Showing posts with label album. Show all posts
Showing posts with label album. Show all posts
Thursday, 25 August 2011
New album published: 3 7 4 11 2 5
My newest album is already available for free listening and download on Jamendo: 3 7 4 11 2 5 features six tracks, all entirely instrumental, with a radically more electronic and abstract sound than my previous releases. The title of the album is a numeric pattern used to determine most -- but not all! -- of the rhythmic aspects of the music in different scales, from within each individual measure, to the album as a whole. All of the melodies, harmonies, instrument choices and everything else were NOT generated algorithmically, however.
Thursday, 14 May 2009
Update on my next album: Of How a World Is Built
Hold your horses: the thing still has a LONG way ahead before it can be considered finished. Still, I feel confident enough to give some info on how it's coming along.
This album has been a real headache. I'll be honest. Big Robot, Little Robot was challenging, tricky, somewhat time-consuming and sometimes frustrating to make. This bastard, though, is just time-consuming beyond all imagination. But then again, whose fault is it other than mine? I can't complain. The problem, basically, is that the songs are LONG, the arrangements are THICK, and the requirements I've set to myself are way beyond what I did on the previous album: brass, woodwind and string ensembles in nearly every song? Check; complicated and carefully balanced quiet/loud and slow/fast dynamics? Check; breakcore section with dozens of different drum sounds? Check; pseudo-neo-classical collages and juxtaposition of parts? Check. Yeah, all that and a bit more
Good news, though: the album IS progressing. My initial plans were to first write the album ENTIRELY, and only then start the recording. I felt that mixing those two processes was slowing me down and sidetracking me, so I decided to keep the recording details for later, until I had all the melodies, arrangements and instrument parts worked out. The result is that the songs are all in a pretty advanced state. Here's a rundown:
As you can see, the whole thing will be about 60 minutes long. I had planned another 40 minute album or so, but the songs turned out to need more than that.
Anyway, I have now broken the plan to keep the recording stage for later. I'm already setting down the recordings for the first track, and let me tell you: I'm quite impressed. I had never imagined that I'd ever be able to make my MIDI works sound so vigorous, dynamic and convincing. I'm trying pretty hard to keep myself away from making it sound "realistic", because that was never my goal. The sounds, however, are very alive. The drums are amazingly dynamic and responsible; the guitars sound pretty thick, without falling headfirst into Uncanny Valley (at least it seems to ME); there are sampled MELLOTRONS, produced by a freeware VSTi called Tapeworm, by Tweakbench. Seriously, I'm really excited by it.
As for the title, I have settled with Of How a World Is Built (Music Without Emotion) several months ago. The primary title is justified by its "concept" (hint: it sort of follows the trend of the previous album), and the secondary title is something I've been carrying for a pretty long time, and I think this album is just the right one to put it in. The thing will be explained later on. The main point of this post is to inform that, yes, I'm STILL working. Maybe way slower than I wish, since college and work take away much of my time, and this album is littered with "dead ends" that I have to beat. But I'm doing it. Maybe by the end of the year I'll have a finished product, or something very, very close to it.
And, if my mood is good enough, I might put up the first track for a sneak preview once it's finished.
This album has been a real headache. I'll be honest. Big Robot, Little Robot was challenging, tricky, somewhat time-consuming and sometimes frustrating to make. This bastard, though, is just time-consuming beyond all imagination. But then again, whose fault is it other than mine? I can't complain. The problem, basically, is that the songs are LONG, the arrangements are THICK, and the requirements I've set to myself are way beyond what I did on the previous album: brass, woodwind and string ensembles in nearly every song? Check; complicated and carefully balanced quiet/loud and slow/fast dynamics? Check; breakcore section with dozens of different drum sounds? Check; pseudo-neo-classical collages and juxtaposition of parts? Check. Yeah, all that and a bit more
Good news, though: the album IS progressing. My initial plans were to first write the album ENTIRELY, and only then start the recording. I felt that mixing those two processes was slowing me down and sidetracking me, so I decided to keep the recording details for later, until I had all the melodies, arrangements and instrument parts worked out. The result is that the songs are all in a pretty advanced state. Here's a rundown:
- roughly 12 minutes long. Nearly finished. Only a few parts left to write and details to fix.
- about 9 minutes long. Almost finished. A couple of parts left to write.
- about 8 minutes long. Very advanced. A couple of difficult parts left to work out and closing portions left to write.
- about 14 minutes long. Pretty much finished. Probably nothing left to write.
- about 16 minutes long. Advanced. Several difficult parts left to work out, but might be more simple than I estimate.
As you can see, the whole thing will be about 60 minutes long. I had planned another 40 minute album or so, but the songs turned out to need more than that.
Anyway, I have now broken the plan to keep the recording stage for later. I'm already setting down the recordings for the first track, and let me tell you: I'm quite impressed. I had never imagined that I'd ever be able to make my MIDI works sound so vigorous, dynamic and convincing. I'm trying pretty hard to keep myself away from making it sound "realistic", because that was never my goal. The sounds, however, are very alive. The drums are amazingly dynamic and responsible; the guitars sound pretty thick, without falling headfirst into Uncanny Valley (at least it seems to ME); there are sampled MELLOTRONS, produced by a freeware VSTi called Tapeworm, by Tweakbench. Seriously, I'm really excited by it.
As for the title, I have settled with Of How a World Is Built (Music Without Emotion) several months ago. The primary title is justified by its "concept" (hint: it sort of follows the trend of the previous album), and the secondary title is something I've been carrying for a pretty long time, and I think this album is just the right one to put it in. The thing will be explained later on. The main point of this post is to inform that, yes, I'm STILL working. Maybe way slower than I wish, since college and work take away much of my time, and this album is littered with "dead ends" that I have to beat. But I'm doing it. Maybe by the end of the year I'll have a finished product, or something very, very close to it.
And, if my mood is good enough, I might put up the first track for a sneak preview once it's finished.
Tuesday, 13 January 2009
"New" album
So, after a short period of waiting, Jamendo put up my "new" album. It's "new" because it's not new, but I see it as a sort of reissue, in a more official fashion. "Better Than the Beatles!" (the quotes are part of the title, since it indicates it's a paraphrase and and irony) is the album immediately previous to Big Robot, Little Robot, and I'm publishing it mostly because I recently "rediscovered" it and realised it's actually quite good, even though it's quite a mish-mash of stuff. It's got but 5 tracks, and musically they're completely distinct, but conceptually, it does have a common thread uniting them.
The basic idea is that, after completing three albums using not much more than General MIDI sounds, I was being confronted with the idea that the albums were not very good because: a) they sounded unrealistic and annoyingly video-gamey and; b) they sounded unemotional. I can understand a), because I was only making music that way because of my poor equipment (an old AMD K6 computer with dial-up Internet), but b) left me quite puzzled. I highly doubted the notion that says the fact that I make music with genuine care and attention means nothing to the final product, and that merely tweaking the veloticies and positions of the notes slightly would make it more realistic and thus more "emotional". In that case, emotion is a fakery! A forgery! A blatant lie! That bothered me deeply, and I decided to put that to the test.
The idea here is that, basically, each track approaches that problem from a different angle. The two songs on side A have vocals. Yes, folks, I SING on those tracks. The first one is 'Thunders', a 16 minute monster with a sort of talkin' blues rant against, of all things, rain (that explains the cover artwork). The first half was recorded entirely on a very old Casio keyboard I owned since I was a kid. It's controlled via MIDI by the computer, and there's no handplaying at all - yet it gets VERY intense at parts, culminating in a massive ensemble with ALL of the keyboard's instruments playing a half-improv on locrian B, and from there are more "conventional" sounding rock band takes over, with two drumkits ping-ponging in stereo. It's still all entirely synthesized, with MIDI instruments and all, though. The second half also features the poem De Destructione Romae, written by Swedish writer Christina Nordlander specifically for me to use in a song (thank you, Chris!).
The second track is 'I'd Rather Be Home', a four minute pop tune with the same MIDI band and a slightly untrivial chord structure. The vocals kick in on the last third of the song or so, a style sort of borrowed from the Cure, though the vocals ain't worth of even a tenth of Robert Smith. Side B starts with a seven minute piece entirely handplayed on an electronic keyboard -- the main idea was to write a piece with little to no melody, but giving it the "human touch" by picking the most intense and mistake filled take. It's basically asking whether "emotion" compensates for the lack of actual content. The next track, 'Tetralogy', reverses that, by sticking entirely to MIDI and sampled percussion; the trick here is that the entire score is palindromic, and yes, it's an exact palindrome: the first half of the song was written, copied, pasted and reversed, thus creating an exact mirror image. But all the parts are written in a way to give the song a sense of flow and motion, and the palindromic nature of some isolated elements of the song results in "echoes" of things already heard.
In case you're scratching your head there, yes: this thing is very, VERY pretentious. I was indeed a bitter, annoying guy when I wrote that music, and everything oozes that kind of artistic irritation. And to lighten up things considerable, the last track bursts in with a sample of very weird canned laughter (taken from the Brazilian dub of the ultra-classic Mexican comedy El Chavo del 8, no less -- my Brazilian listeners will probably recognise that in a matter of seconds) which leads into a very upbeat, energetic and danceable piece of South-Brazilian accordeon-laden traditional music. Once again, the sounds are all synthesized, but the entire recording is augmented by sounds recorded live in my house and horrible bursts of feedback caused by swinging the headphones before the microphone! This is a sort of homage to the summer of 1996, when I grabbed a cassette recorder and made a whole side of tape with me playing keyboards and crackign stupid comments with my cousin, while all the sounds from the house flew right on top of the songs. Fun times!
I have to say, though: even all tracks are charged with that sort of cheekiness, I still enjoy them. And I think it's better to remove the "concept" and enjoy the songs by themselves (and for that you'll have to take 'Pompous and Pretentious' as a sort of Residents-y aimless improvisation), and I have far outgrown those issues. In particular check out the two last tracks, as that's a kind of music I probably won't be doing again for a long while; and the second track is a good example of what I'll sound like when I become a sell-out corporate whore (ha!).
Oh! And of course, in between the songs you'll find several recordings taken from very ancient vignettes from Brazilian TV. Those tunes were highly likely copied (illegally?) from North-American TV stations, so if you should complain about their use, blame them, not me. Ha! In either case, the end of 'Thunders' features the first movement from Entends-Tu les Chiens Aboyer? by Vangelis; the intro of 'I'd Rather Be Home' incorporates a barely audible 'Jamaican Girl' by Barry White's Love Unlimited Orchestra; and the album closes with a sample of 'The Fight', by Giorgio Moroder. The poem De Destructione Romae belongs to Christina Nordlander, and the rest of the music and words is mine.
The basic idea is that, after completing three albums using not much more than General MIDI sounds, I was being confronted with the idea that the albums were not very good because: a) they sounded unrealistic and annoyingly video-gamey and; b) they sounded unemotional. I can understand a), because I was only making music that way because of my poor equipment (an old AMD K6 computer with dial-up Internet), but b) left me quite puzzled. I highly doubted the notion that says the fact that I make music with genuine care and attention means nothing to the final product, and that merely tweaking the veloticies and positions of the notes slightly would make it more realistic and thus more "emotional". In that case, emotion is a fakery! A forgery! A blatant lie! That bothered me deeply, and I decided to put that to the test.
The idea here is that, basically, each track approaches that problem from a different angle. The two songs on side A have vocals. Yes, folks, I SING on those tracks. The first one is 'Thunders', a 16 minute monster with a sort of talkin' blues rant against, of all things, rain (that explains the cover artwork). The first half was recorded entirely on a very old Casio keyboard I owned since I was a kid. It's controlled via MIDI by the computer, and there's no handplaying at all - yet it gets VERY intense at parts, culminating in a massive ensemble with ALL of the keyboard's instruments playing a half-improv on locrian B, and from there are more "conventional" sounding rock band takes over, with two drumkits ping-ponging in stereo. It's still all entirely synthesized, with MIDI instruments and all, though. The second half also features the poem De Destructione Romae, written by Swedish writer Christina Nordlander specifically for me to use in a song (thank you, Chris!).
The second track is 'I'd Rather Be Home', a four minute pop tune with the same MIDI band and a slightly untrivial chord structure. The vocals kick in on the last third of the song or so, a style sort of borrowed from the Cure, though the vocals ain't worth of even a tenth of Robert Smith. Side B starts with a seven minute piece entirely handplayed on an electronic keyboard -- the main idea was to write a piece with little to no melody, but giving it the "human touch" by picking the most intense and mistake filled take. It's basically asking whether "emotion" compensates for the lack of actual content. The next track, 'Tetralogy', reverses that, by sticking entirely to MIDI and sampled percussion; the trick here is that the entire score is palindromic, and yes, it's an exact palindrome: the first half of the song was written, copied, pasted and reversed, thus creating an exact mirror image. But all the parts are written in a way to give the song a sense of flow and motion, and the palindromic nature of some isolated elements of the song results in "echoes" of things already heard.
In case you're scratching your head there, yes: this thing is very, VERY pretentious. I was indeed a bitter, annoying guy when I wrote that music, and everything oozes that kind of artistic irritation. And to lighten up things considerable, the last track bursts in with a sample of very weird canned laughter (taken from the Brazilian dub of the ultra-classic Mexican comedy El Chavo del 8, no less -- my Brazilian listeners will probably recognise that in a matter of seconds) which leads into a very upbeat, energetic and danceable piece of South-Brazilian accordeon-laden traditional music. Once again, the sounds are all synthesized, but the entire recording is augmented by sounds recorded live in my house and horrible bursts of feedback caused by swinging the headphones before the microphone! This is a sort of homage to the summer of 1996, when I grabbed a cassette recorder and made a whole side of tape with me playing keyboards and crackign stupid comments with my cousin, while all the sounds from the house flew right on top of the songs. Fun times!
I have to say, though: even all tracks are charged with that sort of cheekiness, I still enjoy them. And I think it's better to remove the "concept" and enjoy the songs by themselves (and for that you'll have to take 'Pompous and Pretentious' as a sort of Residents-y aimless improvisation), and I have far outgrown those issues. In particular check out the two last tracks, as that's a kind of music I probably won't be doing again for a long while; and the second track is a good example of what I'll sound like when I become a sell-out corporate whore (ha!).
Oh! And of course, in between the songs you'll find several recordings taken from very ancient vignettes from Brazilian TV. Those tunes were highly likely copied (illegally?) from North-American TV stations, so if you should complain about their use, blame them, not me. Ha! In either case, the end of 'Thunders' features the first movement from Entends-Tu les Chiens Aboyer? by Vangelis; the intro of 'I'd Rather Be Home' incorporates a barely audible 'Jamaican Girl' by Barry White's Love Unlimited Orchestra; and the album closes with a sample of 'The Fight', by Giorgio Moroder. The poem De Destructione Romae belongs to Christina Nordlander, and the rest of the music and words is mine.
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