Stay

I did the music. XavierXreivax did the lovely video. Not what I was expecting at all, but I love it’s subtle power and simplicity more every time I watch it. Thanks Xavier!

This song was on the cd, “Pop Down The Years (electronic music for the mind and body)” and is available here.

Pacifica ~ The Video

A new piece for chamber orchestra and electronics, intended to be the first of a cycle of pieces wherein the theme is water. In this case, the Pacific Ocean and many of its beautiful creatures. Written, arranged, and produced by yours truly.

I’m too tired to write much more about the piece right now (Friday midnight), but I will tomorrow or Sunday.

I will add a link where you can buy the song shortly. For now, enjoy.

Song-by-Song ~ World’s Night from Flight of the Atom Bee

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USS Arizona burning at Pearl Harbor (from http://www.aviation-history.com/airmen/pearl.htm)

 

World’s Night is the third to the last song on the album, Flight of the Atom Bee, following The Blue Man Wept and preceding When We Were Machines.

World’s Night began, that is to say, the initial inspiration came from the drums, specifically the kick drum pattern that opens the song. I was using the Emu SP-1200 drum machine and programming it from my Mac using that great old program StudioVision from Opcode (and may the dweebs of my generation at the Gibson Guitar Company be forced to listen to an eternity of Vanilla Ice songs for buying Opcode for the hardware and letting its excellent software die).

I started building on that, adding the second kick and then the bass organ part, the flute and Moog synth lines. (I later discovered a similar flute/bass arrangement on a Massive Attack song, Karmacoma from Protection, but maybe I should just put it in the “great minds swimming same currents” category. I love what they did there.)

The bass organ came from the workhorse Roland JX-8P. The flute and the faux Moog lead line came from a Roland D-110. Somehow the Moog patch got deleted and when I went to re-record the song due to the line noise in this version, I was unable to recreate the patch, so I was stuck with this noisy version. Hence the addition of vinyl surface crackle and pops to mask the noise in the intro and outro. It also gave the song a vintage sound to evoke the recording technology of that era.

I had read, a couple years earlier, a wonderful book entitled Witness To The Fire: Creativity and the Veil of Addiction, by Linda Schierse Leonard, where she had quoted the theologian/philosopher Martin Heidegger quite extensively. Heidegger talked much of the World’s Night in his work. The quote I remember from the book, which I do not have at hand, having given away many copies over the years, was about how God could not return until we made a place for Him. It had stuck with me.

The gods who “were once there,” “return” only at the “right time”—that is, when there has been a turn among men in the right place, in the right way. For this reason Holderlin, in the unfinished hymn “Mnemosyne,” written soon after the elegy “Bread and Wine,” writes (IV, 225):

“. . . The heavenly powers
Cannot do all things. It is the mortals
Who reach sooner into the abyss. So the turn is
With these. Long is
The time, but the true comes into
Its own.”

As I was working on this song, early on, I knew the title would be World’s Night and the title shaped the song. His perception of the dimming of the Light of the World, I’m sure, came from the two world wars of the twentieth century, Stalin’s holocaust, and other atrocities.

The image I had the whole time as the song emerged was that of a battleship knifing through the darkened grey-green and white-capped currents of the North Atlantic ocean.

Obviously, the song was rather stark in its conception, and very simple, really, built on simple parts, driven by the rhythm section.

In the middle part where almost everything drops out, save the bass and Moog line, it was my hope to evoke a burst of light, however small, into the darkness, followed by the cascading flute figures in the final bars of the song. The beginning of the end of the World’s Night, the turning.

Heidegger’s writings predated the assassination of John Kennedy, of which the fiftieth anniversary is today as I finish writing this piece.

The rest of this article is all from Martin Heidegger himself:

The world’s night is spreading its darkness. The era is defined by the god’s failure to arrive, by the ‘default of God,’ … [which means that] no god any longer gathers men and things unto himself, visibly and unequivocally, and by such gathering disposes the world’s history and man’s sojourn in it. …

Poets are the mortals who, singing earnestly of the wine-god, sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the gods’ tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning … To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy. This is why, in Holderlin’s language, the world’s night is the holy night. [Emphasis mine]

The closer the world’s night draws toward midnight, the more exclusively does the destitute prevail, in such a way that it withdraws its very nature and presence. Not only is the holy lost as the track toward the godhead; even the traces leading to that lost track are well-nigh obliterated. The more obscure the traces become the less can a single mortal, reaching into the abyss, attend there to intimations and signs. It is then all the more strictly true that each man gets farthest if he goes only as far as he can go along the way allotted to him. The third stanza of the same elegy that raises the question—”What are poets for in a destitute time?”

We have a way out of this wasteland. While “song still lingers over their desolate land,” there is still the possibility of hearing and heeding this call.

The singer’s word still keeps to the trace of the holy. The song in Holderlin’s Sonnets to Orpheus (Part I, 19) says it:

Though swiftly the world converts,
like cloud-shapes’ upheaval,
everything perfect reverts
to the primeval.
Over the change abounding
farther and freer
your preluding song keeps sounding
God with the lyre.
Suffering is not discerned,
neither has love been learned,
and what removes us in death,
nothing unveils.
Only the song’s high breath
hallows and hails.

From Heidegger and Poetry: What are poets for?

Song-by-Song ~ The Blue Man Wept from Flight of the Atom Bee

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Silent Color II

 

 

The Blue Man Wept was one of the last songs I did for Flight of the Atom Bee, but I had written it many years earlier, as a solo classical guitar piece. In fact, beyond the huge Orbital influence on the piece in terms of tonal texture and coloration, the thing that makes this piece unique, from my end, anyway, was that I recorded the main parts via midi using an early midi guitar.

The Blue Man Wept was indeed one of the last pieces of instrumental music I actually wrote on a guitar, a nylon string classical guitar, of course. In terms of structure, I suppose it was, and remains, a mess. As with most pieces I wrote on the guitar, I would just start with something that sounded good and then find somewhere to take it, trial and error, my imagination limited by my guitar technique, which has always been sketchy at best.

I had an early midi guitar which was quite cumbersome in the sense that there was absolutely no give in the fingering: you had to hit every note just right, or the thing would start misfiring in the worst ways. That said, I used to string two or three synths off the guitar and play them all simultaneously, creating a glorious din. As with many of my early electronic music experiments and explorations, I truly regret not committing these sessions to tape or disk.

Once I had recorded the main part from the guitar as a midi file, I assigned an overblown flute and later plucked harp sound to the part and I had to quantize the notes by hand. As I recall, this took a while. I’ve always been a little loose with time. But the effect is very nice: it still sounds played by hand, not machine.

Then I began building out parts: drums, synth pads, secondary melodic parts and effects. The whole point was to expand the extra-dimensional world from which the song came, moody, mysterious, of muted blues and greys and greens, purples and taupe in the twilight, a tone poem of melancholy from which an occasional burst of hope glimmers.

emulatorII

The instrumentation was built on three synths: the plucked sound was a sample from the Emulator II, the thick organ pad was the Roland JX-8P, and everything else, I am fairly certain, including the drums, came from a Roland D-110 rackmount synth I was using a lot at the time. As always, I did all my arranging and mixing in real time, recording all parts in one pass to digital audio tape. Not the best way to go, but I was always pushing the limits of my musical knowledge as well as my understanding of  how a studio was supposed to work.

I like to think this method gave my music a unique feel, but the elementary process certainly had its limitations and created challenges at times.

I had thought about adding a vocal at one point, as Pink Floyd might, after ten minutes. These lyrics floated in my head as I arranged the song:

Across the sky, the bozo flew
The blue man wept
And so did you
One matterman
Controlled the tides

But nothing much more ever came to me in terms of lyrics, no matter how much I thought about it, and I couldn’t force it, so I forwent the idea of a vocal segment. Nonetheless the imagery in the words informed the arrangement as I worked away, of that I am certain.

A friend, upon hearing Flight of the Atom Bee the first time, summarily dismissed the album as a “bunch of ambient noodling.” I am certain The Blue Man Wept was the piece that cemented this estimation firmly in his mind.

I find The Blue Man Wept to be every bit as lovely as when I first finished it. It takes me right back into the Blue Man’s realm. I wouldn’t change a thing now, many years later.

Song-by-Song: March of the Molecule Men from Flight of the Atom Bee


March of the Molecule Men was one of the last songs I wrote for Flight of the Atom Bee.  I had decided that the whole album skewed to the experimental and artsy and what I really needed was a straight up easy-listening four-on-the-floor piece of ambient techno.

The problem with four-on-the-floor (a kick drum hitting each beat in the measure 1-2-3-4) is that it’s boring, so I very quickly and quite unintentionally veered off the straight and narrow with this piece.

I created the squishy bassline on my mac with an application called ReBirth that emulated the unique sound the classic Roland TB-303 Bassline synthsizer. It was a very simple pattern, four or five notes, two measures long, in D major, and it drops in and out for the course of the song. I put a slight delay on it.

I was using an Emu SP-1200 drum machine at this time. I believe I talked about it a little bit in my piece on Wild Pink Yonder.  I wrote every note of the drum part – no loops were involved. In fact, I have never used drum loops or audio loops for bass lines in any piece I’ve ever written: these parts are way too important to the song and if one uses clip-art audio, one gets a clip-art song. Many of the little percussive sounds in this piece were created by hitting everyday household objects together, sampling them, editing if necessary, loading into the SP-1200 and using for percussion.

sp12002Normally, when I arrange pieces, I block out sections and usually try to hew to an approximation of a 32-bar pop song for structure: intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-middle eight (or breakdown)-verse-chorus-outro. But that leaves one with a lot of room for play and exploration. Sometime I would have an event of some kind in mind and the challenge would be how to get to it in a musical and emotionally evocative manner.

My particular challenge in this piece was to build the piece rhythmically, leading up to the explosive cartoon bursts at the end.

Early on, as I worked on the piece, the cartoons of Sally Cruikshank popped in my head. I had seen a few of them at an animation festival in Berkeley in the mid-seventies and the visuals had stayed in my head for decades. So March of the Molecule Men became a soundtrack for an imaginary Sally Cruikshank cartoon. Below is one her amazing works. What an amazing and original talent. I highly recommend you buy her DVD (you can find a link to it on YouTube).

As I mentioned, I veered off the four-on-the-floor aesthetic almost immediately with this piece. Rhythmically, I was quite influenced by late Captain Beefheart here. Around the four-minute, you will hear a series of drum rolls, the first one slightly stuttered, the next a little more steady, and the last smooth and steady. This really bothered a friend of mine. I had to explain that it was the drum machine learning how to do a drum roll, that it took a couple of tries to get it right.

Now, to something very important. My good friend, Gustavo, founder of Nude Photo Music, had, around this time, informed me that a good house/techno track had handclaps on the two and the four beats. This seemed very important, so I set about creating an awesome hand clap sound. I wanted it to be BIG. I’m a little vague on what I actually did to the sound, but I know I ran it through a high-end reverb and also put some slap-back echo on it. There were probably a couple other things I did to the sound, but I cannot recall them through the mists of time.

When I published my novel, Flapping, I included a variation of the Flight of the Atom Bee cd, with some added songs, attempting to make it more commercial. In the notes on the cd at the end of the book, I said this about the clap sound:

The clap sound evolved through many steps. One could make the argument that it is the “definitive” clap sound, as well as being a perfect deconstruction of a clap, as well as being a satire of said clap, with self-referential reverb and slap-back echo.

The clap sound to this day bugs Gustavo. It is dedicated to him.

The swirling arpeggio you hear intermittently and at the very end of the piece was done with the Korg DW-8000. It’s great for such things.

All of the other sounds in the song, all the electronic noise, fragments, melodic bits, sweeps, plinks, and spurts, came from a Roland Jupiter 6, an amazing machine.

jup6

I either taped down a number of keys, or just created an arpeggio, synced via beat clock from my mac to lock to the song, and set the Jupiter 6 to hold it. I then manipulated the sound in real time, playing with attack, decay, filter settings, using sliders and knobs on the Jupiter 6 to get all sorts of strange and brightly colored—this piece is a rainbow—fragments of melody and noise. I recorded everything to digital audio tape and then transferred digitally to my mac and began the long and thoroughly enjoyable process of slicing the audio file into usable bits and moving them around, arranging and creating the flow of the piece.

I forget how many days it took to finish the song, but once I started the arranging part, I could easily work for sixteen hours, breaking for meals and coffee once in a while.

I also experimented with time-stretching sounds on this piece: you can hear the results near the climax of the composition—as is often the case, March of the the Molecule Men is about sex, the title a reference to the passage through and the eruption of bodily fluid from one body into another, to be truthful—I particularly like how certain harmonics emerge  in the sounds.

So, that is how the easy-listening, almost four-on-the-four composition, March of the the Molecule Men, came to be.