INSTRUCARP is a sister site to my CARPHEAD site, so it's a good chance that you have found me through dropping in on CARPHEAD. My name is John Saunders, I was born in 1961 in Goring, near a town called Worthing, West Sussex, a place of relaxation and inspiration for Oscar Wilde(The importance of being Earnest, Earnest Worthing, so named after being discovered as a baby in a HANDBAG on Worthing Central railway station. I must just say hear that I prefer to spell his name as ERNEST because the previous looks like EAR-NEST which to me looks silly as no self respecting bird or creature would build a nest in an ear, like, whats the point in Earwigs, ears are supposed to be bald!) I attended Selden school (John Selden, the owner of a vast expanse of land called Worthing, well nearly all of it anyway, well, no it was a small farm really, but the way his name has been bandied about in Worthing you'd be forgiven for thinking he owned it!) from infant to junior and finally West Tarring school for boys. West Tarring was also the school that Keith Emerson of ELP attended, although I think he had left a good 7 years before I started there. Keith used to play the piano in morning assembly, and the very same piano was there for some years after until it was superceded by an electric organ. I used to imagine Keith pounding away at the piano and then storming off leaving a knife stabbed between the keys, although I think it wouldn't have had the same impact as the organ because the notes wouldn't have carried on playing on the piano. Anyway, enough of this daftery and on with the point of this page.
The peices of music on this page are from a greater body of work that started for me in the early 1980's up to present day. The ongoing working title for this work is"Filmless Soundtracks", the main reason for this of course is that they are not on the soundtracks of any film ever, but would like to be. Like a lot of people that make music, I get pictures in my mind when I am composing or recording, these are the films. It's a strange thing, and I'm not sure if everyone gets this, but for the best part of any of my compositions I cannot remember deliberately trying to compose my tunes. It is almost as though I am led along and these things seem to happen. It's not normally a mathematical,"This is a B flat Major 7 and needs to be followed by C minor, because that's how tunes are made!", and I'm not really a technical musician so I don't think I understand the theory side of things properly. To be honest, I'm not certain that I could be classed as a musician, I am a sort of guitarish kind of person that tiddles around keyboards or anything that I can make a noise out of. Whatever this whole thing is, I've had a lot of fun doing it.
If there is anyone out there that would like to use my music for film soundtracks I'd be most interested.
The tunes that appear on this page will nearly always be old compositions of mine, but in a re-recorded style. It will be slow going because I always take forever recording things, never believing that it's the best I can do, and finally with exasperation giving in and wishing that I'd stopped at the first attempt. Apologies to Carphead visitors who have found a couple of tunes here of mine already on Myspace, this is only to get the ball rolling and there will be more tunes shortly.
The first tune new to this site is Andromedary (originally titled 'Space Camel'), and originates from 1978 when I was trying to get to grips with my Woolworths reed organ (noisy wind generating blighter), fortunately you are not subjected to the wheezy tones of this instrument of torture. It did however have a great sound when I played the G minor and the B flat (which made a G minor 7) preset chords, very reminiscent of the grinding noise at the end of 'Willow Farm' from 'Suppers Ready' by Genesis.
