Amiga Me by Claire Welles

In late December 2023, my partner found an old Commodore Amiga 500 in a local junk shop for £50. We bought it immediately and fixed it up with a Raspberry Pi/PiStrom 32 (which gave it unlimited space and memory). By January it was functional and I began making music on it for the very first time, using OctaMED (version 5). Within a few weeks I'd done loads of music on it and an album was beginning to take shape. I did all the music on the Amiga and then ran off each of the individual track stems (all 8 of them) into Ableton, so I could mix the tracks to my liking and do the vocals. I didn't do much mixing on the music itself as I wanted to retain the original 8-bit sounds, I just polished them up a little. It was a whole new way of writing and working and was loads of fun…so having started the album in February it was completed by November (quite a long time for me to work on an album!).
It was a liberating experience working on this and I won't rule out another Amiga album in the future. The Amiga is such a creative and interesting computer, with a ton of personality. I'm glad to have finally got one in my life.

Enjoy- CW x

DIY Outsider Pop Queen. Fiercely singular in her approach to music yet with a musical nous you simply can’t teach.

Claire has actively been writing and recording music for almost 30 years, releasing 19 albums in the process, jumping from genre to genre and reinventing her sound many times over.

linktr.ee