This is week 6 of posting a track for free over at WeeklyBeats, trying to do something a bit different from what I usually put out in the world as Jet Jaguar.

Aims for this week

• Go faster again
• Use my Double Knot, a hardware synth
• Use distortion, which I hardly ever use

That’s it.

Process

I use the software Bitwig. I’ll try to describe my process for other music makers, without being too specific about Bitwig except in brackets.

I recorded an improvised patch on the Double Knot that was making bloopy, pitch-bent percussion tones, and chopped this up so they only happen every second bar. This is a kind of electronic tom sound you hear throughout, the very last sound in the track.

I duplicated the Double Knot recording and ran it through a granular delay, Unfiltered Audio’s SILO plugin. SILO pitches the grains up an octave and has high “masking” that basically reduces the probability sound actually makes it to your speakers.

I added some buzzing distortion on both Double Knot layers, then put them through separate delays to add stereo echoes that ping-pong in opposite directions. So one bounces to your left speaker, then to the right, etc. while the other bounces right first. (Bitwig users, the distortion is an FX Grid patch using the Dome filter to resynthesise the input signal, inspired by a very useful Tildesounds video.)

Once I’d got the Double Knot stuff bubbling away, I made an initial beat by repitching a kick drum at quite different pitches, to create not just the kicks but a snare that goes “bip” like a synthesised rim shot. I tuned the kick and kept the notes within a scale (B flat major). No, I didn’t try and figure out what the Double Knot was doing pitch-wise, I just went with what sounded OK.

I then sequenced the second, busier beat from samples of a live drum kit that I downloaded from a site that doesn’t seem to be online at the moment, Organic Drum Loops. I configured this beat so it changes pitch every 3 beats / dotted minim. (Bitwig users, a Steps modulator modulates the pitch of all of the Samplers in a Drum Machine.)

I sent both drum kits to a convolution reverb to give them a similar sense of space and put a dynamic EQ on the organic kit to filter out the low end when there’s a lot of low end in the first beat. (Bitwig users, just an EQ+ with an Audio Sidechain modulating the frequency of a low shelf. The Audio Sidechain is configured to only detect about 20-100 Hz.)

The angry bass came last, and is a custom-rolled patch from another Bitwig-related YouTube video (a tutorial for building a synth based on the Stargazer synth module). I timed the rise and fall of the sound so it grows during the first half of the track. I reduce the sample rate of the sound as the bass part exits the track so it crackles and fizzes into nothing.

I very quickly sequenced the track and went back and added a simple opening drum fill. I also added distortion to the live drum kit, bringing up both the mix between distorted vs. not, as well as the amount of distortion.

Only 4 months on, here’s some music I’ve been really enjoying recently.

Rita Revell – Folded Volume 33 (Nice Music Label)

As with almost all of what I listen to and write up here, this is an instrumental album that’s predominantly electronic. But beyond that I find it pretty hard to say something about. You might just find it another mellow electronic listen, I find it somehow both diverse and cohesive. There’s nothing here that, at least in the context, I could put a specific genre on, and I enjoy that about it. Some tracks have loops of what I’m sure is guitar, other things sound like the most lo-fi techno, others are like some lost soundtrack from decades past. Really intriguing as much as anything, and has stood up to repeated listens.

In Transit – In Transit (FELT)

If you’re into dance music you might know of 2562 or A Made Up Sound, older aliases of this same guy, Dave Huisman. I really enjoyed his two dancier EPs he dropped in 2025 under the alias ex_libris, but I’ve also found this album worth multiple spins. It’s also from 2025 and showed up on a bunch of end of year lists, but the tracks were apparently shelved for 10 years.

It’s sort of ambient, in that way that most definitely comes out of dance music: swirling synth pads, the textures of sampled records, occasional housey chords or trance-y gated sounds, and drum machine rhythms kind of broken down into (mostly) sparse fragments. And dub effects! Plenty of dub effects.

Lia Kohl – Normal Sounds (Moon Glyph)

I enthused previously about Lia Kohl’s only 16-minute long, 16-track album and content-wise this previous album is pretty similar, even if structurally it’s a bit different (7 tracks about the length of pop or rock songs). This album really clicked for me on a relisten, about a year after its release. I now find it quite beautiful. Even the quite fierce buzz of the opening moments.

Tracks look like they are named after one or two field recordings (almost always machinery – don’t misinterpret “field” here) and Kohl builds on these with cello or synth, occasionally with a collaborator. So that opening track is just called “Tennis Court Light, Snow”, and guess what you get?

The basically untouched recordings and their musical complements work together so, so well. Like “Car Alarm, Turning Signal” starts predominantly with a cloud of instruments and then when an alarm starts up it just sound like another instrument in a slightly weird chamber ensemble. Good times!

Pablo Diserens & Ludwig Berger – Tracing Basalt in the Onsernone Valley (Forms of Minutiae)

More field recordings, but really different sounds, mostly focused on nature and maybe it’s the name that has me imagining pastoral scenes. “Basalt” in the title is a person, and if you click through on the above player and read the album notes there’s this whole story of who they were and how this relates to the album.

Unlike with Kohl’s really prosaic descriptions and apparently unprocessed recordings, I don’t really know what to make of any aspect of this album, from the titles and backstory through to trying to picture what’s actually happening in the audio. How much is processed? Initiated by someone? Added to with instruments? There are some of the latter later on in the album, but most tracks could just be field recordings, perhaps quite squashed and boosted to give a lot of presence to smaller sounds. Perhaps edited, timing-wise too, but never in an obvious way.

Jeremy Hyman – Low Air (self-released)

Maaaaybe saving the best for last, because I have been really, really enjoying this one.

A little bit in the territory of the In Transit record, this is definitely someone who makes dance music, but making more mellow stuff that is often without drums. The opening track has a kind of jazzy shuffle to it, and another 3 of the 8 tracks head in pretty clear housey directions, but the others are quite beautiful ambient synth noodles. And I should be clear that however strong the dance influences all tracks are very chilled out.

I’m tempted to bust out the “Balearic” word (too late) or even suggest it’s a throwback to when people used to say “ambient house” and mean it, about 35 years ago.

This week’s track is kind of a grubby dub thing, which is certainly not a massive stretch for me stylistically, but process-wise I tried something I haven’t done in a very long time. I played something live, off a ukulele (an ukulele, if you say it Hawaiian), and manipulated what I did live with no take backs. Of course I had a few practice runs, but still. More details on the page.

I’m still slightly ambivalent about the whole WeeklyBeats business, but having fun I guess.

I think from next week I’ll switch to writing up my process over here, and link from WeeklyBeats to this – at the moment I’m effectively doing the opposite, but it doesn’t make too much sense to write these blog posts that otherwise don’t say that much. It makes more sense to me to have these posts sit in the context of the other words I’m writing and other music I’m making.

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.

I’ve been listening to this wee 16-minute album a bunch recently and wanted to capture some thoughts:

Lia Kohl – Various Small Whistles And A Song

All tracks are only a minute long, but I find them … legit? Substantial? Yet if I wrote something only a minute long I would worry about that. I’d think to myself it’s at best an interlude unless I extended it out further. Why? Since when? Kohl’s coming up with an explicit rule to help her be creative, my internalised one is, to my mind, a limit with no great value I didn’t even know I’d placed on what I do.

As well as the length, Kohl’s set herself another explicit constraint, as per the album title: the first 15 tracks have some kind of field recording of a whistle, and the last has a field recording of a song (karaoke of a Queen song recorded from outside the room? Pretty funny…). I like these kind of constraints, quite simple and still quite open. It’s part of why I at least look at the Disquiet Junto assignments every week, even when I don’t do them.

There’s also another layer here I’m interested in, which is that the album is a pretty direct a response to an art book that Kohl came across, as described in the album notes you can read at the link at the top of this post. Again, I like it! It’s a reminder I could do something like that too: respond to some other art and make something.

So as well as enjoying the music and the cool things Kohl does within her simple constraints, it’s an album that makes me reflect on my own music and gets me buzzy about what I could be doing myself. Good times.

While I’m here, last night I came across another thing Kohl has done recently via my RSS feed and think it’s worth sharing. Album forthcoming on the forever-interesting contemporary jazz (really?) label International Anthem, who just put out the new Tortoise album and so on.

OK, another year has gone by since I last wrote up some things I’ve been listening to! I still listen to all of those things I was recommending this time last year, which is part of my point of going slow and not just sharing a link to a brand new release. So, here’s another five things I’ve really soaked in over the last year.