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Friday, 17 June 2005
Sweden, days 6-7 ::
The last two days have gone by in a blur. Fatigue has become a factor.
Wednesday we got a late and slow start. We spent a fair amount of time working with the various bits of percussion I’d added to the second half of Remembering Breath (bells, cymbals, hammer, chair), and finally mixed the track a bit before our dinner break.
After dinner we started on Serentripidy, which I’d demoed as a 9 minute epic based on odd electronic percussion. Justin and Christoffer felt that this piece could benefit from being distilled into a shorter form with more repetition, removing many of the long, meandering sections between themes. I felt challenged and skeptical. I’d gone into the project agreeing that I’d open to this kind of rework, so I tried to be true to my word as J and C worked to determine the parts to be kept. But I found myself far more cynical and critical than helpful as we (mostly they) identified the parts which formed the A B C A B arrangement that emerged. C was marvelously patient and diplomatic. The turning point might have been when C said he loved the 4 bar synth fill I’d done before the final B section. Or it might have been when one of them spoke of how great the B section was. In any case I apologized for having been stubborn and negative for those couple of hours. I said that a lot of what I really liked about the piece was still present and that I thought the new arrangement could work. So we began to figure out what parts and sounds to keep, remove and replace in order to fill out the new arrangement.
I replaced Pat’s electric piano track with a Fender Rhodes played through a slightly grungy tube preamp and a Leslie, a more or less clean Hammond organ track, and a cembalo track. It looks like we’ll use a varying mixture of the three. I played some grungier Hammond parts. Christoffer added a soprano sax (probably not be kept) and slide whistle to bring out the melody of the top line of the electric piano part.
That took us until quitting time. We got another late start Thursday and continued with Serentripidy. Doubled the melody on a Yamaha CS-60. Took quite awhile to find approaches for the bass part; ended up with a mix of Christoffer playing electric bass (at times doing something resembling a bassist’s impression of a techno synth part, lots of 16th notes), with me playing mostly longer, sustained notes an octave lower on Minimoog. A lot of time was spent getting section lengths right, repairing transitions, and editing bits of parts I’d improvised on various instruments during the C section on takes where I’d had set parts for A and B but no ideas for C—some of those were keepers. Somewhere in there we also tried some ideas on guitar. Justin and I did takes on some of album-wide recurring themes (on guitar and piano, respectively), but they may end up not being used or in the background of this track.
I was far happier with the piece than I imagined I’d be when we started tearing it apart, and I told C and J that when we broke for dinner. There were a couple of bass loose ends yet to be repaired after dinner; those took a couple hours and then Christoffer did a rough mix while I prepared the next song to be transferred to his computer.
It was probably around 11 when we started with Where You Laid, another track for which major simplification was on the agenda. I’ll omit our non-PC term for the process, but I told C and J as we started that I was open to it this time. As a way of getting some reference points, we listened to some Kraftwerk and Air and I spoke about what I liked and didn’t like about the songs we heard. This turned out to be a really useful exercise; we got to learn more about each other’s aesthetic sensibilities around “electronic pop” and express criticism and disagreement in a neutral context (i.e. as applied to music other than mine). Returning to my song, fortunately for my fragile ego, Christoffer emphasized how strong he felt one theme was. And even more fortunately for my ego, he’d chosen the parts I’d written last month in response to his January suggestion to develop one theme.
The transitions were far too abrupt when listening to the crudely cut-up demo tracks, so C and I sat down with guitar and piano, playing the chords as we came to agreement on how that first part of the song would go. Then our new self-imposed curfew of 1 am arrived and we were out by 1:30, early enough that the sky was actually dark, something I’ve not seen much of! It had been still quite light out at 10:15.
Whenever I’m not in the studio working, I’m finding myself keenly aware of the schedule. Jens is coming to play drums on Tuesday, and we’re taking the weekend off, so that leaves two working days. We now have 1 “finished” song that he won’t play on, 4 songs that are ready for him to play, Where You Laid (which needs some more structural work Friday) and then three more songs to prepare for him. One is going to require very minimal structural editing, so it’ll be just a matter of transferring the session from Logic on my PowerBook to Digital Performer on the studio G5. The other two will take some significant work. We’ll do our best. It could be that it makes sense to do a lot of our rework on Talking Points while Jens is here to participate and influence decisions about structure with his playing—it’s a super-heavy rhythmic piece.
Justin and I planned to go a music festival over the weekend but I find myself contemplating either just holing up in the guest house or going to Malmö and getting a hotel room instead. I could catch up on sleep instead of continuing or getting further into deprivation. And I have 4 or 5 songs with string parts to score before Thursday or Friday when the quartet arrives. I did a couple of scores over the last month, but they’re only for violin and violin, not the quartet as Christoffer strongly recommended, and we’ve since identified more songs for them to play on than I had planned. If I don’t do them this weekend, I don’t know when I’d do it other than late at night after our sessions. It also looks like Where You Laid might need some parts to be re-sequenced after we’re done condensing the form.
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