RUOK by Kieran Mahon

During a productive period of time, facilitated in part by the "lockdown", I made a number of long form pieces and started to feel like I was approaching a formula. It is always at the point when a creative process starts to become familiar that I then question whether I am challenging myself, or not. There's nothing wrong with finding things easy - not every piece of music has to carry extra value because it was a struggle to make, it is more a question of keeping things interesting, or not.
Two things happened while I was making this piece. The first was developing my instruments to include the beginnings of a modular synth set up. The second was the news of the death of Florian Schneider.
Having a new set of tools to make sounds with is always liberating and makes me try new things, often quite naive experimentation.
Listening to Kraftwerk more than usual also made me reconsider compositional structure, especially pieces like Ruckzuck and Autobahn.

So, RUOK has my usual traits of length and being linear.
However, I think that despite this being a straight line "journey', it moves through a couple of environments and meets a few people on the way.

Tracklist