I just sent off the deliverables package for my first-ever music commission — the soundtrack for a television show! I’ve written the intro theme song, the closing credits song, and nine “interstitials” — little snippets taken from the intro theme song to be used for segues between scenes like the infamous bass lick from Seinfeld. I might get back a request for changes or modifications or he might not like it at all — he’s heard the intro theme song and liked / approved it, but the rest is new — but either way, it’s kind of a cool thing.

I have another such gig, the introductory music for a play, which I should get started on soon. I might treat myself to a Kore soundpack that looked like it might be quite useful for the work in question, and I have to read the play first, to get a sense for the feel.

I realize that it’s been ages since I posted anything here for you folks to listen to. I’m hoping to get back to that as soon as this play work is complete, which with any long won’t be *too* far off (well, it can’t be too far off, as there’s a deadline for when they need this piece).

It’s been ages since I’ve posted an update. Why? Well, the bulk of that answer is that life has been keeping me busy elsehwere. However, also for the next couple of months I’m going to be tied up with… well… I’m not sure what to call them. What is it when you’re “commissioned” to do something but you’re not actually getting paid? Volunteer projects?

Anyway, it’s pretty exciting. I’ll be doing the opening and closing credits and interstitials for a television show and then some theme music for a play. I received a copy of the show about a month ago and have mostly thus far just fiddled with getting the video loaded in Logic and figuring out a good tempo to sync with the transitions and such. I just got a copy of the script for the play over the weekend. Work will have to begin in earnest on both projects shortly!

Here are a few questions for the audience in the meantime, though. For those of you who are faily familiar with the releases, do you think I should merge Fountains and Orchard Days into a single album (which I would probably just call Orchard Days)? Do you think that album / EP / single groupings even matter in this day and age?

Also, what do you think would be the most productive thing to do for the work if I were to toss some money at the “getting the word out” end of things? There is a company who offers a service that will get your tracks posted for sale on iTunes, Amazon, PureTracks, etc. — all the major online music shops. That would certainly get me wider distribution, but I’d still have to think about promotion to get people to notice that distribution. (I’d also have to figure out how that sort of approach intermeshes with the Creative Commons licensing I’m using these days.) On the other hand, I could buy advertising for the site somewhere. Facebook? They let you target ads fairly finely, but they’re also a little expensive. Where else? Maybe pay to have the material highlighted on Jamendo? Reviews of Fountains on Jamendo are pretty much nonexistent, possibly because A Quiet Sunday is such a slow starter, so people didn’t stick with it to hear out the rest of the album. Somewhere else? Or should I just take a block of time (the rarest commodity these days) and try to drum up interest on Jamendo and other places just by chatting the material up, and/or submitting reviews of other people’s material and hoping they’ll reciprocate?

Or should I perhaps just get started on new material and not worry about all of this at all? Thoughts?

One of the things I wanted to talk about with Heima but forgot to in my last post:

Watching the DVD brings home the bravery of the performers, I think. They all talk in the interviews about entering a mode where they’re not even really self-aware per se while performing, but nonetheless, I find it impressive. Their song structures frequently set up these huge, reverent sonic spaces and build up enormous cachets of anticipation, and then as opposed to many acts who will burst forth onto such a space in unison, they often have just one member emerge. Maybe the experience is not like this for them, but to me, I’m struck by the incredible bravery it must require to set up such a space and then step out into it as a single performer.

It impresses me most with the drummer, I think, because it seems that so often he’s carrying the song entirely on his own, and with grace and power, and yet in the interviews he’s such a small, almost timid guy. I really love this dichotomy, this transformation.

Sarah and I just finished watching Heima. I think this is my third time watching it since I got the DVD. It is and remains a lovely, moving experience.

I don’t know if I could readily say that Sigur Ros is my favourite band, far less my favourite artistic unit operating. There are certainly measures by which that’s not the case. However, I can say that of any artist or artists that I know of currently operating save perhaps Amina, who are in their own way kind of a part of Sigur Ros (or were in the era in which Heima was produced), they most consistently produce work of startling beauty.

I really like the beginning of this song (”Less Talk More Rokk” by Freezepop). It seems like something I could learn from. On the one hand, I’m curious about the way the sound changes through the sequences. Did they layer two patches and crossfade between them, or is it some sort of waveshaping, or did they just stack a bunch of waves and slowly decrease the offsets, or did they use some sort of distortion filter and pull it back, or…? So many possibilities.

The other thing about it that I could use from is that starting an album this way is incredibly bold. I mean, you’re really starting things full-on. Can you live up to that for a whole album? I do like subtle introductions, but maybe just jumping in with both feet would be fun to try next time. I may have to ponder this.

I found myself pondering a concept I heard in a Barenaked Ladies song that came on in the car last night, where they established a certain pattern and then in one iteration they jumped back in with the vocals on the first beat and then all the instruments come in with a big punctuating crash on the second beat, and the way that worked was really interesting.

And then there’s the astoundingly dynamic and organic bar structure in Alexander Hacke’s “Sister,” which I don’t think I’ve really explored. There was a bit toward the end of working on Little Eschaton where I accidentally did something in Logic through a simple mouse slip that made me think, “Hey, that’s how I could work with that idea.”

Didn’t I decide to take a hiatus to work on the mundane parts of this?

I was just checking to see if Fountains had gone live on Jamendo yet (it’s done all the preliminary steps and is just awaiting moderation by their administrators — I expect that will take a few days) and I noticed that one of the top tags for Peristalsis and for Ramp as a whole is “sinister”. Hee! *rrr* Look at me, all sinister and stuff!

Now that I’m done, I wanted to talk about Fountains a little, and also Orchard Days, which is not something I’ve done in the past, but which I suppose is why you’re all here (other than to download the tracks, anyway).

Orchard Days came about a little bit by accident. When I was working on Peristalsis, the album, I would really want to avoid the mundane aspects of calling the project “done”, and so I’d keep composing new songs, more than I really needed. Some of these got scrapped entirely or are still on my “work on this someday” stack, of course, but I started to wind up with the occasional song that just didn’t seem to *fit* anywhere on Peristalsis. Some of these were because a project was suggested to me externally and so I felt free to work outside of the sound space that Peristalsis had put me in. Pixel Part 1 was inspired by Pixel Stained Peasant Day and A Measured Proposition was composed to go along with a reading. When I was finishing up Peristalsis, it also became apparent that the earliest tracks on it were transitions from Ideology, which was an album that I wrote toward the end of highschool and the beginning of University, never finished and which therefore none of you have heard (with a couple of possible exceptions). Those became Origin Stories. (A couple of people have asked me, so yes, for you trivia buffs, there is a companion track to Titania called Oberon, and it is on Ideology. It’s actually my favourite song on there and the one I’m most likely to want to resurrect at some point.)

Anyway, it became apparent that when I was done a large work, I needed bridge pieces to move me between works — pieces which would have elements of the work and yet not quite fit. Maybe it’s like exorcising demons and calling down new ones.

Orchard Days is the EP wherein I allowed myself to step free of Peristalsis, and I feel that Fountains must contain hints of where I want to go, although I haven’t figured out where that is yet, and I might take a break before beginning the next album (which I’ve already promised some friends I will call Disaster Onion for reasons which are apparently entertaining if you’re a bit of a polyglot, which I am not, although the title amuses me anyway).

Aside from these, the works generally do have things I was trying to play with of their own accord. I’m not sure that I could put into words a theme for Peristalsis, since it fell into place through a series of prunings and was largely what stayed clumped together and felt like a unit when I was done, although the individual tracks all have things I was trying to accomplish. Orchard Days was a jumping off point from Cluster, which felt raucous and exciting when I wrote it and feels restrained and a little quaint to me now. The goal of Orchard Days was to be less afraid, to allow myself to work with fat sounds and big spaces and have the confidence that I could handle them. It’s a bit mixed, at times a little more personal than I expected, but I like it.

The idea behind Fountains was to play with gently directing sound that had its own internal motion. This comes through most on Estelle and Paulina, which was the first track I wrote. (The order of composition of Fountains was: Estelle and Pauline, Caesura, Watersail, A Quiet Sunday, Little Eschaton. There were big gaps between E&P and Caesura and again between Caesura and Watersail in which I generated a whole bunch of ideas that haven’t yet gone anywhere and might not. The last three came fairly quickly one after another.) The opening section was really what I wanted to do, where I felt like with all the internal rhythm that ended up being at odds with the feedback and delay, I felt like it was out of my ability to do anything useful with until I thought about it as a rush of water, and remembered gating the water in the hose with my thumb as a kid to make patterns in the air. The whole track has a slightly forward-leaning feeling to it that I like.

The rest of the tracks are me looking at other kinds of motion, with somewhat mixed success from the perspective of having a shaping goal, but I liked how they sounded in the end. One thing I wanted to try that I think *feels* to me like water but may not be as readily apparent was more scattershot melodic parts, where I’d throw a bunch of notes in a general diffusion pattern around where I wanted the melody to go instead of just saying it outright. A little of that appears on all the tracks. And then A Quiet Sunday and Little Eschaton have some parts where I let the delay lines and modifiers get away from me on purpose to see where they’d go.

Overall, it’s not as intellectual an endeavour as I’m making it sound and I never forced myself to really explore the concept — it’s more that that’s what I was thinking about at the time and so that’s what I was most likely to latch onto when I threw ideas down. Still, I actually am pretty happy with Fountains now that it’s done (and was happy when it was in progress), and I hope you will be too.

All of that said, I do think that it feels like it’s moving toward something, and I haven’t seen what that is yet. I might take some time away to work on learning how to play the EWI and take the piano lessons some friends generously gifted me for my birthday, and see if those give me some tools to look into the dark. We shall see.

This is the fifth and last track, so that rounds off Fountains, folks. I hope you like it! I’m pretty happy with how the EP turned out, all told.

Little Eschaton (download)

A long time ago, I made a switch entirely over to software for my music needs. Software is flexible, I can take software with me without adding weight or complications to my setup, the timing of software is tight, software is closely coupled with my composition tools, software has a nice interface, software is relatively inexpensive. Overall, I’ve been very happy with that decision. I’ve become especially fond of the software synthesizers and tools from Native Instruments, as I believe I’ve mentioned here before.

However, there’s still this appeal to hardware, and sometimes I find it hard to fight. I drooled over the Dave Smith Instruments Prophet ‘08 when it was released recently. It’s a lovely, dreamy machine.

However, there’s always been a secret love in my life, quietly burning away, refusing to fade away. That love is for the Access Virus TI P0lar. *dreamy sigh*

You see, the Virus line is a product line with distinct character, and it’s a character that’s always appealed to me. They have personality and a specific tonal signature that I really enjoy. However, I really did not want to deal with the whole issue of adding outboard gear to my software-based studio. Then the TI (Total Integration) line came along. The TI products are synthesizers in the usual sense and can be used that way all you like. You never have to involve a computer at all, and if you like, you can use it with a computer the way you’d use any synthesizer with a computer. However, they also come with software that resides on the computer. The software acts like a plugin of the sort that I use. When you use it that way, you get all the features of a plugin, and the same user experience of a plugin, except that unlike a plugin, it uses the TI unit’s hardware to do all the sound processing, so it doesn’t load down your CPU. You can even use them in tandem, setting a value with your mouse, then tweaking it with a knob on the unit. The P0lar added to this that it was absolutely beautiful and much more compact than previous similar units (and this type of integration is becoming more common these days). Drawbacks? It’s still big, when you’re used to just lugging around a laptop, and at $2850 USD, it’s not exactly chump change.

Today I went to their site to look up some mp3 samples for a test I was doing for my friend Serene. I never got the test finished (because work got in the way), but upon visiting their site, my jaw dropped. They have a new unit. The Access Virus TI Snow.

It’s beautiful. I’m head-over-heels for this thing. How appropriate that I saw it on Valentine’s Day.

Okay, it’s a lot less knobby than the P0lar, but it’s still got all I’d need. It’s compact and portable. Okay, it needs a power brick, which means that taking it to the cafe requires a little doing, but still. It’s only $1250. And it’s otherwise essentially got the same Virus architecture, sound and personality.

I’d best start saving.

I decided to insert this track as track 1 on Fountains, which meant renumbering all the other tracks and extending the projected number of tracks in the project. All the other mp3s have been updated, but the music is the same, so it’s not really critical to grab the updated files.

That said, here’s the new track! I hope you enjoy it.

A Quiet Sunday (download)