Vampire Dreams
Back in 1992 I made a cassette album called Soundtracks that featured some music I recorded with some chums, notably vocalist Mary Browne & percussionist Sudha Kheterpal for soem theatre projects by another chum Jess Tyrell plus a couple of guitar tunes I recorded for a Bjørnar Bjørnson art film Departures.
Well recently I found the digital master and got it transfered to disk. Hadn’t heard it in years. In truth not all of the music was worth re-releasing though there were some really excellent tracks. So I wove some very short interludes into a nice track and cut down a 15minute track to about 8minutes.
I thought it would be nice to combine these with other film music I have done - I did quite a bit of music for a Kafka-esque horror film with an East European feel called The Appointment where I overdubbed my voice into a Ligeti-like creepy choir and added plinky out of tune zithers and dulcimers.
I also recorded quite a bit of music for the web TV series Raising Kayn - the longer tracks were mostly also in the ambient/horror vein.
I did a 2.5minute piece for a documentary film about Freetown, Sierra Leone called Freetown - 200 years of freedom. Sadly I checked up on this film online and found the director chose other music in the end…
My plan was to make a nice album out of the best of this music. Of course I then got carried away and started adding other stuff including rejected, often comical, music I’d done for corporate videos. I guess the driving force there was to put as much of my dormant music up on iTunes as possible.
Luckily a wiser head returned and I trimmed the music down to under an hour of quality music and realised the majority of it was ambient/horror style which I used to bookend the album with a few mellower tracks from the 1992 Soundtracks tape and the Freetown music in the middle. Lots of titles came to mind - often dull punning ones - Settling Old Scores, Behind The Scenes etc, but thought I’d make the most of the horror music angle and call it Vampire Dreams - especially as Vampires feature in the Raising Kayn story.
I dithered a while with cover art as well before remembering a creepy photo I took of King’s Norton church lit windows in the dark. Just the job.
You can hear Vampire Dreams online, and download it (name your price - no minimum)
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