So a dear friend bought me Logic Pro as a birthday gift last month, and I’m teaching myself the program by creating music inside it. If you’re the kind of music lover who finds rough mix acetates fascinating, you may enjoy sampling the quick mixes of partially completed pieces I’m beginning to share in a new album on Sonica.

At the moment, there’s one partial piece up: a rough mix of the beginning of something I’m temporarily calling Airy Clouds. The music will change significantly in the coming weeks. At the moment, only the first minute or so is “finished;” bass and drums continue when Section One concludes, but that isn’t meant to be listened to, except as a loop on which the next section may be built. I will probably upload several versions of the piece as I continue to work on it, so the curious may follow its progress. (At least, I hope what comes next is progress.)

I haven’t worked at music composition and production since the late 1980s, when I had my Red Flowers studio in Washington, DC. Back then it was analog multi-track, early MIDI, African reed instruments, and handmade effects and treatments. You can hear some degraded mixes of that early music in my Hound of Muzak collection, also on Sonica. Those tracks were never mastered. They were quick, cassette mixdowns in DBX noise reduction that got played back in Dolby C (don’t ask!) and converted to RealAudio, then later converted from RealAudio to MP3, so if they sound any good at all, it’s kind of a miracle. I still have the multitrack masters, but the equipment they were recorded on used a proprietary tape format that hasn’t been supported or manufactured for close to four decades, so it’s unlikely there will ever be clean, mastered versions of those pieces (and others I didn’t even get a chance to mix down).

If you wondered what prompted my interest in standards when I became a web designer, the answer is that the absence of standards in my former (musical) creative chain made it impossible to create clean, proper mixes of a great deal of music I had created, and I did not want anyone’s web work to suffer the same fate. Silver lining.

Forty-ish years is a long time to go without making music, and an NYC apartment isn’t an ideal recording location, but I’m inspired as hell.

Works in Progress is what its title suggests—a composer’s sketchbook, if you will, with progressive renderings to come. Remember those animated shovel-wielding guys that symbolized “construction in progress” on early 1990s websites? If you don’t like my “classical” LP cover, picture that guy instead. And if you’re still reading this page, why not pause and visit the Sonica LP-in-progress instead?