I hope you weren’t waiting for the second chapter of that story…
I’ve been working on a number of new tunes. Well, one new, one not-so-new, and one very old. Ok, ok, six new pieces (with the same age caveat…let’s call it revisiting).
Three of them are yakked about below, with links being underlined.
You may remember my piece Always. Details about its origin can be found here in a post from last October: A Simple Word
It was basically a nice, short, piano piece, but I couldn’t leave it alone. Nothing is ever really finished, after all.*
I felt it needed a little something something, and decided that that something was an orchestral interlude which needed to be inserted in the middle.
I also wanted it to have some dynamic range to it. It ended up with a loudness range of about 8 LUFS, which is probably meaningless to you, but it’s a decent range from quiet to loud. I used no compression, no EQ except on the piano (to provide a tiny bit of clarity).
Who knows what the streaming services will do to it…they tend to crush dynamics, so the links here for all three pieces are to Bandcamp where things are presented as created. Free to listen to, of course. I think they let you listen three times for free before they expect you to help me send my son to college.
All three are on the streaming services…but they’re slightly older versions. The most up-to-date versions are on Bandcamp.
No, those aren’t car horns honking. They’re bassoons and Bartok pizzicato violins.
*Almost immediately after writing that paragraph I went in and made even more changes. I think I’m done now. I think. Nope. More changes to all of them. Now I’m done. I think.
Created sometime in 1991/1992 with each part improvised in real-time — meaning I recorded one instrument track, “rewound”, then improvised and recorded another instrument track on top of it, rinse and repeat until I couldn’t think of another line to add.
My “studio” was my barracks room at Fort Detrick, Maryland after buying a couple of pawnshop keyboards…nothing fancy…using some very basic MIDI software.
This was actually the first part of multipart piece that went on way too long. No one has the patience to sit still for a 20-minute tune anymore.
It was real PITA to mix. I tried to give each instrument its moment to shine by lowering the other instruments a bit.
I hope you like flutes. If not, I’m also considering paralleling the flute with voices. I’ll see what happens.
In any case, play it relatively quietly.
Three synth tracks and a cello, doing quasi-ambient things. The music itself was created based on the image above (not the text, of course) — a photo of a sunset over Mihail Kogălniceanu, Constanța, Romania.
I love the cello solo toward the end.
Why the title? It was taken from a line in a Paul Kanter song: Your Mind Has Left Your Body from the Baron von Tollbooth & The Chrome Nun album — with Paul, Grace Slick, and David Freiberg. Thank you, WNEW-FM for introducing me to it.