Guitar Music by John Ralston

"I am more and more convinced that music is not, in essence, a thing which can be cast into a traditional and fixed form. It is made up of color and rhythm.” -Claude Debussy, 1909

This is a Fantasia. Free form composition. No plans or agendas. No lyric sheets or chord structures. Pure music. It started with a few old drum machines that I had at the time. I recorded some beats from these machines at various tempos and layered them at random across the session fading into and out of each other. I also used some undesirable quirks from gear like effects pedals that ended up as percussion artifacts. From there, I layered on various synths, guitars, and vocals - and often, those patterns would be reversed or reoriented to something other than the original effort. Delays cascaded into delays.

What emerged over the course of these sessions was an instrumental piece that I began to compose in flight as background music. Recommended for passive listening. So, if you are doing homework, washing dishes, practicing contemplative writing or yoga, working through your taxes, sleeping, waking up, or just plain being - this is for you.

Recorded in my Lake Worth studio (Wildlands) over a two month period of sessions.

"I love music passionately. And because I love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth, an open-air art boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea.” -Claude Debussy

“I live my life in ever widening circles, each superseding all the previous ones.” -Rilke