These Sound Inventions are a pleasant surprise. They are varied in style, and leave the listener with a sense of having been on a journey. Paul likes searching at the keyboard. It relaxes him. Music is very like sleep to him, a joy to sit at the keyboard and search for sounds. “There is a notion that I am searching for something sublime in the music. I never quite find it, but sometimes I get close.” Modern synthesizers have increased the music palette beyond the imaginable. Still, the rules of music apply. There must be contrast: Loud Soft, Fast Slow, High Low, etc. Harmony must have some semblance of logic. Paul does try to meet these goals. He tries to get the levels so that distortion is absent. New rhythms, textures, twisted melodies, are not foreign to him. Still the act of improvising must yield clichés. Paul honestly tries to avoid them. Don’t expect recognizable tunes. Paul avoids them, on purpose. He believes that too much of music is all to ordinary. This isn’t someone else’s music. This is “Paul Music” as his wife often quips. He thinks it is just time to share it. He doesn’t like writing, so there are no scores for this music. “ I just cannot scribble that which I can easily perform.” He is content for others to ferret that stuff out. He has written a few scores, and perhaps one day he will assemble a CD of those things, but the music is the thing, not the score. Once he decided to record his improvisations, he realized that this was an art form in and of itself. Would that we had available to us the improvisations of the great masters. We only have scores. Paul doesn’t just sit and bang away randomly. There is a mysterious logic to his methods that sometimes yields that sublime quality he pursues. The photograph used for the cover of Sound Inventions is one he took of Lake Vyrnwy in Wales. Paul is often heard to complain that words ruin the music. Pictures evoke memories for him in a similar way that music does. Both fall short of the sublime found in human emotion that is expressed in music. Hopefully we will hear more of this.