09/01/23 - New quartet gig confirmed at CICCIC, Taunton 31st May 2024

11/11/23 - New quartet gig confirmed at North Devon Jazz Club for 19th Feb 2024

07/11/23 - Very excited to announce that I've been awarded a Develop Your Creative Practice grant by the Arts Council of England! More info to come soon.

01/11/23 - Subscriber EP Nov '23 now available from Bandcamp

I wanted to work quickly and produce some mood pieces which resulted in this short suite. Although there's quite a lot of ambient moments here I couldn't resist injecting some variety to create more of an implied narrative arc. I always like to feel like I've been on a journey with music and hopefully you'll feel like it took you somewhere too!

06/09/23 - Subscriber EP Sept '23 now available from Bandcamp

Out of Time

An improvised piece inspired by church bells in Valencia.
I love the contrast of a simple descending scale representing an idea of order which becomes chaotic in practice due to the failure of people to be perfect while striving to do so. That this is happening not just within the community of one church but in multiple churces all over the city simultaneously and in tandem with the hustle and bustle of people getting on with their lives massively adds to the complexity. The patterns of life are there but so complex that they appear random and so all pervasive that they get taken for granted to the point of invisibility.
Performed from the point of view as an observer from outside the city there's 1) a stage of discovering the soundscape habits of an other way of life, 2) this gives way to a transcendent peace of mind at being freed from the concerns of what you left behind, 3) then becoming entwined in the rhythms of elsewhere and finding your own way to move with it before 4) having to return and being left with increasingly fragmented memories of the experience.

Threshold

Another improvised piece using a modular synth this time. There's an underlying, semi-random, rhythmic figure that I'm improvising the texture of. This is also influenced by the held pad sound played above it. I like the contrast of the busy with the calm, seemingly separate but both having an influence on the other.

Ebb & Flow

Another of my folk / rock pieces. Put together quickly and recorded as a series of overdubs back in 2020. Sadly the original parts were lost in my hard drive crash during the pandemic but I do still have video footage of the various stages to possibly help me reconstruct what I did in the future. The thing is that performances are never the same when the original inspiration is based around improvisation and I struggle to go back, without wanting things to evolve in some way, so this probably will be the only document of this piece in this form.

02/08/23 - Subscriber EP Aug '23 now available from Bandcamp

A slightly loss themed collection this time.

Lost to Lockdown is literally a track I've rescued from faceback. I suffered a catastrophic hard drive crash during the pandemic and lots of work that I put out has disappeared forever. Some pieces, like this one, got uploaded in rudimentary form to facebook so I'm downloading them to work on later. They exist in no other form.
Forgotten Prayers 2 - another vocal improvisation. 6 tracks of vocals recorded with click track but without hearing each layer. I wanted to see what would happen harmonically and rhythmically without reference points beyond click and drone. Rhyhm track is created from things in reach of my desk.
Duck (for Alex) is a tribute to Alex Christaki. Alex was a pianist / composer that I worked with on and off for several years around Plymouth under his Half / Quarter moniker. A sudden heart attack earlier in the year took him from us. Alex had complete belief in himself to achieve anything he set his mind too. The pianos you see at bus and train stations are something he campaigned for as part of a public access to music project. This piece is loosely in the style that he wrote in as a tribute.

05/07/23 - Subscriber EP July '23 now available from Bandcamp

A slight change of pace this month. A single composition with several takes. I often start with an outline based around melodic or chordal fragements then fill in additional elements by improvising with it. A fair amount of this one is now fixed but structures might change and there are several areas where a melody has yet to emerge consistantly.

I've included a photo of the chart as it currently exists in written form. Pretty loose with other chord movements that I like but didn't fit etc I tend to write them down to remind me later. One of the sections I moved around a bit but haven't yet written down. It's all pretty loose at this stage!

Recorded on one ambient mic in my music room. The sound quality is really basic but I just wanted to get something recorded for my subscribers to see where I'm at with this one and a bit more insight into my process.

Recording like this also yielded a load of weird noises that I liked - stool creaks, pedal noise, throat clearing etc. Couldn't resist looping them up and feeding them through a load of fx processes to make a soundscape. So there's two mixes of that this month as well.

The title 'We're Only Haunted...' comes from a very short poem by Bridgett Devoue :

We're only haunted
by the things
we refuse
to accept  

07/06/23 - Subscriber EP June '23 now available from Bandcamp

04/05/23 - Subscriber EP May '23 now available from Bandcamp

10/04/23 - Al will be returning to deliver some live improvised Pointless Beauty for Jessica Lerner's free movement workshop in partnership with Groundwork Cardiff on 21st April.

05/04/23 - Works in Progress April '23. Check out the one minute teaser from the full nine minutes of new material below.

These are not finished ideas in the sense of completed tracks but they are finished in the sense of documenting a process of development. So much of my time is spent in exploration and it can be a long time between official releases that I wanted to find a halfway house that I can feel sincere about and hopefully is engaging for those kind enough to support me by subscribing.

The linking conceptual theme is the fragility of memory and a linking technical concept is to do with attempting to create the illusion of machines improvising. An important part of the process for me is to allow things to go where they seem to need to at the time. It's interesting to me how the tools used also to some extent encourage particular ways of working and stylistic output. I worked entirely in Ableton on these so far. Ableton encourages looping and music that generally feels more groove driven. The second tune fights against that a little to give contrast but still gets drawn in!

All three mixes are available for subscribers to stream and download until the first Weds of each month when they'll be replaced with three new mixes or ideas.

01/04/23 - New monthly subscription tier for Al Swainger's Pointless Beauty on Bandcamp of just £3 per month. This includes all 22 previous releases plus a special monthly 'works in progress' release of 3 new mixes or track ideas.

30/03/04 - Subscriber only release of 'Hearts Full of Grace - Demos & Alternates'.

These are the original pre-studio demos that I prepped for reference before hitting the studio with the full band.

I tend to do a lot of production work in advance as part of the compositional process, including track sequencing, so I know how things will sit as a narrative. It's kind of my way of 'storyboarding' an album.
They generally don't feature solos but I include the space they will occupy to get a sense of pacing.

Some deviations from the above include :

Pausing for Breath - this was improvised live in the studio but I initially wondered whether it was too long between tracks. Here's an unused shorter edit.

The Shrug - A version recorded with the band Monkey's Uncle from 2005. I always loved this but didn't quite feel it captured the vibe as freely as I imagined it could be. Wonderful solos though from Otto Caretta on Tenor and Jesse Molins on Guitar.

Hope you enjoy this as a behind the scenes look at my process!

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