@Fulcrum

The 1TB LaCie drive that houses all the Describing An Arc sessions (and, for the moment, all the Luminous City remixes) is beginning to fail, I think. The data seems to be there and intact—when I’m able to actually access it. If for any reason I need to shut the drive down, though, as I did when flood waters were coming into the Sanctum a couple of weeks ago, it takes forever and a day for OS X 10.6.8 to find and mount the drive via the Firewire 800 bus. I’ve known for a while now that I needed to lay hands on a second drive of at least that capacity, but I wasn’t counting on having to do that quite so soon.

It puts me in a bit of a bind. Renewals for Luminous City and Movement are due right about now, and rather than still have the old version out there, I’m going to allow Luminous City to lapse and upload it again when the new mixes are ready. If only I could actually get at the sessions in order to complete it.

And it kind of breaks my stride a little bit, too: the new mixes were coming along quite nicely. Certain parts of the old album were unusable, and others wouldn’t export from Sonar even if they were; I managed to replace those for the new sessions with new parts generated from the same MIDI data. One song, Topanga Canyon Blues, turned out never to have been backed up—I still don’t know how that happened—but I found an older session that apparently existed before I added the trading-fours section at the end. So that section is gone.

I’m happy to report that Pete has expressed interest in cutting his original guitar parts from Storming Heaven in the near future; the parts I cut were among those that didn’t make the transition. As significantly different as Luminous City will sound when my work is done, I think Storming Heaven will probably sound most different as a result.

But that session is on the LaCie drive, too. As I write I’m waiting for the drive to find whatever data it needs to send to the OS in order for it to finally mount, and I could be here a while waiting for that.

This song bothers me… but not enough that I didn’t put it on the record anyway. It filled a specific and quite important purpose in the band’s repertoire: it’s fast, it’s aggressive, it gives the soloists a chance to stretch out some, it’s a bit snotty and misanthropic. It invariably closed our second and final set, with a long line of exclamation points following the reverb tail out.

And yet it bothers me, because it’s a lyric that no one in that position would actually articulate. It might be their id talking, sure, or at the very least they might even think like that; but who actually speaks from there? By definition the id is unarticulated; what we say and do filters up from there to the ego and the superego, if you hold to the Freudian model (I don’t necessarily, but I’m using it for illustrative purposes). You wouldn’t hear, say, Donald Trump talking like this.

I’ve made a conscious effort over the years to stay away from writing lyrics like that, and then discovered too late that I did it all the same. And in this case changing the words was not really an option (as I had done with One AM Deluxe, although I was also changing the arrangement at the same time).

The closing section, starting with the keyboard solo, came out of a particularly fruitful vening of jamming between Josh, Paula, and me down in the New Haven space– it might have been before we met Pete, or Pete might have been en route, I don’t remember now. The section after the keyboard solo and before the guitar solo gave us a bit of a Genesis moment: it reminded me a little bit of a progression and climax Tony Banks might play, and led into a guitar solo that Daryl Stuermer might have rendered. Not that I’m anywhere near those guys, but there are faint resonances.

Once upon a time there was an Englishwoman living in Manhattan with whom I really wanted to get my freak on– and I think she might have been interested in the same thing (judging from an evening spent macking at a mutual friend’s dinner party). Only thing, there was a bit of a language barrier.. she spoke British English and American English (French, too, but that’s not important now); and while my American English isn’t bad at all (and my French isn’t bad either once I’ve hung out in Montréal for a week– what is it with me and the French thing all of a sudden?)– I think in retrospect I had an overly inflated sense of my own command of British English. Signals were missed; mistakes were made, likely all of them on my end. After a few long phone calls and a couple of visits where we didn’t quite know what to do with one another, we drifted. Our collective freaks remained unadorned.

Two years removed from that, rather than assume complete culpability for my failure, I wrote lyrics about “our” failure to stay connected. The song to which I would fit them already had lyrics, but over time I became less and less enamored with singing them; I no longer believed them. Some nonsense about living in Provence, or suburban Paris (ah, that’s why I was making so much of France earlier), and meeting up with an old friend who disapproved of my adopted boho lifestyle, wanting to show her around to justify why I liked my life now. (At the time I was a going-nowhere-never secretary at a pharmaceutical house, so I had reason to daydream of foreign climes.)

I started the guitar part by wondering “What would Chris play?” but probably took it to places he wouldn’t go then. As he seems to have dropped off the face of the earth– none of his musical cronies from that era can find him– I have no idea what he would play now, or whether he is even still playing. I wish him well, no matter what.

Precisely one person who has heard this cut so far heard the Wabash Cannonball allusion.

My English friend now runs her own business somewhere in the five boroughs, and in my heart I am glad; it is what she wanted.

As with Storming Heaven, the song began with Pete. He had the wistful opening section, I wrote the key change/jam section and the lyrics… about as close to jazz fusion as we ever got, actually. This aspect was what appealed to Nolan, the guitarist after Pete, Josh, and Paula left, and it was a cross between him and Larry Carlton circa The Royal Scam that I envisioned as I performed the “guitar” solo. I also borrowed his acoustic guitar arpeggios during the choruses.

I’m pretty sure I would not write this lyric today. The initial impetus was observing two of my former girlfriend’s five children, both in accelerated learning curricula at the late grade school and early middle school level, coming home with backpacks weighed down and at least five or six hours’ worth of homework assigned each and every night. With all that, when were the kids going to have any time to go out and play with their friends in the neighborhood? It was as though someone somewhere in the school system had decided, “Hey, we’ve got to catch up, how did we fall so far behind the Asians and Europeans? Damn the cost, these kids need to work and make us proud.” Their childhood was falling before them and adulthood rearing its head at what we used to consider an abnormally young age.

Which brings me, not coincidentally, to the line about “Japs and Krauts”, over which I’ve caught shrapnel. I’m not going to plead a case here, or apologize for my potty mouth; I’m just going to tell you straight up that as a rule, a more, and a code, I do not refer to either nationality as pejoratively as that (I’m probably eine kleine Deutscher myself, but my great-uncle is guessing about all of that except for my being of Welsh descent). My point is that the kind of people who think that there is a quick fix to our education ills– a fix such as overburdening the best and brightest among our children– seem to me to be also the kind of people who would refer to other nationalities as dismissively. As with much of the criticism of Robert A Heinlein’s work, it’s generally a mistake to attribute the attitudes of his characters to those of the author.

Anyway, that was back then. About ten years later, during my first significant stretch of funemployment (ha, and ha) since I joined the ranks of IT support, I spent two years scraping for any kind of work to bring money into the house, and one of the jobs I found myself doing was babysitting teenagers, that is, substitute teaching, mostly on the high school level if I could help it. It mattered not whether I was in the inner city or in the comfy suburbs; wherever I went, I saw that children outside the accelerated programs seemed simply not as inclined to learn. So much for the attitude of Chaucer’s clerk: “And gladly wolde he lerne…”

I don’t know whether it’s that the teachers and administrators cannot or will not make things such that children and young adults want to learn, or that the kids themselves won’t do anything that isn’t entertaining and immediately gratifying to their constant need for sensory stimulation… but there’s a standoff in the classroom. Maybe most regular teachers don’t sense this, and my magpie-on-tourist view is skewed by the transitory nature of subbing, but it’s what I saw.

So this would be one of the first songs the three of us wrote together. Josh had the bass riff. Paula had the accompanying second-line beat (though I tweaked it somewhat in the rendering). I told Pete, “Maybe a Chuck Berry riff? Oh, and solo here.” That was pretty much it.

Lyrically: it was winter and I was thinking a lot at the time about California. I had lived north of Los Angeles for about five months when I was very young, and now with the wind blowing upstairs and out of doors down George Street in New Haven, ice freshly chipped off the sidewalks and salt duly spread liberally by the landlord, I tried to recreate the gestalt of the San Fernando Valley and the adjacent canyons– a five year old’s eyes grafted into a 32-year-old’s body. Lizards in the low evergreen hedge in front of the house and the dull pink noise of Balboa Boulevard traffic. Learning to ride a bike up– and down– a steep hill. Pouring dirt into the in-ground kidney-shaped swimming pool to see how long it took for the filtration to remove it from the water. My first kisses with a fellow kindergartener on the playground. A smiling Buddha statue (with a clock in his belly) in the display window of Treasure Isle at Topanga Plaza.

Oh, how cruelly life had turned out since then, I thought; me here in the deep freeze and no one to keep me warm, working a shitty day job with no future– and this band, the only thing keeping me going, still without a guitarist, and good Lord, what a chore finding one. Our last one, when the band was still called Fulcrum, had bailed to Colorado and a better day job– understandably.

There are a couple of people in my past to whom I could be singing, people who left the band du jour just when it was on the verge of doing something really cool, like for example actually playing out, or finally getting an original set together. (Our last guy wasn’t among them: we had actually gigged with him a few times.) As much as it would have been better karma for me to wish the lately-departed well, at the time I couldn’t help being royally pissed off over the lack of faith and the doors that would have to close now that we would have to replace them.

Really I’m singing to myself, because I have also left bands just when they were on the verge…

Jay and Paul together constituted an off-kilter reference to a local bilionaire. I named the barista Stymie because it just seemed like a good idea at the time– I envisioned a guy who reminded me of a fully formed version of his namesake from the Our Gang comedies. The Plaza has long since been taken over by the many-tentacled Westfield, but don’t worry, our hero has yet another mall to conquer in Edmonton.

The second verse, for those not conversant with the biz, is a sidelong acknowledgment of the pay-to-play syndrome that has now filtered east– in order to play Toads Place, my ex-wife’s nephew’s band had to buy a roll of tickets and sell them to all their friends. The amount of tickets sold with their name on it would determine whether the band got a second shot at playing there. I’ll let you know how that goes. So much for bands getting paid when they’re starting out.. it’s a major outlay of cash for them now.

I knew that I was going to set the song in one of the canyons around town– historically the canyons, especially Laurel Canyon, had been a hotbed of activity for some of the bands I spent large amounts of time admiring and studying later (Buffalo Springfield, CSNY, Jackson Browne, Eagles– pretty much anyone Henry Diltz photographed, as it transpired). Some time after I started fleshing the lyrics out, I realized that I had a golden opportunity to sneak in the phrase Fernwood Tonight, and out of respect to Fred Willard, Martin Mull, and especially Norman Lear, I just couldn’t pass that up.

Continuing with our tour of the seven tracks on the album, we arrive at the song that does not sound like the other six.

This one has other musicians on it.

History. The Radiant City rehearsal space was in the basement of a funky brick building in the North End of New Haven, complete with a bus stop and a junkie or two in front. We shared it with one other band, which was OK because we could trust the guys in the other band, Seven Story Mountain: both me and our bassist had been in that band at one time or another. (Notwithstanding the fact that their guitarist blew out a tweeter on my PA column and by way of apology spilled a Coke into my Kurzweil K-2000, thereby destroying its pitch bend and modulation wheel function.) The rehearsal space had its own rest room, and at one point must have been a recording studio because what apparently had been a control room sat just off the main space, with a heavy door and a window looking out on to the main space.

I walked into rehearsal one evening to find Pete, Josh, and Paula doing battle with a sprightly and yet driving riff in A dominant– the first guitar riff audible in the finished song. I liked what I heard, and leaped in with supporting Hammondesque comping. It felt good; I immediately had ideas for where the song could go, and told the others so.

My SOP at the time was to take whatever jamming we did and mine it; e.g., discover whether there was anything there that I could fashion a song around. (As resident auteur and presumptive visionary behind the band, I claimed that role of benevolent dictator for myself, which included setting editorial tone for the music and lyrics. While this would later come back to bite me, thus far in the band’s development and history the arrangement had worked.)

So I went to town. The thing took a day or so to come together as I modelled it in the EPS sequencer. Each section flowed organically from the one before, and back into itself. I stood the guitar riff on its head, turned it around, split it down the middle, translated it into Esperanto, and I must have written half the song  just from that. Dynamics, technicality, drive… I christened the song and was pleased with what I’d done.

The others were, hmm, less than thrilled. They never did say why, or if they did I was too busy being myself to hear them. Even though we were hurting for new material, I shrugged and opted to put that one on the back burner and take another swipe at it in the future.

By the time I got around to that second swipe, that incarnation of the band had been defunct for about ten years. We never did get around to writing new material; a battle of the bands had us in thrall at the time…. But I’ve discussed all that already.

So ten years down the road from that full hour of studio glory, I was hanging out (virtually) at the precursor to The Womb, a place which I will not name here– because advertising ain’t free. We had instituted an annual or semi-annual worldwide musical and engineering activity called Collaborative Audio Production Experiment, CAPE for short, and rashly I had signed up to be a songwriter. Before I opted to include it on Luminous City anyway, the only Radiant City song I had handy that wasn’t already spoken for by one of the two Fulcrum albums I had (and have) planned was Gaining On Me.

It seems to me that the CAPE Team who wound up recording it, christened Team Galactic by the guy who put us together, was constructed for the purpose of doing something progressive or at the very least musically challenging. As it was, I had the two best guitarists hanging on the board at that time playing on the track (MudCat and Trazan are still the two best now that they’re on The Womb); our wizardly mix engineer, Otek, had access to a top flight session drummer in his native Karlstad; and Spock, the project manager, was keeping us on track. All I had to do was play them the model.

Those are not their real names. I just thought I should mention that.

The response to the initial airing of my model was more or less unanimous. “Um could we hear something else?”

It didn’t occur to me to wonder what it was about GOM that put musicians off initially. My thoughts were: good melody, memorable guitar riff, GottaGoodBeatAnYouKinDanceToIt… and I was assured that it wasn’t that it was a bad song, far from it, but these guys wanted options. Hurriedly I put together a second model of another song which if anything was even more complicated than GOM– that will see the light of day sometime, trust me. I think part of me did that on purpose in order to ensure that GOM would be the choice. All right, maybe it was all of me.

Team Galactic agreed that GOM was the lesser of two evils, but Trazan offered to have a bash at “doing something” with it. I gave the digital nod to Trazan through Spock, and he disappeared for a few days into his studio somewhere in Norway.

What came back was the form that you hear on the finished track. One or two sections excised, a new turnaround to get back into the last verse, a busy string quartet sawing away over much of the chorus and instrumental sections, and some Beach Boys harmonies during the final chorus. Mind-blowingly good work, and though it took some getting used to, I embraced what Trazan did with it to the point that I gave him a partial songwriting credit along with Pete, Josh, Paula, and me.

The slide guitar work you hear is MudCat, who chose just the right notes for my paranoia. Our bassist, bassman134, lived somewhere on Staten Island and for all I know is still there.

Now. Compound our efforts over three months with those of 15-20 other “teams”, and you have an idea of the scope of CAPE– the latest (eighth) iteration of which is now starting up over at The Womb Forums. At the time, reaction to our work from members of other teams ranged from “This one shines, I just had to groove to it again”, “I wish there was music that good in video games”, and “Incredible journey” to “Weather Report gets stoned and watches Star Trek”, “I’m gonna sync my Christmas lights up to this”, and “How did you get Kansas to record your song?”

I guess we done good.

In my mind’s eye I envisioned the video: Mad Max redux, with a desert truck chase scene populated not by heavily armored road warriors with piercings at odd angles and through odd appendages, but by business-suited drones firing the rifles and lobbing the grenades, all chasing after the flatbed lorry driven by me (with the rest of the band chugging away on the flatbed itself, a la the splash screen of Rock Band). Of course the dashboard has a Hammond built into it, I think the steering wheel is protruding from the spot where the Leslie controls would ordinarily be, and the accelerator doubles as an expression pedal.

Well, let’s make this the repository for everything I might have to say about the various Luminous City songs and compositions I’ve released into the veld of public consumption.

M’boy Dan had a listen to Movement Along A Path the other night and told me that he thought that album was cinematic in scope, despite the stripped-down instrumentation. (I’m not going to take that album song by song here in this blog, only because everything that need be said about those songs is already contained in the liner notes [link to follow shortly].) I think that descriptor is probably even more apt when used against this album; I did have certain images in mind, shot in high-def CinemaScope and playable only in my third eye. I’ll describe some of them to you in the blog posts that follow, but please feel free to come up with your own if you so desire.

Inbound is the title I gave to the drone that begins the album under assorted ambiences: a plane flying overhead, a foghorn, a ship at sea, traffic building to a climax. People are aware and yet unaware that something is coming.

Storming Heaven begins with the initial guitar riff. The seeds came from an instrumental piece written (at least in part) by Radiant City’s guitarist, Pete Crane. (The astute, or at least the long-memoried, among you will recall Radiant City was the precursor to @Fulcrum.)

His coming into the band was a story in itself. The three of us– Josh, Paula, and I– had been auditioning guitarists who were less and less appropriate to the kind of music we wanted to play: speed merchants mostly (I mean, right? Prog rock demands a hot-shit guitarist who can above all other considerations play faster than God), and of those who weren’t, technically daft or socially ill-fitted. There was one guy who might have worked, but I think we didn’t see eye to eye on a personality level.

So when Pete walked into the music store where Josh was working at the time, and struck up a conversation about (I think it was) Yes and Genesis, Josh invited him along to have a jam. Our jaws dropped when he broke out a hollow body electric and started playing Wes Montgomery licks over Tender Friend. Thinking outside the box, technical proficiency, actual melody, not beholden to fast licks but capable of them every so often.. clearly this was the guy.

Shortly after he joined, Pete played me the finished model recording of the piece that became Storming Heaven. This model also had an actual bassist and drummer on it, whose names I never knew. (Nor do I know whether they helped him write it. I presume they did not.) My recollection could very easily be faulty 15 years downstream from my original memory, but in that memory the model consisted of the opening guitar riff repeated over and over with some interesting guitar embellishments here and there, the 7/4 movement which currently supports the synth solo, and the eight descending chords joining the two sections.

7/4. Paula laughs now to recall that basically she was paying tribute to Phil Collins’ drum work on The Cinema Show (I would guess the live version from Seconds Out, which I saw recreated magnificently in late February at the Ridgefield Playhouse when The Musical Box were in town).

Sufficiently inspired by the model, I wrote the remainder of the piece from there. I added the first two verses to break up the guitar chugging, and then the stately closing section, when (in my mind) the offstage fleet of roadies would crack open the dry ice canisters, surrounding everyone but Pete with mist as he peeled off his Comfortably Numb solo to ride the song out, swatting adoring groupies out of the way as though his Strat were a five wood.

The interweaving kalimba lines (in three different meters, I think 15, 19, and 23, or something similar involving dovetailing prime numbers) were supposed to represent data streams flowing down a wire and becoming something new in the process, recontextualizing with each iteration against the other two lines. I had just discovered the Internet in 1994, and (irony of ironies) it did indeed seem at the time like it was going to be the vehicle for global change and community. And what better messengers of human unity than a band– especially one with a navel-gazing lyricist (e.g., me)? Cultures listen to their musicians, don’t they? The health of the nation is gauged in part by how well it treats its artists, isn’t it?

Thus the album begins. The band arrive in town, in the Luminous City, and declare their intentions to observe how people are to one another, and eventually to deliver a hopeful message.

The good news is that Luminous City is live at iTunes, Rhapsody, and Napster!

The bad news is, the band name as it appears in their stores may be slightly off. At iTunes and Napster, it’s being listed as being by Fulcrum (minus the @ symbol, or even the lower-case “at” prepending it), which might lead to a bit of confusion between what I’m doing and what those guy(s) are doing (electronica/dance). Rhapsody, for whatever reason, seems to have gotten the name right.

I’m looking into this as I write, but you can still buy the songs for $0.99 each through whichever store you prefer… as long as it’s iTunes, Napster, or Rhapsody.

Yesterday I uploaded Luminous City to Tunecore for distribution in about a month’s time through the assorted iTunes stores (USA, Canada, UK/Europe, ANZAC, and Japan), Rhapsody, and Napster.

That means that in about a month, or a month and a half at the outside, the album will be released into the wilds of competition for your entertainment dollar. These are not the versions you have heard on my Myspace and Soundclick pages– these are full audio fidelity, full length, no compression schemes.

At that time, I will have more to say about the various songs on the record: how they came to be, possibly a few anecdotes about their making, and a whole hell of a lot of rambling, probably. But every bit as entertaining as all my other blog posts have been. <<cough>>

As they say, watch this space.