About
Jun 3rd, 2009 by crystaldreams
Crystal Dreams is the brain child of Australian musician Joel Sutton. In early 2009 Joel suffered another attack of severe depression and was not able to continue working at his day job. At the recommendation of his psychologist he began to focus on as many creative tasks as he could. Continuing to do ambient / new age music seemed to be a logical choice as Joel has been working on tracks in this genre since the late 1990’s.
“It’s a real bizarre twist of fate that the depressed super-anxious guy ended up doing relaxation music. Some days it’s me that really needs to chill out! Seriously though actually creating an episode is something I find very relaxing and I know if I’m relaxing then the audience will be able to relax too.”
The basic format of the project was defined very early on. Episodes would be released weekly with a duration as close to 15 minutes in length as possible. Instruments would be combination of analog synthesizer sounds and traditional new age sounds (e.g. Waterfalls, Koto, Bamboo Flute, Piano). The podcast distribution mechanism was chosen to allow the audience to get the latest episode as simply as possible. Although is it possible to listen to the podcast via the website most listeners subscribe via iTunes.
All of the instrument sounds are created in the computer either from scratch using virtual synthesizers or using existing sound libraries. The musical building blocks for each episode are built up piece by piece in Ableton Live and then Joel adds additional improvisations via his MIDI keyboard controller. The combination of building blocks and improvisations are captured, adjusted slightly so that the sound levels are ok, and then processed into an audio file for the web site. Very occasionally Joel will use one of his hardware synthesizers but for most episodes using the virtual instruments saves time.
“Part of what I wanted to do with Crystal Dreams was to not make it too perfect. It’s very easy to get bogged down with tweaking every last little thing especially when you’re working on the computer. You can literally spend days doing that for just one track and it can take away some (sometimes all) of the original magic. So I made the decision very early to try to not make any corrections. In some ways it makes it more of a live performance because that’s what you’d hear (mistakes and all) if I was playing for an audience.”
The Crystal Dreams project continues to be released weekly and is now available as a free podcast via the iTunes store. Each episode is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia License which allows flexible distribution (burning CD’s for your friends), use in other podcasts, and use by therapists in their practices. Please check the license itself for details.
Joel is working on a relaxation CD for commercial release and hopes to have it available by the end of the year.
