About The Composer Pete Swinton His Art And Music .

I made visual art for more than 20 years.

For about the last 5 years I came to realize that I wanted to learn more about my aesthetics.

So to facilitate that idea I began to impose re-strictions on my work, to narrow down the options

e.g. I decided to only use maximum of 4 colours,which were red, yellow and black (or brown).

That was a good beginning. Then I decided tostop using brushes. Instead I just squeezed paints

out of tubes or bottles, and to use spray paints or aerosols. Also I used old debit cards to drag paint over the canvas. In this way I was almost repeating similar ideas for each painting. I also used masking

tape to formalize the structure of a painting, e.g. Some paintings would consist of 4 vertical bars,

often with similar shapes and colours in each bar. By using there formal ideas I was learning

about my choices, of colour and shape, of comp osition and balance. It was a successful time.

Then I stopped painting. Really just because there was no more space in my apartment to store the work. I returned to making music, as fully as I had been painting. And after about 2 years I began to

buy synthesizers, drum machines, a sequencer, a 16 channel digital mixer, studio monitors. Over

time, after years of experimentation, I found a home in Ambient music. And in Dark Ambient. Slowly, by making quite minimal music, I found myself in a similar position that I had been in with my visual art. I imposed restrictions on my compositions, ina similar way to choosing the same 3 or 4 colour's Instead I am now choosing 2, 3, or 4 instruments to make a piece of music. Was I making variations of the same idea for my paintings ? Am I now making variations of the same piece of music ? Not exactly, but it is helpful to try to understand my musical aesthetics in a similar way that I attempted to learn about my visual aesthetics. My music now is far from repetitive, but I see how patterns of sound Can be layered over each other. How using basic math- ematical patterns I can impose structures over a piece of music .