Paul Jackson Music

Paul Jackson Music

Wednesday 23 December 2015

#29: Rounding Up and Rounding Off

So for the last blog post of the year and the foreseeable future I thought I'd round up the links to my musical online activity from the last 12 months. At the end of December 2014 I used Bandcamp to publish a bunch of tracks I had recently been working on under the name Duster Jack across five digital eps. This then paved the way for further use of the Bandcamp service throughout the year.
Time To Dust was the first digital album comprising of some of the previously released Duster Jack tracks including some slightly tweaked and remixed versions and two new additions.



Duster Jack: Time To Dust [album] (January 2015)



Android was the next album compiling the remainder alongside two more new tracks.

Duster Jack: Android [album] (May 2015)


My former synth pop music moniker, Production, was revived for a new digital single paying homage to the classic 7" and 12" formats I used to enjoy collecting back in the day. I had started formulating a new Production album of material from as far back as 2003 and after some years of going back to various works in progress, I managed to reach the finish line. 


Desperation [digi-7"] (June 2015)

Desperation [digi-12"] (June 2015)



This was followed by the full album Tonic featuring a longer version of Desperation 



Tonic [digi-album] (July 2015)



In September I decided to transfer some early recordings I made in the nineties under the name S-cape during my years in Salford, and I created a Bandcamp page for these too. I included five CDs I compiled of recordings, plus three earlier cassette albums and a couple of live recordings. Visit the S-cape page for full track listings and audio.

S-cape: The Salford Tapes (Archive '99 Series 1-5) (September 2015)








In September I went through some other Duster Jack ideas I had programmed and written and decided to flesh them out into full tracks. This resulted in an album called Inside Influence


Duster Jack: Inside Influence [album] (September 2015)



I followed up the Production Tonic album with a homage to the six track remix album often released by synth pop bands of years gone by... in the form of a six track remix album called Proud 

Proud [remix album] (October 2015)


While I never regarded Live It Down as a favourite of mine from Tonic, I had so much fun remixing it that I ended up doing a few versions to make up a followup single


Live It Down [digi-7"] (October 2015)




Live It Down [digi-12"] (October 2015)


During the year I also re-packaged, re-issued and re-mastered the tracks I had previously composed and produced under Paul A Jackson for the music for dance in education label Dancesounds. This time I released them as a Production Music Library for media use.. While these are only available to media users on certain platforms, the original Dancesounds albums remain available at my original Bandcamp page featuring Volumes 1-12 plus extra material, that has continued to see a bit of traffic with tracks streamed and downloaded every now and then..








So after a few musically dormant years, it was a good feeling to actually get some projects finished and out of the way. Uploading content to places like Bandcamp helped me draw a line under them and allowed me to think of other things to do next. As I no longer have the same drive and ambition to do anything else with the tracks, and regrettably nor do i have any vision of how or where I could perform live again, it still felt worthwhile to continue writing, recording and uploading.  
As for the near future I had been mulling over what I should tackle next. 

More Duster Jack
More Production
Rework some old Production tracks? 
Finish off some other pending projects?

But I've now decided that it's time to wrap things up. I started the Production musical umbrella over 25 years ago, S-cape is something I see as belonging to the few years I spent in Manchester, the Dancesounds label was a good home for the music I wrote for a specific audience embedded in dance education and performance and Duster Jack was an experiment in creating new music with new musical toys while on my daily train commute. Alongside all that, this blog has been a fun way of offloading and sharing some musical observations, thoughts and memories with some like-minded friends.

I don't know what lies ahead music wise but it feels the right time to draw a line under what has gone on before and do something different.
Many thanks for your support


Paul A Jackson
Production
Duster Jack
S-cape