“Let music speak”
Bastian Swain...
Hello, welcome to my website. My real name is Luis, a Spaniard living in bonnie Edinburgh since 2000. During the day I am a geologist specialised in the conservation of the built heritage in Scotland. In the evenings and weekends I let Bastian, my artistic 'alter-ego', to take over and create music, paint or entertain with magic tricks. And this is what this website is for, to showcase this artistic side of me.
At the age of 9, I remember listening absolutely enchanted to Vangelis' 'Chariots of fire' as it awakened something in me. I remember clearly thinking 'I would love to make music like that one day'. Soon after, I watched Mike Oldfield on TV explaining recording techniques at the studio and I knew that was the kind of musician I wanted to be. There was an art in building layer upon layer of music, a complexity, that fascinated me from that early age. Along with Vangelis and Oldfield, musicians like Jarre, Fajerman, Morricone, Vollenweider, Mertens and many others would drive my interest in telling stories through music. Yet, it wasn't until I was 30 years old that I could start working on what you can hear in this webpage.
So... yes, I came into composing and playing music quite late in life. By then, I had listened to a lot of music from many genres. Taken into darkness in my early teens by bands like Depeche Mode, The Cure, The Mission and later by Faith and the Muse, Dead Can Dance, This Mortal Coil and the Cocteau Twins, I developed a taste for dark, dreamy, melancholic music that has never left me. Yet I have always loved Pop, Rock, Psychodelia. Prog-Rock... To this day, Tears for Fears, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Waterboys and Queen still remain some of my favourites after so many years listening to all sorts of music, all day, every day. Many other current bands and musicians also inspire me; lately Lana del Rey, Gemma Ray and Florence & the Machine have been playing non-stop on my CD player.
Self-taught as I am, it is the interpretation of what I have learned from listening to all that music attentively throughout my life that has become the inspiration for these three different musical projects. As I have never had commercial interests, fame or fortune in mind, what you hear in this music is truly a labour of love over many years.
Instead of spreading myself too thin with a variety of social media, I have created this website in the hope it will be the hub for all the news and the music I produce under the guises of Bastian Swain, Out Of This Rock & A Garden of Strange Flowers. Since 2022 I am also using it to showcase my other interests: magic and illusions, and the fine arts.
Thanks for your interest and I hope you enjoy your visit to my site!
Bastian
Bastian Swain / Out of This Rock /A Garden of Strange Flowers
What's the difference?
They are all Bastian's own musical creations. They are all a bit of me.
For the threee projects I compose, play and produce the music and write the lyrics (if any). All my musical friends get invited into my musical pursuits, enriching them tenfold. Then I mix and master it all into what you are listening to. I also take the photographs and create the artwork for the covers of my albums.
The process is as follows: I create something musical: a 'seed of a song', whatever that may be. This 'seed' may lay unlistened to for years before I pick it up again and work on it to turn it into a song. There is musical overlap and cross-pollination across the three projects and I like it that way: you can follow some musical ideas across albums and even across projects. Once I have a song, depending on its feel and style, or how it fits the 'theme' or 'concept' of a particular album, I choose the project the song will be part of.
If I feel a song works better for female voice, or the music is particularly dark and melancholic it will be for 'A Garden of Strange Flowers'.
If the song is only instrumental, often slightly cinematic, with 'world music' components that will likely make it into my 'solo works'.
Finally, if I think the song would work better with a male voice and the lyrics or the music have some component of introspection, storytelling, madness, social critic, love or other poisons, that will likely become a song for 'Out Of This Rock'.
In each of these projects I pour my different musical ideas, moods, emotions and observations of the world that I live in. And of the worlds I create...
I hope you like them all.
Bastian
A very young me attempting to play a guitar. Did not work at the time...