The UFOverdriver Story, Part 2
If you haven’t read Part 1, you can find it here.
The Transition to UFOverdriver 2.0
During 2013 we plotted a move to the hi-desert of Southern California. Our goal was to move to Joshua Tree. We spent numerous weekends driving out to the desert from our apartment in Long Beach to look at different places to rent. In October, following a two week road trip to New Mexico, we found a homestead cabin nestled in the boulders at the edge of the hi-desert near Pioneertown, just twenty miles from Joshua Tree. By the end of the first week of December we had moved to the cabin and began a completely new phase of our lives.
The place we lived is called Gamma Gulch, and when we moved there our closest neighbor was over ½ mile away down the dirt road. We lived three miles from the nearest paved road and were barely tethered to the grid. We had no phone reception, our water had to be trucked in, and our internet connection, which was incredibly slow, came to us from a satellite dish.
At night it was so dark and quiet you could hear the ringing of your own ears and all you could see was nothing until you looked up at the explosion of stars in the sky. When there was a full moon it would light up the gulch like a second sunrise. It was all stillness and quiet in the gulch… and the psychic energy that I used to fuel the UFOverdriver was completely absent.
During our first year at the gulch I attempted to make sound collages but couldn’t. There was none of the bustle and energy of the city, I had stopped reading most conspiracy theory stories, and all around me was nature. We lived on 10 acres on the side of a hill that I hiked daily, making drawings and taking photos… trying to figure out how to make my art in this new environment.
I started to listen to more of Brian Eno’s ambient music because it fit the place. A couple years after moving to the gulch I started to try my hand at making my own ambient music. Of course, I decided to use the UFOverdriver name for the albums and EPs I released, but this was a whole different UFOverdriver.
To get a flavor of this period of UFOverdriver, check out this album called Meditations Group 1: The November Sessions –
To make my ambient pieces I made short loops of “music” that I created on my keyboard and repeated them, laying other loops of music on top of the loop using a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) on my computer. I followed the idea that I got from Brian Eno that “repetition equals variation”
“Repetition is a form of change” – Brian Eno, Oblique Strategies
“Repetition doesn’t really exist. As far as your mind is concerned, nothing happens the same twice, even if in every technical sense, the thing is identical. Your perception is constantly shifting. It doesn’t stay in one place.” – Brian Eno from an interview
Because I was nowhere near being a musician at the time, I had no idea how to make “real” songs. The next few years were spent learning to play the keyboard and making songs. My approach with UFOverdriver has always been collage and sound sculpting. I like sonic experiences and with this project I’ve always striven to make the listening experience a sonic journey. That’s the main ethos that ties all periods of UFOverdriver together.
In 2017 we moved to another cabin in the hi-desert, this time in a very rural area of Yucca Valley. Now we were on five acres, on a hill side that gave us a million dollar view of the desert all the way to Twentynine Palms. Our primary view looked towards Joshua Tree and the entrance of the National Park. We loved the place and called it The Outpost.
It was an outpost. The town of Yucca Valley was close enough to be convenient, but far enough away to feel distant. I continued to make ambient music, but now it took a more science fiction turn, more space oriented. I was writing speculative fiction novels at the time that got all the conspiracy theory out of my system. I found that little hints of sound collage was starting to enter back into my sound constructions.
In February of 2019 I had an idea that led to the next pivotal album – Interchange. I was driving on a backroad in Yucca Valley, returning from our PO Box in Pioneertown when I decided I needed to make a Pink Floyd-esque UFOverdriver album.
I’ve always been a fan of Pink Floyd, ever since I heard Money for the first time when I was nine or ten. My best sound collage (The Brothership Has Landed) was based on the Pink Floyd album Animals and my ideas about sound collages were influenced by the use of the spaces between songs on Pink Floyd’s albums. I call those spaces the margins between songs.
During February and March I listened to the 1970s Pink Floyd albums again and again, soaking in their feel and paying special attention to the margins. Then about mid-March I began recording. I was surprised at the very electronica sound all my songs seemed to have. The songs weren’t sounding like Pink Floyd at all. Undeterred I kept recording until I had recorded an albums worth of songs. Then I got into mixing the album and paid special attention to the margins. Whereas the previous UFOverdriver sound collages had been dense and continuous, I kept these sound collage bits light and airy, and confined them mostly to the margins.
Interchange quickly became one of my favorite UFOverdriver albums. It’s an album that I would have loved to have when I was fifteen and listening to DEVO and Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark. It was a pivotal album because it took everything I was doing since I started the ambient period and married it to the earlier sound collages, launching UFOverdriver into it’s next phase.
Version Three
Around the time that Interchange was released I launched a new music project called The Near Heaven Orchestra to carry out my soundscape/soundtrack compositions, keeping UFOverdriver as my primary experimental project.
Using my old metaphor for UFOverdriver that it flies like a Vimana, I would take my project out for a flight every so often and release an album when I had recorded a collection of songs.
During late 2021 we moved to Joshua Tree, and now we live in a neighborhood, but have vacant lots and expanses of desert on all sides of us.
The psychic energy isn’t the same level as when we were in Long Beach, but it’s enough to fuel more sound collages. February 2022’s release called Lunar Sunrise followed the same trajectory as the previous few releases, and started to incorporate little bits sound collage on a regular basis.
In the Fall on 2022 I got out my keyboard, and began to use music as medicine for the deep depression I was going through. Music composition is great brain medicine for me I discovered! I found a lot of peace in the moments I was creating, a quiet time away from the noise of depression. As the depression continued through the Fall I kept creating songs. During that time UFOverdriver released three EPs and several albums. It was a very prolific few months in which I created 61 songs, many ending up on releases as the season moved along.
Album cover art: Artificial Intelligence is upon us, and I embraced it for album cover creation during the Fall of 2022. Because I’m the graphic artist that has created all of UFOverdriver’s graphics since day one, I wasn’t too worried about the AI putting a graphic artist out of work. Even using the AI to produce raw images, I still needed to enhance or alter the images before I could release them on an album cover. Every raw image for the album covers after Interchange have been created by an AI (with the exception of the Bike single)
Sunday was the last album of 2022, and one of my all-time favorite UFOverdriver albums. It is very influenced by Pink Floyd, but so were most of the music during late 2022. It contains a trio of songs called “Dreaming with The Night Birds – Part 1 through 3” that might be one of the most interesting works of the year.
Of course, being influenced by Pink Floyd doesn’t mean UFOverdriver sounds even remotely like the Floyd. Roger Waters has some epic bass lines I’d love to recreate, and David Gilmore’s guitar is legendary. I love Nick Mason’s keyboard treatments, but Pink Floyd has already existed, and the world only needs one Pink Floyd, right?!
What is UFOverdriver?
When it comes down to it, UFOverdriver is an experimental project instead of a band. Because it’s just me and a number of synthesizers and drum machine, audio clips and my imagination.
I make UFOverdriver music because it’s what I want to hear. There is nothing that I know of that sounds like UFOverdriver, whichever version you listen to. I put UFOverdriver on Spotify so I could listen while driving in my car. I do this for myself, but I invite the world to come have a listen…
And Now Version 4…
As of this year I’ve now added vocals to the mix. I went looking for a vocalist during late 2022 and ended up hiring myself. I don’t feel that I have a traditionally “good” singing voice but I’ve found ways to make it functional, to put it humbly. I’m beginning to like the sound of my voice as I work with it more, but I have found that writing lyrics – good lyrics – is very difficult. I wrote poetry for years, but writing song lyrics is a whole different ball game.
The most recent pivotal album is Here I Am, released on January 1, 2023.
This is the first UFOverdriver album with my voice on it. I have listened to this album so many times so far that the songs all sound like classics when I hear it. I’m probably UFOverdriver’s biggest fan!
Upcoming:
UFOverdriver will be participating in Wonder Valley Experimental 15 – Virtual Edition on March 31st on YouTube. I have created a special fourteen minute video I’ll be premiering at the event.
