About Spectral Streams

Inspirational Intergalactic ambient/progressive inspired chill out music brought to you by Derek Cook

Spectral Streams is the outlet for my solo music endeavours.

Each "stream" of music that you will shortly be able to find on this site represents different areas of interest/themes that I have, as my musical interests are quite diverse, and I felt the need to break them down a little.

The website will shortly have the following streams for the music,

Earth - songs inspired by our amazing planet, where inspiration may come from a real or imagined image in my head or a particular sound in my keyboards evoking a feeling.
Cosmos - The songs I created when I am inspired in a galactic manner either drifting or flying through space
Electronic - a bit of a catch all for my songs that have no discernible connection to Earth or Cosmos, but are inspired by the classic electronic musicians of the past, such as Jarre, Vangelis, Tangerine Dream, etc.

You can think of these streams as play lists grouping related songs

I may add more streams in future as I root through my backlog of recordings that I have done over the years!

Spectral Streams: What's in a name?

How to name a music endeavour? It's always a challenge, so why Spectral Streams?

I wanted the name to represent something other worldly or spiritual, so spectral was a good start, and then I settled on steams as a metaphor for flow/movement.

I am also a huge fan of Steve Hackett and have always loved the title of his seminal third album "Spectral Mornings". So there you have it!

My Musical Journey

As I became interested in music as a teenager, my taste was already becoming quite eclectic, loving what was in the charts at the time like ELO, Blondie, Gary Numan, Ultravox and so on. Then in the late 70s Jarre's Oxygene became all the rage in school. I had never heard anything like it. Jon and Vangelis were in the charts with "I hear you now" - there was something about Vangelis's sounds in that record that I loved. And Carl Sagan's seminal Cosmos series was also showing around this time. It was using other Vangelis music, and I was spell bound by the total package.

But my real seminal moment of musical discovery came in '79 when BBC Radio One's Friday Rock Show played a "listeners' all time top ten", where I heard bands like Yes and Rush for the first time, and was totally blown away by such music that I had never heard before! And of course '79 was the year that Pink Floyd's "The Wall" was released and I fell in love with that band as well, and so these discoveries pushed me into a much wider music universe outside of the charts.

I was also getting into electronics as a teenager, which later became my early career. Whilst I was still living with my parents, my dad was buying me electronics magazines, and one day in 1981 he came back with this copy of Electronics and Music Maker, and it changed my life. I had never heard of a synthesizer until I saw this magazine. Until then, keyboards were just keyboards. I am sure that this purchase was accidental/unintentional - it was probably the copy on top of the electronics magazine pile, but I had to find out more about these amazing devices called synthesizers.

In the 80s, whilst I had the interest, I did not have the money for synthesizers; they were so expensive! I did dabble with a few cheap Casio home keyboards with mini keys and a single Yamaha CS15 monophonic synth, but unsurprisingly I was not getting those amazing sounds I was hearing in the music I was listening to, so it was not to be at the time. It was not until much later in the late 90s following the cost pressures of mortgages and babies receding a little and having a little more spare disposable income that I finally had the budget to indulge in synthesizers as a hobby, and I got a second hand Yamaha DX7 MKII - I had always promised myself one when they first came out, but out of my price range!

For a year or so I just tinkered in my little attic space in our old house with the DX7, not really going anywhere, when in 2000 a friend gave me a push into the world of playing in bands, as a new local band that was starting up was looking for a keyboard player. To cut a long story short, I "progressed" from a standing start in 2000 playing in the "Pub Rock"/covers/function band called Highly Strung until 2005, through to a short lived classic/progressive rock oriented originals/covers band called Echoes where I got to play some 'Floyd numbers for the first time in 2006. When Echoes folded (far too soon), I auditioned in 2008 for Swansea based Pure Floyd, which became Welsh Floyd, gigging on and off within both bands from 2008 to 2017.

As well as playing live I was also writing original music in parallel in all sorts of different styles. When the Covid lockdowns put a stop to Welsh Floyd starting up again (maybe one day we will get going again...) I have focused more on writing in the studio as Spectral Streams more as a solo outlet. In 2023 my mate Steve who runs The Cellar in Cardigan asked me if I would be interested in playing at the meet and greet night of the 19th Dream of Dr Sardonicus festival, and I jumped at the chance of doing something different. I had never done a solo gig before, I had never done an improvised gig before, but decided it would be a good challenge. It certainly was! But it went well, and based on the two performances I did at the festival (I also stood in at short notice for a band that had to cancel), I took the next step to do another solo gig but with lights and visuals as that side of gigging has always appealed to me as well.

So here we are! This is how I got from being a teenager in the late 70s with a burgeoning love of music and electronics to a 60 something in Spectral Streams!