Fear the Groove

I haven't posted a finished electronic piece for a while, so here's a newly polished one.

Because They Fear the Groove

This tune started with a bluesy bass-line in E-flat minor. I added layers to it while consciously avoiding giving much concern to the usual rules of harmony. The result was quite cool but a little too simple for my taste, so I added a coda in B-flat phrygian dominant to spice up the overall experience. A neat trick that results is that when the "B" section reoccurs at the end, you hear it in the context of the new tonality. This ambiguity isn't fully resolved until the final chord(B-flat).

New Music

Three new things, here.

Rediscovering The Beatles

Recently, thanks to the Purple Chick remasters, I've been listening to the Beatles a lot. I heard them in my childhood but never seriously listened to them until the recent Love album. I have an early memory of hearing songs like Rocky Raccoon and Piggies, thinking they were really about animals.

I'm more of a Pink Floyd guy - more instrumentals, more keyboards, more earnest lyrics - but there's no doubt that the Beatles were the best at what they did. Their humor often surprises me. I tend to take music at face value, so I don't immediately notice when a song is supposed to be a parody(I thought the strings in Good Night were lovely rather than comically over-the-top). Pink Floyd's humor tended to be either acidic or incomprehensible.

I think that Come Together is my favorite Beatles song, because it accomplishes so much with a cool rhythm and a small selection of modal chords, and the lyrics are so wonderfully surreal. Other times I'm more attracted to Because for opposite reasons, but the two are definitely top of my list.

One of the great things about the Beatles is that so many of their songs are one of a kind - unique within their catalog and elsewhere - and yet, if you had only the one song to go on, you might think that the band sounded that way all of the time, because they make it seem so natural and practiced. It's fun to imagine parallel universes where, for example, a song like Because might have been the basis for an entire album. I'd really like to visit those alternate worlds and bring back those albums. But then, maybe it's better to leave them to the imagination.

Voice of Wind

For the past week or so I've been wrestling with editing an aimless 15 minute improv down to a reasonably sized collage of the best parts. Eventually I realized that I was trying very hard to turn a spontaneous event into a composition, and that perhaps this was foolish, or at least more trouble than it was worth. So I gave up on that and slapped together something new in just the past few hours.

Voice of Wind

It's three pan instruments playing in distinct ranges and each in a different pentatonic scale(adjacent on the circle of fifths). The result is more of an unchanging soundscape than my solo recordings, although paradoxically it took more planning and arrangement.

Accompanying it is a bonus track of the same piece distorted in amusing ways.

Devonian

My girlfriend had been saying for some time that "Devonian: The Age of Fishes" would be a good title for a piece of music. After composing the basic melody for this piece, it seemed quite old and fishy, so I used the name.

Devonian

This piece is in the Phrygian mode, which can be found by playing the natural notes from E to E. The trick to composing for modes is to find alternative ways of expressing tension and drama, because they lack the dominant function chords that most western music is based on. Here, I've used tone clusters that contrast with the sparse harmony of the rest of the piece. The hardest part was coming up with a drum part that provided the right amount of structure and syncopation without calling too much attention to itself.

Composing this was pretty quick and easy, as it's a relatively simple piece - it can be played on piano using only the white keys. I tend to be suspicious of pieces like that. I can't help thinking that people have been writing tunes like this for thousands of years, and surely someone has used "E-B,C-F" as a melody before. Then I remind myself that if I really cared about total originality, I would have to do something crazy like throw out all my instruments and design new ones around weird tuning systems. I have to believe that the things coming out of my brain have a certain flavor to them that's original even if the ideas aren't entirely new.

Trekkie Confessional

I've been revisiting Star Trek recently, following the realization that I could rent all the special features DVDs from my local public library. The Star Trek franchise is dear to me, even though it went a little off the rails toward the end. As I've been watching special features and the occasional episode, I've been contemplating things like "What went right for the character of Julian Bashir that went wrong for the character of Wesley Crusher?" and other fannish notions. I love behind-the-scenes stuff so this has been great fun for me.

It's been said many times before, but it's nice to see a future where humanity figures out the whole civilization thing and solves issues of disease and hunger. I'm a utopian at heart; I feel that it should be possible to get everyone to coexist happily if you can just kick a few close-minded people in the seat of the pants and get them to pay attention to themselves and to the world. I know, in my realist's ego, that people are too stuck in their own narrow reality tunnels to even agree on what utopia is, let along create it, but my intuition says otherwise, and it may be because Trek has defined my idea of the future.

My favorite people on Trek are the outsiders, the Stranger in a Strange Land types - Spock, Data, and Odo. Alienation sums up how I relate to most human beings, so naturally I identify with the aliens, and appreciate that they are given their place in Trek and allowed to be weird, free of judgment. And when they face some kind of threat, or discrimination, or accusation of inanimacy, their friends stand up for them. Friends who are more normal but no less open-minded.

Probably the only scifi show that strikes closer to my heart is Doctor Who, but I'll save that for another time.

Ps. Various dictionaries, via Google, are telling me that "inanimacy" is not a word, but I don't like the sound of "inanimateness."