What happens to musical interactions and meanings when the context of the music is dramatically altered through abrupt, blatant combinations of that music?
OVERLAYS is a simple concept operating at multiple scales. At its simplest, it is the mixing process of combining different instrumental and/or vocal tracks to produce coherent tunes. Do they have to be coherent? To what extent is coherence a figment of normalised preferences over time with increasingly external shaping?
Perhaps, at the smallest scale, it is harmonies or the retention of multiple takes of the same, often improvised, part. These themselves may well reflect an inability to prioritise. At a larger scale, different sections of music, written separately, may be layered to see what sonic interactions emerge. This approach may be extended to whole songs or albums and combined with other core concepts. It often involves genre mashups. Unlike the rapid genre shifts in consecutive sections of multi-genre tracks, these shifts happen in real time and lack the subtlety of more traditional approaches to genre blending.
Overlays explores how alternative sounds, experiences, and interpretations emerge from their combinations. It also represents the mind's busyness. Compared to Chop, Randomise, Recompile, Discard, which focuses on the nonlinear chaos of thought that is hard to follow, OVERLAYS focus on the real-time noise of multiple thoughts. Not dissimilar to a DJ combo, but without the constraint of pleasant outcomes. Define pleasant, nice, or pleasing? Perhaps the outcome is pleasing, even if hard to listen to? Is it time to step outside the dominant paradigm of music-business bullshit, which couches everything in the particular language of business schools and economics, ensures thought is led by corporatism, and ignores the broader foundations of societal ailments? It always appears that the symptoms, not the causes, are treated.
Compared to the music and approaches of both the Chop, Randomise, Recompile, Discard and the DRUM AUTOMATISM SERIES (2026) series, OVERLAYS reduces the dependence of the musical outcomes on intentional random compositional chance, seeking, instead, to explore the emergent manifestations of varied listening contexts. The sounds of music heard from two separate, equidistant festival stages, or moving from room to home, shop to shop, club to club; in whichever ways music is now experienced.
In 2026, two volumes of OVERLAYS were produced. The first, ‘Ominous Repeat’, collated the two vocal-based albums from 2025 and dropped them side by side in a two-track format, with each track starting from a different album and alternating between the two in the order they appeared on the releases. The resultant piece was then split in half to produce two new songs. The second volume took the two instrumental albums from the ‘Subtle Antimusic’ series (released in 2024 and 2025) and repeated the process across three tracks. These were likewise split into two new instrumental pieces.
More detail may follow soon…