Hey all fellow music lovers, Hive community and (hopefully all of you) sleepers!
I have a new track out today on Bandcamp (only) where you can stream or download it for free!
After releasing my Awakening album and curating the art/story project and exhibition - this track is about something I feel like doing more of!
Sleep isn't always serene - it can be fleeting, can have all sorts of different patterns and even be a strange experience with disturbing dreams.
My sleep pattern has been somewhat chaotic for a number of years now, and I've learned to try not too hard to make sense of it all. I had a period of being awake more than usual during the night in the lead up to the Awakening exhibition, but it's been somewhat better since then!
The Sleeping is composed of segments recorded from one of my live Twitch streams, broadcast on 28th April 2025. Like my sleep and dreams, it's a bit all over the place - also has a very airy vibe to it - like drifting in and out of consciousness.
I hope I managed to capture something about the mysterious experience of sleep that resonates with you.
The techy bit! (some technical/production notes for those interested)
The parts for this track were created out of the stereo audio recording of the Twitch stream. I have chopped up several parts from the stream that I liked and blended them together in Ableton to hopefully make a seamless track. This is a process I quite like because it allows me to release music with relatively little production time but more importantly from a musical point of view inevitably captures the spontaneity of the improvised set on Twitch.
It does mean that structurally it is somewhat undefined and this wouldn't work for all genres. But I hope it works for ambient and experimental synth tracks like this one - and I hope to do more of these! That said I am also about to get back to recording multi track stems of my Twitch streams so I have much cleaner well defined parts that I can use for upcoming musical projects. Watch this space
Final tech note regarding mastering: For Awakening and all of my more 'produced' tracks I always use (and pay) a trusted mastering engineer but for these ethereal, experimental tracks I'm doing only minimal mastering myself. I actually tried a mastering plugin on this one but ended up using the version without it with some basic mastering chain in Ableton instead. Purely because I listened to it on a number of speakers as I always do and I like this more dynamic version better.
The Video intro:
So! I'm keen to hear about your experiences with sleep and music and if there is any music that make you think of sleeping. Do write and let me know at hello@tdctunes.com or in the comments below...
TDC Tunes
TDC Tunes is a Live Modular Artist and experimenter with sound. He plays several times a week on Twitch and gigs around London.
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