about:

The World Outside is the culmination of almost ten years in "underground electronic dance music" - what the rest of the world calls techno.

Techno being what it is, most of the music I've made is for dancing, usually in dark rooms with very loud sound systems. And as much as I like dance and volume, this left me unsure as to whether I could make a large scale piece of music that people would sit down and listen to.

The World Outside, then, is me taking all my work over the past umpteen years, and presenting it in a way that makes sense in a listening environment rather than a dancing one. For some tracks this meant breaking them down into their component parts and then building them back up into something very different. Other pieces were used with essentially no changes - maybe an altered intro or outro. Some keys got changed, some time signatures got bent, some percussion got rewritten, some melodies got added.

And then I ran into a problem: I wanted to present the finished product at the University of Victoria, where I study music... but presenting techno is kind of a hard thing. Not many people want to watch someone press play on a CD player. Pre-made music, by its very nature, makes for poor spectacle - and I like spectacle.

So I made a video.

The video was made using the BBC's Planet Earth series as source material, edited together to match, suit, and support the music as closely as possible. As Planet Earth consists of nothing but drop-dead beautiful footage, this was easier than it sounds. The footage is so good, in fact, that it distracts from the music. This is a risk that I am prepared to take; I am awfully proud of the music. I hope you like it too.

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