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A good cyber friend from Second LIfe is, in Real Life, an expert creative seamstress and doll maker. A recent event for which she designed and made clothes was TribalXFest (also see LuluVoodoo for examples of her costumes).

This music is fascinating to me. In Real Life, the ultra-liberal church I work for has frequent drumming circles. In Second Life there are elven drum circles where groups of fae may jam one electronic drums while others of us dance widdershins. I confess I prefer worked out drumming to jamming but that’s from the perspective of a listener/composer. I’m sure for drumming participants it’s cathartic!

So, this new movement for The Forest is Elven Drums. I used traditional rhythms for part of the drums, tracks (Maqsum and Baladi for the main body of the song and Nawari and Bambi for the relief strain). Please don’t think I know what I’m doing with these rhythms. I tracked them down on the internet and then used them my own way. A purist will, I’m sure, be in pain listening to how I mangled them.

Here is a link to The Fairy Ring, the newest addition to The Forest. The first link takes you to the newe addition and the second link takes you to the complete set (only four movements at this point, but about a dozen anticipated).

If you don’t know for sure what a “fairy ring” is, here’s a good description and some background on celtic fairy rings: http://anamkaracentre.com/Celtic_Fairy_Ring.html.

One of my favorite pastimes has become spending time in Second Life as a fairy. (That’s me in the picture on the left.) This whole set is inspired by my activities and friends there.

Larger pieces evolve and often change direction, entailing a complete reworking of the idea and its parts. That’s what’s happening with this new groups of pieces called “The Forest.” The Soundcloud tags I’m using are “electronic,” “ambient,” “fae,” and “elven.” So…that pretty well describes where this group is settling in!

This involved a makeover of one completed piece, a reassignment of yet another earlier piece, the deletion of another, and, most recently, the composition of a new one (“Forest Dawn”). It feels like there’ll be maybe another 5 pieces or so in this set.

Here’s a direct link to the Soundcloud set: http://soundcloud.com/hilton-kean-jones/sets/the-forest, and below is the widget. As I add new movements, I’ll up date the widget.

Admittedly, these are outright, unabashedly commercial pieces aimed at a specific audience, namely the good listeners of radioreddit.com. I’d uploaded some of my short pieces for piano there and surprisingly they’re getting repeat airplay and upvotes every day (so I know it’s not just my friends).

The piano pieces have a “classical” tag on radioreddit. These electronic pieces will have an “electronic” tag. I’ll be very curious to follow the daily stats on them.

Should you happen by radioreddit and care to check some of my pieces out, my nom de plume there is The Linnet. The piano pieces are in rotation now (usually on their “random” channel, but increasingly on the “main” channel). However, it usually takes a week or so before new uploads are approved, so it’ll be a few days from this posting before their getting airplay there.

The order of pieces in this set is important–more like a suite than just a collection of separate pieces.

PS: Yes, three pieces already on SoundCloud under different titles were renamed and reworked and made part of this set. I’ve deleted the hiltonkeanjones.com posts that linked to them.