Cooking in the Dark
A few weeks ago, I bought a slightly beaten-up1 SP-404SX while on a roadtrip to Montreal. I fell in love with the thing. For about two weeks, I stayed up late into the weird part of the night, sometimes till dawn, sitting on my bed with my headphones on, by the light of a lamp and some Christmas lights. The process of making music with this thing was so utterly absorbing. There's no real screen on the device, beyond a three-digit red LED display, like you'd find on an old clock radio. (There's also no clock in sight, which accounts, in part, for the very long nights.) There's a sequencer, but no grid to program -- the only way to sequence your samples is by actually playing them, in real time, layer by layer, with optional quantization (which I'd usually do without). This means that the experience of composing a song on the 404 is essentially a matter of iterative performance -- playing, repeating, deleting, and listening to what you've done so far, very, very closely. It forces a heightened form of attentive listening, not entirely unlike the experience of playing in band, its intensely solitary character aside.
By Friday, December 5th, 2025, I'd composed eight songs I was happy with, and released a solo album under the title Bog Sorcery 1: If I'm Not There to Receive These Ideas, God Might Give Them to Prince.
Swamp Magic and Bog Sorcery
About a year ago, my partner, Zain, and I started a band called "Swamp Magic", with me mostly playing bass and Zain playing synths. Sometimes we'd also play weird little machines I'd built, like this touchtone telephone synth named Phaedra, and her sister, Phoebe, but those two really deserve a post of their own, and I won't get into them here.
We had our first show this year, at Ducky's, in my new home town of Sackville, New Brunswick (a sweet little town, known and loved for the sprawling marshlands that surround it and the mysterious white cube that looms over it).
I've been having such a great time bringing Swamp Magic to life with Zain, and there's really nothing quite like making music in a room or on a stage with someone you love. When I'm home, alone, noodling around on my bass, cooking up bass lines that might find a place in a Swamp Magic tune, I'll sometimes hit on something that I decide to record and stow away for later. Sometimes these grow into Swamp Magic songs, and sometimes they just sit on my hard drive, waiting for their day in the sun.
By the time I got my 404, I had scads of such of recordings lying around. Four of them grew into the spines of the songs on this album, and I'll have more to say about that soon.
So, Swamp Magic is the name of our band, and Swamp Magic remains the centre of gravity of my musical life. But here I was with an album's worth of tracks I wrote in my room, alone. Releasing them as a Swamp Magic album felt a bit off -- Swamp Magic, after all, is me and Zain, together, and it wouldn't make sense to cut Swamp Magic album that Zain wasn't on (aside from a few synth samples, which add a beautiful sparkle to a couple tracks and which I'm very grateful for). But I also didn't want to set up an entirely separate musical act, since the music I make on my own still feels like it has an essential, umbilical connection to the band. I decided to call the solo project Bog Sorcery, and release everything under the Swamp Magic bandcamp page. (I think Zain's got the name Saltmarsh Witchcraft reserved for their solo work.) Riffing on synonyms seemed like a good way to connect these projects.
If I'm Not There to Receive These Ideas, God Might Give Them to Prince
The title of the album comes from a running joke that started when Zain would try to encourage me (in vain) to get to sleep at a reasonable hour. Here's the version of the story I found on a Prince fan forum:
With the budget already past $24 million, [Michael] Jackson told his team he wanted to recreate one of the world’s largest waterfalls — Victoria Falls in southern Africa — on the stage. “I was ready to jump off the balcony of my office,” says Randy Phillips, president of the concert promotion firm AEG Live. “We went and met with Michael, and [director] Kenny [Ortega] said, ‘Michael, you’ve got to stop. We’ve got an incredible show, we don’t need any more vignettes.’ Michael said, ‘But Kenny, God channels this through me at night. I can’t sleep because I’m so supercharged.’ Kenny said, ‘But Michael, we have to finish. Can’t God take a vacation?’ Without missing a beat, Michael said, ‘You don’t understand — if I’m not there to receive these ideas, God might give them to Prince.’ ”
I organized the album into an A-side and a B-side, each about 15 minutes in length -- primarily so that I could ship out cassettes, and maybe vinyl in the future if and when it becomes feasible to do so, but I also like having a structure to work with. It's more interesting to think about what the last song on side A and the first song on side B should be, than to think about the 4th and 5th songs in an 8 song playlist.
A-Side
Please Please Please
This wasn't the first song I recorded for the album, but it was the first that kept me up until the actual crack of dawn. It started with the bass line, which I think I came up with a few months ago, noodling around on Wilma (my six string bass -- an Ibanez Gio with flatwounds). Having the bass line as a foundation gave me a steady and organic rhythm to build on, but one that often chafed against the grid, so I kept quantization almost entirely off for this one, using it only to trigger the bass sample at the very beginning of what I think were a series of 16 bar patterns on the sequencer.
The vocal refrain on this track, "please please please, fill me with grace" (or peace? possibly grease? for a long time I thought it was "please please please, deliver me"... feels like it's best to leave this open) comes from Dan Gallant's vocals "Diego Smelled a Fume", from the Fantods' first album, circa 2004. Dan's an old friend of mine. Seeing the Fantods play at basement shows and bars around Halifax (thinking in particular of the & gallery basement on Agricola Street, and the Bike Shop Cafe and Menz & Mollyz on Gottingen), or hanging out at their jams in Headquarters (an unusually cheap and smokestained apartment in the North End that passed from friend to friend for a couple of decades), all this was formative to me. I hadn't really found my way to making music, myself, at the time, aside from thrashing on an old tenor banjo from time to time, but the Fantods' music was part of air our circle of friends were breathing as artists. Dan and I, along with Gary and Neil Peacock (the drummer and guitarist of the Fantods) and a few other friends -- Gord Goulding, the poet Jen Devlin, Katrina Evans, Phil Godin -- used to sit around making art together in some grimy apartment or another (Headquarters, or Grayskull, they all had names). We had an art zine going for a while, which I still have on my shelf, called The Necronaut -- I think you can still find it in the Anchor Zine Library at Radstorm, in Halifax. Good times. But I think I've wandered into the weeds here... My point, I think, is that it's not stretching things too much to say that seeing the Fantods play made me want to be a musician. Felt fitting to kick off the album with some sounds from the 'tods.
The other samples on this track were sourced from the Internet Archive's vast trove of 78s, mostly released in the 1920s or 10s. The most important of these was a recoding of the Gregorian chant "Gaude", as performed by the Benedictine Monks at St Benoit du Lac, an abbey in southern Quebec. This recording presented me with such beautiful phonic material. But I wanted to abstract it, somehow. There's something a bit hokey, it seems, in the way Gregorian chants have tended to be used in pop music -- I'm thinking, here, of the new age band, Enigma, and its peers in the 90s. But I also didn't want to use the material ironically or impiously. Preserving its sincerity and spiritual intensity was important to me, even as I deformed and mutated it. It appears on the song in two ways: the rhythmic choral chops that you hear keeping time with the bass line were made by slicing samples from "Gaude" to give them an abrupt, essentially flat attack, pitch shifting them somewhat, and reversing one of them to subtly change its timbre. I assigned these chops to two pads on the 404 and just played along to the bass line until I found a countermelody that I liked. The other appearance is in the keening, upshifted "aaAAAAaaahh", which I carved from the source material passed through the 404's "VOICE TRANS" vocoder effect. There's something so moving to me in the sound this produced, eerie and transcendent -- humanized, oddly, in the denaturing effects of the vocoder, which seemed to throw the voice backwards through an alien adolescence.
I quite like the fact that this album begins and ends with hymns.
Yodelay
I think I composed this song the night after finishing Please Please Please. The foundation of the beat is a long loop that I'd, a few months earlier, improvised on Wilma (the bass), accompanied by Roxy (my Yamaha RX11 drum machine) and Debbie (my Yamaha DX11 FM synth). It's important for instruments to have names. The basic rhythm is in 5/4 time. The RX11 is still one of my favourite drum machines, even if its stock of rompler 16 bit drum sounds can see a bit sterile and dry all on its lonesome. It's a delight to sequence on, using a realtime overdubbing method, with quantization, that's very similar to what you get on the SP-404SX, but unlike the 404, the RX11 lets you key in just about any time signature you can think of. This was my first attempt to write a song in 5/4. The DX11 contributed a layer of more or less arhythmic twinkling glockenspiel sounds to the piece -- I have yet to really crack open the user manual for that machine, and the glock sounds are just a preset, but there's something indescribably pretty about the way chimes, bells, and glockenspiels sound as interpreted by a frequency modulating synth.
The yodel comes from Jimmie Rodgers's 1927 recording of "Blue Yodel". The spoken lines, "Take these clothes and burn them. I'm going to lock you in here. If you hear that music again, fight it! Fight it with all your strength!" come from a 1940s radio drama series called "Inner Sanctum Mysteries" -- from an episode called "The Melody of Death".
Working in 5/4 time, and with the low end of the rhythm section held down by my own bass playing, quantization again proved more or less useless, and I enjoyed the looser more laid back sound I was able to find here.
Phaedra the Telephone Synth makes an appearance on this track. Listen for the sounds that sound like a minor explosion in a mad scientist's lab on a Saturday morning cartoon. The abrupt soprano vocal samples you hear throughout this track were my friend Melinda's contribution, clipped from a late night post-karaoke jam at (Weird Lines frontman) CL's place, which I'd recorded on my phone. "Phrygian Phreakout" was the name of the voice memo, iirc.
Bear in a Lady's Boudoir
This was the first complete song I composed on the SP-404SX. The immaculate drum loop cribbed from The New Percussion Octet's "Sandpiper" does a lot of the heavy lifting here, and builds a nice little structure for me to do all sorts of ridiculous things within. The vocals on this track come from Cliff Edwards vaudeville number, "I Am A Bear In A Lady's Boudoir".
This is the first track on the album with no bass line, the low end being held down, in its way, by Edwards' pitch-shifted and transformed vocals, instead.
Pink Slip
The Fantods return in this track to bookend the A-Side. Here, we're sampling from "! at the sun" on their sophomore album, Horrornova. Dan's vocals are buried deeper in this mix, here -- the "it's your paycheque in your name" that he belts through a megaphone on the original recording is EQ'ed into an even narrower midrange band. A looping one bar sample of Gary's drumming drives the track. I thickened the drums up with a smidge of tape echo on this one and I remember layering in some additional sounds percussive sounds to accent the kick. The brothers of St. Benoit du Lac are back on this track, chopped, shifted and piped through a tape echo with a longer rhythmic interval. The horns, I think, might have come from an orphaned recording by the London Experimental Jazz Quartet (that's London, Ontario). There were moments in earlier drafts of the composition where the energy seemed to sag a little, and horns were the cure.
The bass line here wasn't played on a bass but on a cheap, pocket-sized bass synthesizer, the Stylophone Beat. There's not much you can do on that little machine in the way of sound engineering -- just four preset voices for the bass -- but I liked it texture, its attack, and brutal, slablike sustain. I recorded a long C and D-flat to a couple of pads on the 404 and just overdubbed them into the track when it was otherwise almost complete. (I'd earlier tried to match one of the bass guitar recordings in my stash to the already pretty busy track, but nothing quite seemed to fit. It needed something stark and minimal.) There is a little bit of Wilma in there, though, playing in a middle register: the bomp-wowwww that you hear every second measure or so is from a recording of Wilma that I made when she still had her roundwounds, played through the EQD Spatial Delivery envelope filter. I almost forgot about that.
I liked the idea of ending Side A with this frantic burst of energy, giving the listener a moment to catch their breath while they flip the tape, before settling into the groove on Side B.
B-Side
Our Enemies Cannot See Me
This might be my favourite tune on the album. It opens with Betty Boop's voice, from "The Old Man of the Mountain": "Whatcha gonna do now?" And the Old Man answers: "gonna do the best I can." The bass line is me playing Wilma, again, following a dub-like progression. The four-bar drum loop I play out by hand -- possibly quantized to 1/8ths or 1/16ths. Some of the individual percussive sounds (the clip-clop, in particular) come from an orphaned 78rpm recording of Bill Snyder and his Orchestra, playing "Drifting Sands", which is also the source for a pair of vocal refrains: "ride, ride, ride" and "drifting sands"/"drift drift drift drift drift". There's a handful of other drum sounds on here as well, cribbed from various dusty 78s I found in the archive. And I think there's a plucked cello from the LEJQ's "My Dog's Tail is Longer Than Yours", layered with some guitar strums, to lend a descending motif to the beat here and there.
There's also a touch of Fantod buried in here -- from the chorus of "Oatmeal Prison". Dan's voice here is pitch-shifted and transformed with the 404's vocoder, very faintly squeaking "every crime that you don't see / is one more time that I go free".
The title of the track comes from a line from the old time radio drama "The Shadow", voiced, I think, by Orson Welles.
What is There to Say?
This is the second track without any contribution from Wilma. Holding down the low end, here, is a bytebeat composition I wrote some time ago, the code for which is just a few lines of C:
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
int t = 1;
for (;;t++) {
putchar(
t ^ t >> 7
| t >> 10
& t >> 9
);
}
return 0;
}
Bytebeat drones have a strange and alien musical quality to them. The waveforms can be weirdly jagged and sprawl over a wide expanse of harmonic space. They can be difficult to combine with conventional musical elements. This is the first time I've really gotten that combination to work.
I took a long, 28 bar sample of this drone and resampled it while I finger-drummed a kick overtop, then resampled it again with a bit of gentle filter sweeping. The kick itself was made by layering an analog drum machine's kick with one of the deeper and more percussive sounds I was able to get from Phaedra, the telephone synth. I then set that long sample down as the foundation of a pattern on the 404's sequencer, which is more forgiving to edit and fine-tune than a bounced sample. The entire song is 56 measures, cycling through the 28 bar drone first without and then with the echoing clap.
The haunting chimes are sampled from Syd Dale's "Rain Drops". The imperfect pitch shifting algorithm on the SX gives these chimes an eerie, trembling quality, accentuated by the the wow and flutter of the 404's vinyl sim effect. I like how much tension I was able to coax out of the same, repetitive chime sample by gateing and halting its refrain at shorter and shorter paces.
Most of the vocals come from another old time radio drama called "Johnny Dollar", a slightly goofy detective show featuring an insurance investigator who frames his narration in the form of an expense report. The percussion sounds are synthetic, and chopped from drum track for a draft of a piece I composed in Ableton about a year ago, and may in fact be the sole exception to my "no stock sounds" rule. The 404's bpm-locked delay effect turns a series of claps into something weirdly haunting. The funereal bells are from an old 78 called "bells and gongs", or something like that.
This number feels heavy to me. It can sometimes be hard to get through. Death looms large here. What is there to say about it?
Just a little.
Empty Guns, Empty Boots
I love the sauntering cymbals here. I'd clipped it from an improvised and arhythmic performance by the London Experimental Jazz Quartet (again, that's London, Ontario), looped it and fell in love with it. In the LEJQ piece, "Edible Wallpaper", the drums don't play any periodic pattern I could discern, and it was a happy discovery to find an interesting rhythm in looping them.
The two source for the vocals are, on the one hand, The Old Man of the Mountain in the Betty Boop cartoon. The "gone" began as the word "gong" from the lines
You gotta kick that gong to get along with me
Clipped just right, it could be made to say "gone". I time stretched it while pitching it up a little, which made the Old Man's voice crack a little, changing its affect completely. (I've always loved when a sample could be flipped this way -- thinking, for example, of the way J Dilla turns "Clair" into "player" on Slum Village's "Players".)
What's not a vocal sample at all is the mournful horn that comes in to ask, it sounds to me, "where do we go?" in an almost-human voice. I think it's from another LEJQ piece -- possibly "Jazz Widow Waltz". I don't know if you hear it too, but the way that horn speaks chills me.
The remaining vocals come from a old cowboy tune, "Empty Saddles", as sung by Red River Dave. I was surprised how natural the collaged line "Where do you walk, covered in rust, where do you walk tonight?" came out. And I like how the eponymous refrain, "Empty guns, empty boots" hovers ambiguously between mourning and menace.
I didn't have a bass line ready that fit in the pocket of that cymbal loop I'd chopped, so I loaded the loop onto my looper pedal (a Boss RC-3) and noodled around on the bass until I found something that fit. This bass line, again, follows a vaguely dublike melodic pattern, but takes on a very different character when set against jazzy percussion and cowboy vocals.
I should explain what I mean by "a vaguely dublike melodic pattern". I'm honestly not sure how far this generalizes, but something I noticed when learning to play the bass lines of Aswad's "Dub Fire" and Augustus Pablo's "Pablo in Moonlight City" is that the bass cycles through the following relative notes (this is intended to be a fretboard diagram):
| | |
+-4-2
| | |
3-1-+
| | |
Pablo in Moonlight City goes 111111 12341. Dub Fire goes 1 112 33 41.
In my notebook I've got "riddim rhombus" scrawled next to this diagram. Is that a thing?
Anyway, once I was happy with the way the bass and cymbals meshed together, I sampled each to a pad and ensured that they were exactly the same length (by ear, this being a 404SX), and then started building my patterns on this rhythmic foundation.
Smoothness is Pleasure and Pleasure is Good
This was the last song I composed for this album, but I wasn't sure until I'd finished it that it would be the album closer -- in my working notes, "Empty Guns, Empty Boots" held that position. On the heels of a two-song-long rumination on mortality, and an album of fairly dark sounds, in general, I wanted something to lift us up, but something that wouldn't just betray or distract all that led up to it. Something to relieve the weight we shoulder through "What is There to Say?" and the forlornness of "Empty Guns, Empty Boots".
The bass line is one I've been sitting on for a while: a 12-bar blues progression with funk characteristics that I think, in my notes, I called the swampy strut. Roxy's laying down the skeleton of a drum line in the background, which I'll thicken up with various percussive oneshots on the 404, doubling the RX11's anemic tones with a kick made from the bass drum of a Scottish marching band, CL's clap, and some sounds I sampled from the built-in drum machine on CL's old (mid 70s?) electric organ. The other percussive sounds you're hearing in there are dolphin clicks.
The album begins and ends with hymns. We start with the Gregorian chants of the Benedictine brothers, and end with the Wiseman Sextette Gospel choir, here singing a couple lines from "Lord, I Can't Stay Away":
Got to go to Judgement
Got to go to Judgement
Got to go to Judgement
Got to go to Heaven
The sample that gives this number its title is from Day of the Dolphin, a 1973 spy thriller about a talking dolphin. Early in the track, we hear the dolphin, whose name is Fa (short for Alpha) say "smoooth" and call out his own name, and at the end of the first verse say, with such an earnest and innocent voice, "Man is good". The response comes from one of the scientists who had come to the aquarium to audit the trainer's progress: "Why is Man good?" To which Fa replies, "Smooth". We then have George C. Scott's voice, on alternating bars with the Gospel choir, saying, "smoothness is pleasure and pleasure is good". I'm happy with how snugly both this line and the Gospel refrain sit in the beat -- this took a bit of minimal BPM stretching and squeezing, but the cadence is unchanged.
Zain comes in on this track, with a synth sample that gives a nice sparkle to the melody. On alternating bars in the first and last verses, we have a twinkling arpeggio from the Arturia Microfreak, to which I added a descending low pass filter sweep on the 404, bending it into a melodic arc.
I was uneasy, at first, about how this song would be heard. I didn't want this juxtaposition of the sacred and the ridiculous to come across as smirking or cynical, or to cast the choir in a condescending light (as they are in fact cast in the original recording, whose master of ceremonies introduces them as an ethnographic curio: you will hear the hymn, he says, "with its quaint minor and all the peculiar turns, just as you would hear it in one of the most primitive congregations of the real South"). I wanted Fa to play the role of a redeeming angel, announcing a judgement of universal salvation. I wanted the song to be a celebration of beauty, of music, of a groove mysterious and important. Goofy as the dog but earnest as Worrell.
1 By "slightly beaten up", I mean that the volume pot was completely shot. For a while, it was stuck on max, and swivelled loosely in its socket. I coped with this by just reducing the gain on each individual sample to a tolerable level, and then worked from there. But when I woke up after working on "Please Please Please" until sunrise, the short circuit in the volume pot had given way entirely, and the volume was stuck on zero. This was a less tolerable development. I was on the verge of finishing a piece (the best I'd made so far, too, the one that kept me up till sunrise!) and the box was kaput. I didn't have a logarithmic stereo potentiometer handy, and waiting weeks for one to arrive was out of the question, so I just removed the busted pot and soldered each pair of its leads together, and then hot-glued a dime I had on my desk over the gaping knob hole. This got me back where I started: with volume locked on max. Not ideal, but workable. I finished the song that afternoon.
