dust particles in sunlight by low light mixes

This track is my one and only attempt at ambient music, or any music for that matter.

In 1982 I was a student at UW-Madison and very much into ambient music. Eno had released the 4 ambient albums along with others like Music for Films, Discreet Music, Evening Star, No Pussyfooting and I had them all.

I don’t play any instruments but I enjoy playing with anything musical. My roommate had a Teac reel-to-reel tape machine that I loved to play with. Through Fripp & Eno, I learned to feed the output of the play head back though to the rec input to create a nice loop/echo effect. I’d sit & play with it for hours. I made recordings as I strung rubber bands on the legs of the coffee table, poured water into metal bowls, beat coffee cans with pencils, created feedback by dropping the mic into various containers and so on.

One of my favorite things to record was my cheap little Casio keyboard, the kind with only four voices…piano, flute, violin and organ. I played it by taking the attack off the notes and chords through simple control of the volume knob as I "played." Eventually I figured out how to get the system to create nice drones & feedback loops. This track is the result of that experimentation. There is little or no musicianship involved. It was improvised live to tape using the Casio keyboard & the Teac reel-to-reel.

At least I think it was live, there might have been some drone recorded in the first pass then played back on some crappy cassette deck while more loopy feedback was played along with it. Either way, I was just making it up & twiddling knobs as I went along.

I actually like how this track, “dust particles in sunlight,” turned out. It’s definitely the only thing close to musical or ambient I’ve ever recorded. I have no idea if anyone else will find this listenable. But I wanted to put it out there anyway.