ovoxovo

music composition

Lost And Found

The orchestral / movie soundtrack genre has always fascinated me, so I wrote this simple piece as an experiment. Obviously, I don’t have access to a real orchestra, so I used an orchestral sample library for the instruments I needed for the arrangement.

Ant Wilmore 

music composition

The Governor

The Governor is a song I wrote that imagines the kind of things that might happen when a country's government is taken over by an evil authoritarian regime. 

For the musical arrangement, I wanted to create a dystopian mood, so synthesisers form the bulk of the backing elements. When I added the vocals, I was aiming to sing the lyrics with a slightly military feel, which might perhaps represent a citizens' resistance movement.

Ant Wilmore 

music composition

Everybody Knows

This song is a collaboration with Adrian Crossen. We were experimenting with recording random bits of music and Adrian asked me for a chord sequence for inspiration, so I gave him the 4 repeating chords from an unfinished song of mine called Everybody Knows. For the words he should sing, I just said 'everybody knows', the title of the song, without saying what the rest of the lyrics consisted of.

After we added a couple of simple keyboard tracks and a bass guitar, I copied the 4 chord sequence lots of times to extend the length of the track to about 10 minutes. Adrian then did improvised singing over the backing track, all in one take! So from that session we had something that sounded interesting-ish, but it was 10 minutes long, quite repetitive and lacked any percussion. 

Over the next few days and weeks, I  put a lot of effort into trying to craft this rough raw material into something that felt more finished and  complete. I added a short intro,  some experimental percussion (with a big emphasis on the bass drum), drenched Adrian's vocal with extreme echo, and edited the duration of the track down to about 5 minutes. 

Finally, I added my vocal part from the original 'Everybody Knows' song that I had written years before.

Ant Wilmore 

music composition

Water Under The Bridge

I co-wrote this song with Neil Sambrook. Neil came up with the foundation of the track in terms of rhythm and bass guitars, drums and a blues guitar solo. I liked that a lot as a starting point, so then I came up with words and a tune for the vocal aspect of the song. I added keyboard tracks, deleted the rhythm guitar, and mashed up and simplified Neil's lead guitar parts to fit the dreamy/haunting vibe that suited the words of the song. I also added some weird percussion to accentuate a sense of memory flashbacks, and there's a whole verse of incoherent backwards vocals for the same reason.

Ant Wilmore 

music composition

On A Normal Day

It's a common thing for people to think of a normal day as being 'not very interesting' or 'somewhat boring and inconsequential'. Personally, I subscribe to the alternative perspective, which is; 'anything can happen on a normal day'. Of course, anything really does mean anything, good or bad, there's a massive spectrum of possibilities. 

So that was the idea that inspired me to come up with this fairly simple piano-based tune. (By the way, for this track, I didn't play a piano like a 'normal' pianist would (my keyboard skills are very rudimentary), instead, I used midi sequencing to enter each note one by one into my music production software, the equivilent to writing music notation on a treble clef staff). 

Ant Wilmore 

music composition

This Is What Happens

I wrote the initial version of this instrumental for the soundtrack of a video I made about a journey on a sailing boat. But it didn't have a lot of energy about it. So recently I thought I'd re-do the whole thing with a bit more of an edge. The guitar parts were entered note-by-note as sequenced MIDI tracks, because I'm totally incapable of playing lead guitar. 

Ant Wilmore