I make my music on my own, alone in the studio, a band of one. Wait technically that's not a band, the smallest band you can have would be two right ? I'm certainly not a one man band, I saw one of those last night and it wasn't good... Ok whatever... Anyway I make music on my own and I really make it to please only one person, me. I hope other people like it but that's not the driving force behind it, the driving force is my inner urge to create which I have no control over. I have control over what comes out, the 99.5% crap that I make that nobody ever hears, apart from the cats and the cows in the next field....

So when I release a record and people first get to hear it its rather an interesting phase of the musics life. Its like its being born and although you rarely say, at least to the parents anyway, that a baby is ugly or it smells and its noisy the same can't be said of music reviewers. Ugly, smelly and noisy have all been used to describe records at one time or another probably mostly by me though hahahah.

When somebody listens to your music and they just totally get it, they totally understand what you are doing, why and how, it is very pleasing. Especially when your music is not quite straight forward as mine isn't. It often blows me away when somebody identifies a part as making them feel a certain way, the same way it makes me feel. They acknowledge an influence here or there and they even can understand an emotion between two people just from a few notes.

I hold most people in the music business who don't actually make music pretty much in contempt. Over the years I have met them all, the idiot A&R guy, the clueless publicist, the inept marketing fool but worst of all the bitter music journalist. Perhaps all of their days are numbered though as we enter this new world of a democratised music business.

However there seems to be a new breed of music writers and reviewers emerging, they aren't controlled by editors and they really do have a love of music, they aren't just bitter failed musicians. By the way if you ever get the chance to see a music writer perform on stage please go, go armed with rotten fruit and vegetables and throw them at them mercilessly ok ? Because they are shit, they are all shit ...Sorry I got side tracked....

Anyway, I just got a review of my new record from Textura a music blog from Canada and it pretty much sums up my record in a few words. It just makes me feel that at least one person in the world understands and appreciates what I am doing so I thought I would post it here>

TEXTURA
http://www.textura.org/reviews/odonnell_songssilverbox.htm

December 2008

Anyone who fell in love with Roger O'Donnell's 2006 album, The Truth In Me, will most assuredly do the same with Songs From The Silver Box. In some respects, the template established by the earlier album remains in place for the second: the ten electronic songs are again performed almost solely with a single instrument, specifically the producer's beloved Moog Voyager; the album includes a mix of instrumental and vocal pieces (with his partner Erin Lang appearing once again on the new release); and as The Truth In Me ended with an extended composition (the fourteen-minute "...And So I Closed My Eyes") so too does Songs From The Silver Box close with the thirteen-minute "Musique Pour Irakli."

A key difference between the albums, however, is the presence of beats on the new album, a change that nudges O'Donnell's material closer to the refined melodic electronica associated with Boltfish artists such as Cheju , Mint, Milieu, and Joseph Auer. Though O'Donnell's material may (as reported) find its inspiration in the music of Autechre and Daedelus (among others), it evidences little of the alien severity of the former and the sample-based mayhem of the latter; O'Donnell's oft-pastoral settings, by comparison, are soothing and serene, and exude a warmth and humanity that sets his music apart from other genre practitioners.

The opening notes of "The Prince of Time" immediately identify the music as O'Donnell's when the Moog Voyager's warm sound is used to generate the song's kinetic bass and treble melodies. A few minutes into the piece, a midtempo funk pattern, the beats courtesy of Alka member Bryan Michael, makes its entrance, setting the stage for an extended synthesizer solo. Michael also programs the locomotive patterns that drive "If You Were Alone" and, interestingly, the pitter-pattering beats that appear in other pieces are likewise suggestive of "Trans-Europe Express" in their propulsive quality. Gentle pastel melodies dance over a repeating bass pattern in "Endlessly," a song whose surface quietude tends to camouflage the emotion that slowly swells as it advances from one stage to the next, with lovely flourishes emerging ever-so-surreptitiously at the four-minute mark. Elsewhere, a beatific trip-hop lilt underscores the open-air splendour of "Changing" while "Always" brings a refreshing, free-floating spirit to the album.

On the vocal front, Lenka's siren-esque contribution to "In Your Hands Now" bolsters its already rapturous character, with the Australian singer's multi-tracked voice sinuously navigating a path over the rolling hills of the keyboard melodies and lightly skipping beat pattern. The first piece composed for the album, "Musique Pour Irakli," originated when O'Donnell was commissioned to write and perform the music for an haute couture fashion collection in Paris for the Georgian designer Irakli. Swaying rhythms and intricate keyboard melodies suggest an elegant latticework of patterns and colours, while Lang's layered vocalizing offers intermittent sparkle. Her breathy singing also lends an appealing innocence to the melodically radiant "Tiny Pieces of You." In its quiet way, the song is perhaps the album's most powerful, due in no small part to the fact that the intensity of feeling Lang and O'Donnell have for one another is so palpable.

O'Donnell's history will always precede him—how many others can say they played keyboards for the Psychedelic Furs and The Thompson Twins, and was a long-standing member of The Cure?—but such background is almost incidental in the case of the solo releases. They signify not just a new chapter in his career but an altogether separate volume, and anyone expecting songs remotely resembling The Cure's should look elsewhere. At this stage, O'Donnell has nothing to prove and could easily rest on his laurels, which makes the pleasures afforded by his wonderful solo material all the more satisfying.

Thanks very much Ron and everyone please go and check out his music page ....