Shades of Light follows on from The Slow Measure, my first album devoted entirely to ambient music. That album grew out of my exploration of Brian Eno's work and was composed entirely by me, using a deliberately limited collection of instruments and sounds.

After finishing it, I became curious about approaching ambient music from a very different direction. Rather than composing another album note by note, I wanted to explore generative music: creating musical systems capable of producing evolving pieces, then working with what emerged.

For that experiment I turned to Wotja, a generative music system with an interesting connection to the history that had led me here in the first place.

Wotja is a direct descendant of SSEYO Koan, generative music software developed by brothers Tim and Pete Cole in the 1990s. Brian Eno began working with Koan Pro in 1995 and subsequently released Generative Music 1 with SSEYO Koan Software in 1996. Rather than being distributed as a conventional recording, it was released on floppy disk, allowing the software to generate the music itself. It was during his work with Koan that Eno coined the term “generative music” for music created by systems capable of producing continually changing results.

Wotja grew from that technology. The software has developed enormously over the intervening decades, but the underlying idea remains fascinating: instead of defining a single fixed sequence of musical events, generative techniques allow music to emerge and evolve according to systems of probability, rules and musical relationships.

So, thirty years after Eno was experimenting with Koan, I found myself exploring a descendant of the same technology.

My role on Shades of Light was very different from my role on The Slow Measure. I wasn't interested in simply generating music and releasing whatever came out. I spent time exploring Wotja, listening to the results, making choices and discarding material. From that process I selected the pieces that I felt had developed an identity of their own, then curated, mixed and mastered them into the album presented here.

That process also raises an interesting question about where a piece of music actually ends. A generative system can continue producing variations indefinitely. An album cannot. At some point somebody has to listen and decide: this is the version worth keeping.

The ten pieces that survived that process gradually developed a character of their own. Their titles suggested a loose journey through changing light, weather and eventually darkness.

The album begins with Dawn's Early Light, before moving through A Glimpse Of Something and the warmth of Warm Rays Of Sun. Stream Of Thought turns inward, while Seven Winds introduces a sense of movement. From Autumn Rain onward, the atmosphere begins to darken. Storm Clouds gather, daylight gives way to Dark Star and Night Murmurs, and the album finally arrives at Knowing.

I don't regard that sequence as a story with a prescribed meaning. The titles are simply impressions suggested by the music, points along a journey that the listener is free to interpret differently.

There is, however, a connection between this album and the one that preceded it that I particularly like. The Slow Measure was concerned with time and our experience of its passing. Shades of Light turns toward something else that is continually changing: light. Dawn becomes daylight, weather alters its character, darkness arrives, and the cycle begins again.

Two ambient albums, then, approached from very different directions.

The Slow Measure was composed entirely by me.

Shades of Light began with generative systems, with my role shifting toward exploration, selection, curation and the shaping of the finished album.

For that reason, I have also chosen to release Shades of Light differently. It is available exclusively here on my website rather than through streaming services or Bandcamp. I want to be able to explore generative tools and share the results when I believe they are worth hearing, without those experiments entering the same royalty pools as artists releasing conventionally composed music.

Having my own space for these projects means they don't need to fit within the conventional release system. They can simply exist here for anyone who wants to listen.

Shades of Light is one such experiment: ten pieces selected from a system capable of producing countless possibilities, preserved because these were the ones I wanted to hear again.