The photo representing this song is called “Alternatives”, and was shot on a Contax G1 fronted with a Contax Zeiss Biogon 28mm f/2.8 lens, using FP4+ pushed to ISO 400 and developed in Rodinal (Blazinal) 1:25.
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