In the beginning of this year I made a summary each week. It’s interesting that when planning my work I seem to calculate with my highest productivity rate. Right now I really feel like I have to fight to keep momentum. The idea that finishing one song per week would be possible … is almost foreign to me now.

Week 8 feels like it was a cleaning week. I sorted through a lot of the messiness in my studio, wired up some stuff. I recorded parts for an uptempo track, but it seems mostly I’ve been in a somewhat slow lyrical mode. That is, I’ve been trying to write lyrics but it’s going slow. I also felt really tired with some kind of headache – and in these times, I almost got a bit hypo-chondric.

So, I’m working on two different Mannheim EP-songs. One is the uptempo-track mentioned above and is about biking, or the feeling of biking. I made a “motorik-beat” pattern on my OP-1 and sent it through DigDugDIY compressor/bitcrusher. Over it I’m strumming/singing a song which in my head has some of the energy of an uptempo Beach Boys-song. I’ve also playing with the idea of letting some synth have a conversation with the riff in Kraftwerk’s Tour de France. I’m unsure about how close to go for copyright reasons, but it’s interesting to see that Kraftwerk lifted the first half of the riff from Sonata for Flute and Piano by Paul Hindemith. Working title? Let’s call it Sturm&Drang for now.

The second song is called Endless. I view it as some kind of anchoring theme song for the EP. It’s a slightly jazzy ballad. My idea is to record different parts with different instrumentation.

Plan for week 9. Finish the lyrics for Endless and “Sturm&Drang”. Get “skeleton structures” recorded into Live so I can experiment. I want to fill up my session view with more experimental loops. I’m also working on a song called Summerhands and I want to write a song about a canary yellow convertible on the autobahn.