Irrational Planet - The Electronic Album

Get it Here.

I have a compulsion to follow my muse capriciously, leaving things unfinished. But with work on my newer projects stalling, I resolved to devote one last flurry of edits to the group of tracks I had long envisioned as belonging to my first album, to be named, as is this blog, Irrational Planet. Some of these I've published before, albeit in different forms. Some are being released for the first time. 

(Technically, I suppose my collected improvisations to date would be my first album... But that seems like a different sort of creature that lacks a specific name.)

Dacrylagnia

Is one of my favorite words that I learned from the internet. It's a whole story in one word. I haven't gotten around to actually writing that story down, but it seemed a good title for a twisted little tune.

Also present in this virtual B-side is the opening piece of my new project. It's a mind-massaging bit of 11/4 rhythms and tone clusters that I put together just today. It's a funny wine, not what you're expecting, but you may like it.

Dacrylagnia

Autumn into Winter

Here.

This is a companion piece to Chrysalis. There's a basic chord structure in Autumn that's reversed in Chrysalis. It's emphasized most clearly during the swing-waltz sections. I started writing Chrysalis because I realized that the chords from Autumn would work just as well in reverse.

I originally wrote the first and last parts of Autumn as different pieces, but they grew and met each other in the middle. It's fun to write arpeggio-based pieces like this. You can use subtler and stranger progressions than you could with block chords.

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.

Chrysalis

Sorry I haven't posted much lately. I've been sick.

Today, I'm putting up a sort of demo version of a piece that I think is my best work in composing via computer. I've been tinkering with it, trying to find a sound that works, but that was becoming very complicated, so instead I've just put up the most recent version using the sounds that I composed it with - all bell-based synths.

Chrysalis

I hope someday to record a version of this for steelpan orchestra but in its current state I fear that the arpeggio parts are unplayable due to their speed and complexity. The cello voice is wonderful for arpeggios but the size and layout of the instrument makes it very physically demanding to play complex lines without rest.

The Irrational Planet Thing

A few years ago, I was sitting in computer science 101 and thinking about music instead of paying attention. I was mentally stuck in 5/4 time, a seldom-used meter with five beats to the measure(famous examples of pieces in 5/4 include the Mission Impossible theme, Take Five by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, and a Gorillaz song simply titled 5/4*). One nice thing about being stuck in 5/4 is it makes you nigh invulnerable to earworms. After a great deal of thinking and tapping out rhythms with my pencil, I wrote in my notebook a rhythmic pattern of three dotted quarter notes and an eighth note. This would become a bass line. I chose E minor simply because I hadn't composed anything in E minor before. I added a repeating motif above the bass that would become the central theme of the entire piece. I had a random idea that the melody could be split between measures, taking up two-and-a-half beats each from the measure preceding it and the measure following. If only all my random ideas worked out so well. It would take two more years of listening, tweaking, and learning before I was able to finish the piece. I began to feel that I'd painted myself into a corner with weird overlapping rhythms and wonky chord progressions.

While listening to the tune, I had a funny notion that it might be considered dance music on some other planet inhabitated by many-legged Far Side-esque aliens(I've often thought that in a perfect world, Take Five would have inspired a dance craze instead of just a trend in jazz). So I decided that the name of the piece would reflect this idea, although it would take a lot of brainstorming to come up with the final title, Irrational Planet. And Irrational Planet: The Song Thing led to Irrational Planet: The Album Thing, and now I'm posting it on Irrational Planet: The Blog Thing. This rendition of the tune was created in Logic with software synthesizers.

Irrational Planet: The MP3



*Video game fans should also recall the Ridley boss theme from the Metroid games, the battle theme from Final Fantasy VIII, and the final overworld theme from Secret of Mana.