Month: January 2026

For week four of WeeklyBeats I have gone back to upbeat dance music.

It was really fun to work with only synthetic sounds, especially making a drum pattern that sounds quite “breaksy” but with no samples of real drums. I think my music has definitely drifted that way this decade, with the obvious exception being use of field recordings I’ve made. But even putting that aside, I often use samples of acoustic instruments like tuned percussion or cello or good old Rhodes electric piano sounds. Or maybe software instruments that have these kinds of samples as their basis.

(Hilariously, late in the piece I actually added a second drum pattern using only acoustic drum samples, and completely forgot that I had planned to only use synth noises… Oops.)

So far I’ve been knocking these tracks out really fast and have had time later in the week to think “hang on, I want to do this other thing now” … but the rules of the challenge mean I have to either park that second idea or jump into it but not submit it as part of this challenge. I’ve started two other complete tracks since submitting this one. I’m genuinely surprised it’s this way around – writing more than WeeklyBeats requires – and I doubt this will continue.

For this week’s WeeklyBeats submission I moved away from the relatively upbeat, dancey stuff of the first two weeks and went the opposite way. The track is entirely “off-grid” – I made it without thinking about tempo or time signatures and without any kind of snapping or quantising to a grid. All elements are either played in by hand with no kind of metronome or are field recordings.

I went into fully ambient mode, perhaps unsurprisingly, but I probably could have tried making it rhythmic, but by hand and ear. My internal sense of rhythm isn’t bad, but my ability to play anything in time definitely … well, it’s not something I’ve ever practiced enough to get good at.

As it stands there are no drums and the elements are mostly fairly sustained or slow moving, so you don’t get a strong sense of a rhythmic relationship between moments.

Anyway, it was fun. A lesson from this one for my “real” music is I could improvise and record textural layers more often.

For this week’s WeeklyBeats I’ve gone even faster than last week, an up-tempo dance track that I guess you’d call “breaks”, or at least that’s what house tempo breakbeat stuff was called after big beat and before dubstep (when people weren’t calling it electro, yikes). Anyway, scene nonsense aside…

I’ve never particularly liked whatever this style is on its own, but there’s a reason I went there. As I write on the page, I tried to:

Channel a friend (another Michael, c.f. track name) who talked about doing a live reboot of the kind of thing Mouse on Mars and Mark E Smith did as Von Südenfed – don’t just do pastiche, but write for a live PA

I think using this as a backing for a vocal, and playing some version live, would be a really different thing to me sitting here at home.

I also explored some techniques I hadn’t really done before, also described on the page linked up at the start of this post. So if you make electronic music yourself, maybe give that a look.

I think for this coming week I’ll try going somewhere really different stylistically. I’m wondering about completely off-grid: no defined tempo or snapping the sounds to fit a beat.

I’ve decided to try participating in a challenge to make and upload a piece of music every week for a year. I talk about why on my WeeklyBeats profile page, and my main aim is to upload music I like that is different to my concept of what I write and release as Jet Jaguar.

Week 1 submission is called Dennis Soda and is pretty direct house music. That’s pretty different to start with, but I made a mental list for myself of things I commonly do and then tried to avoid doing them:

• 30+ BPM faster than I usually work
• Very little in the way of pads or sustained sounds
• Almost no delay fx or dub influences – there’s one part with delay on it, two sounds with reverb
• Focused on the body more than the brain, and
• Don’t evolve the track through textural / timbral changes.

On that last point, the exceptions are sometimes I send the drums into a phone-line amp emulation and the last stab sound that arrives in the track has some evolving pulse width that changes its timbre each time. Otherwise, all changes that happen over time are just different things coming and going, or changes to volume.

The track is named for the recordings of our cat Dennis purring and the sound of pouring soda over ice.

Being a giant fucking nerd, I keep folders of WIP (work in progress) and finished music per calendar year.

My 2025 finished tracks folder has 27 things in it:

• 15 unreleased solo tracks, from which I’m looking at assembling my next album,
• 2 tracks I released as a single,
• 1 contribution to the LCRP (Lines Community Remix Project), a project which I coordinated as well,
• 2 tracks on a compilation combining music by Bryan Wilson & Sly Stone, as Good Boy Banjo Birds,
• 2 Disquiet Junto assignments,
• 2 remote collaborations with people I haven’t met for another compilation, and
• 3 remixes of other people, only 1 of which is released so far.

My 2025 WIP folder still has 5 unfinished projects in it, at least one of which I started before 2025. I emptied out the 2024 WIP folder in the past year.

Numbers don’t really say a thing, but there we go. That’s some of what I got up to, music-wise, in a calendar year when I only released one Jet Jaguar single.