Diffusion history

I first met Paul at The Computer Store in Huddersfield town centre where I was working in 1988, though Diffusion did not start until the end of 1991 after a chance meeting in the Pack Horse Shopping Centre in Huddersfield.  I was looking for someone to help with programming the keyboards, something Paul said he was interested in doing, but he later took on vocal duties.

Paul was also interested in writing material, though at this point, there was little structure to his work, so I often spent time re-writing some of his ideas to better fit into a musical composition, though he quickly caught on and corrected this when it was pointed out and methods shown to him to create structure.  In fact, our first completed song, entitled 'Mist', was an idea of Paul's, re-written and added to by me.  It was completed by the end of January 1992, and lasted about 7 1/2 minutes.  It was a huge challenge, as I ran out of MIDI channels on the Atari I was using at the time, and I ran out of tracks in the sequencer I was using (Pro 24).  It was a minor miracle that it ever got finished at, but there was a great vibe and an easy workflow.

By the end of 1992, we had a number of finished projects, and more in the pipeline, though I had to take a break from Diffusion to work on adverts for the test broadcasts of Huddersfield FM, which was happening in April of 1993.  By the end of the broadcast, I had hit a downward spiral of depression, and sold up almost all of my music equipment, Paul was doing occasional work with a travelling street theatre and Diffusion seemed to be gone.

August 1994, I had a flash of inspiration, I only had a single sound module, mixer, a drum machine and my Atari, no keyboards!  With just a mouse and headphones, I programmed a song into Cubase.  As there was no easy way to enter note information, each note (And rhythm part) had to be drawn in by hand, one at a time(!).  With the idea almost complete, I approached Paul to try and complete the idea.  From there, another idea was started, followed by the purchase of another keyboard (Mouse only operation was getting tedious by now), followed by the re-mixing of our first song, Mist.  Paul had joined a course at Huddersfield Technical College in Media, while I was following my Computing and electronics route at the same college.  We decided to record our first (And last completed) demo at the college studio, and the Esoteric demo was born, well, sort of...

Esoteric was a difficult project, it was to be made up of 4 tracks, Mist (1994 version), All I can, China (Instrumental) and Go with your heart.  China was pulled as I felt it needed vocals (Never got them though), so another instrumental was put in called Reservoir.  Go with your heart was also causing problems, Paul was having difficulty with parts of the song, I was not happy with parts of the music and we had a week before we were in the studio!  In a panic, a new song was written, 'I want to run away', a gritty realism song, who's lyrics followed the life of a close friend of mine at that time.  The song also had a claim to fame as being the only song known to have the words anecdotes and emphatically in it(!).  With the new material and a sense of confidence, we went into the studio to record.  What a waste of time.  The mix was awful, shame, because I heard Paul do some of the best vocal work I had ever heard him do, but the fact was that our 4 track recordings sounded better.  Back home to finish off.

With Esoteric complete and being sent to as many places as we could think of, it was back to the drawing board to work on new stuff.  Go with your heart was re-done, though neither of us was totally happy with it, and an old song of mine from 1988 was brought out and re-titled Searching, it was also added to, with a verse written by Paul.  A new 4 track demo was almost ready, the tracks were Go with your heart, China, Searching and Home.  It was now winter 1995, I added an introduction and started mixing tracks into one another to create a none-stop demo, though this never had more than 3 official copies done.  It was put on hold for another track, Anybody Listening, one of the many tracks that were started, but never finished, as a result, the demo never made it out of the door.

By the end of 1997, things were getting strained, and a clash of personalities was beginning.  Paul introduced me to Rob Martin one night, and I was asked to do the theme music for Rob's student project, Lob Story.  4 months later, Lob Story had been recorded, but  artistic differences were getting in the way.  I shelved all Diffusion projects until I felt I could deal with it properly, and concentrated on the up and coming Lob Stories short film, commissioned by CableTel.  Things did not get any better while LobStories was being planned, and after a problem with recording arrangements, we went our separate ways.

Diffusion eventually came to an end in 1998, but in reality, it died much earlier.  There are no plans to work on any further Diffusion projects, despite requests from interested parties.