Pickford, Andy

Artist: Andy Pickford  
P: 2020/ 2022
VERSION 2 released at 26 April 2022
It's all been remixed and remastered from scratch.
There is a lot of material in this latest album by Andy which is filled with a vision more sweet than usual and with a lot of melodies that are lost at times in this long mosaic that has its lengths. Otherwise, fans of the first era of AP will be delighted by this album that seems to be stuck in this period of the English musician.

Artist: Andy Pickford  
P: 2020
Melodic great syntheizer themes. This is the music we like from Mr. Pickford.
As always it's been a lot of fun messing with the Kronos, the Prophet 12, the A6, V-Synth, Virus T12, Radias, MS20, JD800, JP8080, the shedload of software synths blah blah blah. Well it's always worth name-dropping those buggers since they are me babies :-D
A couple of self-observations this time. Over the duration of these works I've noticed how I've got into the habit of hitting record, playing my line through and basically leaving it as is. It's impressive now how much I play through in entirety in one take. I used to fumble so much years ago. Solos might end up getting played through dozens of times until I could actually play the things reliably enough! Same with any lines requiring effort. I'm a terrible butterfingers! But with these pieces allowing for a much more relaxing approach, I've lost any conscious worries about making mistakes and I just play pretty much everything as it comes.

Artist: Andy Pickford  
P: 2020
Melodic great syntheizer themes. This is the music we like from Mr. Pickford.
As always it's been a lot of fun messing with the Kronos, the Prophet 12, the A6, V-Synth, Virus T12, Radias, MS20, JD800, JP8080, the shedload of software synths blah blah blah. Well it's always worth name-dropping those buggers since they are me babies :-D
A couple of self-observations this time. Over the duration of these works I've noticed how I've got into the habit of hitting record, playing my line through and basically leaving it as is. It's impressive now how much I play through in entirety in one take. I used to fumble so much years ago. Solos might end up getting played through dozens of times until I could actually play the things reliably enough! Same with any lines requiring effort. I'm a terrible butterfingers! But with these pieces allowing for a much more relaxing approach, I've lost any conscious worries about making mistakes and I just play pretty much everything as it comes.

Artist: Andy Pickford  
P: 2020
Melodic great syntheizer themes. This is the music we like from Mr. Pickford.
As always it's been a lot of fun messing with the Kronos, the Prophet 12, the A6, V-Synth, Virus T12, Radias, MS20, JD800, JP8080, the shedload of software synths blah blah blah. Well it's always worth name-dropping those buggers since they are me babies :-D
A couple of self-observations this time. Over the duration of these works I've noticed how I've got into the habit of hitting record, playing my line through and basically leaving it as is. It's impressive now how much I play through in entirety in one take. I used to fumble so much years ago. Solos might end up getting played through dozens of times until I could actually play the things reliably enough! Same with any lines requiring effort. I'm a terrible butterfingers! But with these pieces allowing for a much more relaxing approach, I've lost any conscious worries about making mistakes and I just play pretty much everything as it comes.

Artist: Andy Pickford  
P: 2020
Melodic great syntheizer themes. This is the music we like from Mr. Pickford.
As always it's been a lot of fun messing with the Kronos, the Prophet 12, the A6, V-Synth, Virus T12, Radias, MS20, JD800, JP8080, the shedload of software synths blah blah blah. Well it's always worth name-dropping those buggers since they are me babies :-D
A couple of self-observations this time. Over the duration of these works I've noticed how I've got into the habit of hitting record, playing my line through and basically leaving it as is. It's impressive now how much I play through in entirety in one take. I used to fumble so much years ago. Solos might end up getting played through dozens of times until I could actually play the things reliably enough! Same with any lines requiring effort. I'm a terrible butterfingers! But with these pieces allowing for a much more relaxing approach, I've lost any conscious worries about making mistakes and I just play pretty much everything as it comes.

Artist: Andy Pickford  
P: 2025
Phronesis started life as the wavetable synth bell sequence you hear throughout. The rest of the piece was developed around that really.

Artist: Andy Pickford  
P: 2024
Polaris was supposed to be a RadioSilence project album, but that kinda went out the window as soon as I started adding melodies. After that I just decided to use just about everything and record what sounded cool to my ears. The result sounds pretty strong and may have benefitted from my 2 month break beforehand. It wasn't the best summer for me anyhow and I felt a bit under the weather at times. Even my buggering tomatoes didn't grow much this summer... got plenty of beans though! 4 decent tracks later and I feel a fair bit better. They were fun to do and rewarding to spend a little time over.

Artist: Andy Pickford  
P: 2024
Polaris was supposed to be a RadioSilence project album, but that kinda went out the window as soon as I started adding melodies. After that I just decided to use just about everything and record what sounded cool to my ears. The result sounds pretty strong and may have benefitted from my 2 month break beforehand. It wasn't the best summer for me anyhow and I felt a bit under the weather at times. Even my buggering tomatoes didn't grow much this summer... got plenty of beans though! 4 decent tracks later and I feel a fair bit better. They were fun to do and rewarding to spend a little time over.

Artist: Andy Pickford  
P: 2019
The result of this compositions are almost "soundtrack-ish".
As for where precisely my head was at throughout this time, think Fiim Noir, rainy streets, cityscapes, Vangelis' Blade Runner OST, good ol' TD and Uncle Tom Cobleigh & All. To be honest it's a darker sounding place than most of my works. I was very consciously seeking something of a Lughnasad kind of depth, which itself isn't an easy mind-frame to achieve. Only this time things kinda went along a darker road.
Sometimes I'm given to reminisce about the music I grew up with. It makes me sad that all these incredible musicians are gone or on the way there and their/our style of music is fading. It's often imitated in ways which sound like memes of its former self. So I guess the part of me which grew up there wanted to inhabit that zone and capture some of that atmosphere as deeply as I could. So I have here the spiritual depth of Lughnasad, but with much darker atmospherics. In actual fact the opening track scares me with the lights out!

Andy

Artist: Andy Pickford  
P: 2024