String theory

As reported last post, I’ve arrived at a release date for both the remastered Luminous City and the first of the two Arc albums. While parts continue to roll in from assorted dots on the Northeast Seaboard and beyond, I find there’s a bit of time to tweak the mastering methods used to make the thing sound more and more like what I had in mind, or mind’s ear.

But over the last two days, I’ve been turning my attention to the second Arc disc: hearing little things that need addressing and messing. Little things like no guide vocals on certain tracks, improper balances, even less proper equalization.

Season Song from the first disc is notable here for the pizzicato string arrangement (all sampled) and the verisimilitude I managed to achieve with it. Judicious use of the Flux STTool imaging plug-in on each channel helped me to narrow the focus of each string group—two violin sections panned to a range of the left side of the stereo image, one viola section right of center, one cello far right, one double-bass across the back. The end result pleased me.

So I decided to apply the same technique to a song from the second album, a long 18-minute piece called Requiem. That session has been up on my desk now for about two and a half days: when I got back into the session for the first time in lo these many months, I discovered that in an effort to conserve CPU, I had deleted all the MIDI I’d used to create the string section that was about to be replaced. A while ago. Further back than my latest backup from Time Machine.

So I’ve been cutting the MIDI again for the string parts, using the existing string part (the one which is about to go bye-bye) as a template and finding ways to make the parts themselves more interesting in case a real orchestra should ever chance to play Requiem (cough). At the same time, I’m reading up again on the more arcane features of the EXS24 Mark II sample instrument (it came with Logic) in order to coax a bit more expression out of the parts.

I could be here for a while. I’ve been here for a while; it occurred to me that I hadn’t updated any progress in about a month, and was due to, so this writing thingy is a bit of a break from scoring something I’ve already scored.

In the meantime, a new piece of kit has entered the Sanctum, a Christmas gift from my parents: a Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 audio interface, which I intend to use primarily for live work but also for use in performing bounces through the resident Allen & Heath GS3V desk I picked up in September.

Oh, didn’t I mention the desk here? Slau, an engineer based in Astoria, Queens (go check out back issues of his podcast) mentioned out in the fora that he was in the process of upgrading his studio and no longer had either adequate space or a business need to retain the desk, which he’d used through the 90s and had been rendered redundant by acquisition of a 24-channel control surface. Rather than put the thing up on Craigslist, and rather than research how much it was worth almost 20 years on, he opted to give the thing away to the first person who could haul it away.. who happened to be me. Not a day has passed since I was finally able to get audio running through it that I haven’t been grateful to Slau for his magnanimity, and I was privileged to be able to tell him so when I saw him last week in Jersey City at a forum-related function.

So there’s the month or so sorted. Three months till Luminous City and Over The Curve!

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You’re gonna cry.. 96 tears..

As I was saying before I was interrupted… — Jack Paar

Not quite. Yes, there were interruptions aplenty, but I don’t know that they were necessarily rude, and some actually made me some money. Even so, I need to catch my breath and document what’s been going on and why @Fulcrumland has been dark and silent of late. To make a long story short, in the last month or two I’ve been busily learning Other People’s Songs and have had to put both the Arc and the City on the back burner in the pursuit of coin.

To make that short story long again: the vintage rock’n'roll cover band I’m in, Old Man Noises, have identified ten new songs to add to our repertoire, of which we maybe have learned one adequately in the last month and are working on two others which aren’t quite there yet. On top of that, OMN has a big gig coming up as we tear the November calendar page off the wall, and for that particular gig—a Day Of Peace, which was to have taken place on the anniversary of John Lennon’s assassination but which eventually got pushed up a full week—we learned two other songs by John, and I’m in the process of putting together a solo arrangement of a third about John. But for our gig this past Monday—a benefit for the opening of the first low-cost animal neutering clinic in the Bridgeport area (the show was called Spay It Forward)—we debuted the one new song we had up our sleeves.

But I think I’ll mostly remember hanging around outside in between sets with my own thoughts. It was probably the last warmish night Fairfield County is likely to see for quite a while, and with the club as close as it is to the shore, the humidity rolling in from the Sound reminded me of certain pleasant nights from a now-distant past on the Jersey shore. And I found myself looking back on that era without also looking through the lens of how that whole thing died, and I could honestly say that while it lasted, we helped one another. That it is dead now, irrevocably and finally dead, was at least for that moment secondary to the fact that it was alive once, and that part of it was not the charade it later became.

SUBTOTAL: 10

I had also been asked to take part in the first live performance of a duo project, Tipsy In Chelsea, fronted by Dean, a guitarist friend from the New Haven area, and Trish, a vocalist friend from Atlanta. That involved learning six originals (theirs) and two rearranged cover songs. The gig took place this past Wednesday at Pianos in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and I think it came off rather well. At least I don’t think I blew any cues, although a rather critical guitar cable finally died on me in the middle of the first song and held a tenuous grasp on audio for the duration of the performance.

SUBTOTAL: 16

The next night was residency night at the One-Eyed Pig in Newtown. I guess I’ve become sort of an adjunct member of the Wagon Wheel Band—two guitarists, bass, drums, female vocals, and me—but it’s a good gig with top-flight musicians and of late it’s been getting a little unpredictable in a good way. Certain song choices, and certain segues between songs, keep all the musicians on their toes.

If that lineup sounds like it could almost be a wedding band, well, it is, now. I was asked to join that project a couple of weeks ago, whereby the band would continue to perform the Pig residency as the Wagon Wheel Band and do (hopefully lucrative) weddings and corporate gigs under a different name. I don’t think anyone’s put together a definitive set list yet, but I can’t imagine it would be less than fifty songs.

SUBTOTAL: 66

And coming up on Thanksgiving is the annual Vomitorium show put on by Dean, the aforementioned friend from New Haven. If I am understanding the setup correctly, he takes advantage of the fact that a good portion of the congeries of his musician friends  scattered hither and yon across the Eastern seaboard will actually be back in town with their families for the holiday, and so he gathers them all together, asks them what songs they want to play at the show, and the whole lot of us set ourselves down and learn them. I did that gig last year, and it was a lot of work then, and it’ll be a lot now, too: I have about thirty songs to find keyboard parts for by Thursday, two of which I’m singing lead on.

ESTIMATED GRAND TOTAL: 96

Oh, and I just took a gig for New Years Eve with Slowpoke, another cover band of which I’m an adjunct member. This wouldn’t ordinarily result in my having to learn more new music, except that this is a private party and I’ve been asked to perform cocktail music with an as-yet unnamed bassist an hour or two before the rocking and rolling commences. Song selection will apparently come from The Great American Songbook. That pushes the total up to well over a hundred songs crammed into my tiny little brain in the space of two months-plus. But 96 sounds like a nice, round number at which to leave the grand total, because otherwise I’d have to change the title of this post.

And I honestly hope it doesn’t sound as though I’m complaining. This is what it is to be a full-time working musician, and I’m grateful that I get my chance to make a living out of it now. It is truly following the dream.

The only downside being that there hasn’t been a whole lot of time to devote to @Fulcrum-related matters, like finishing up the Luminous City remaster and the first Describing An Arc album. But I expect I’ll have a bit of time after we tear the December calendar page off the wall: an astrologer tells me that mid-March will be a very good time to release both, and I think that they both should be done by then, so that’s the deadline I’m imposing on both albums.

Wow, I guess I had some @Fulcrum-related business to relate after all.

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If there’s anything I enjoy better than doing something once

… it’s doing it twice.

For a while now I’ve been in thrall of the two albums Jem Godfrey and his cronies released under the collective name Frost*, Milliontown and Experiments in Mass Appeal. Lately I’ve been A/B-ing these albums against the work I’m doing on Describing An Arc.

As a result of Careful Listening™ I’ve modified the plug-in chain on the 2-bus, that is, the end of the mixing chain wherein all channels and sub-busses get summed to a final output and a finished mix, for pretty much all the songs, and things are sounding both more compact and more cinematic now. I’m happy with the way the songs are gelling, and I hope you will be too when I eventually send it out into the wild.

But as I came to the first song on the second album, Maze of Mirrors, I found myself quite unable to work this new magick. At some point OS X, in its confusion and trying to keep up with my incessant mouse clicks and file dragging, must have thought that I wanted to delete the session and most of the tracking I had done for the song, and duly deposited it in the trash. In the course of deleting something else that I truly did want to delete, and without noticing that the MoM session was already sitting there, I wound up deleting the session along with that which really did need deleting.

Yes, I’ve no one to blame but myself for the oversight, or maybe some of the blame lies with this latest rev of OS X that I’ve installed (10.6.8) and how easily it gets confused when it has lots to do under the hood besides listen to me trying to interact with it. I’m not actually certain whether this MacBook Pro was designed to run Snow Leopard; it came out of the box with the previous rev installed, 10.5 (Leopard), and I’ve just been merrily updating it as I went along, and fretting about how long it takes now to boot the thing up. Soon it’ll be time to spring for a solid-state drive, I think, but prices haven’t dropped enough yet on the size I’d need to replace the drive that’s in it.

Anyway, the session is gone, save for a few audio files that wound up in a completely different folder. From these I’ve managed to construct a new session, to which I will need to add a new drum guide for Paula to track over, and new scratch vocals for me and Pete to replace. (The fretless bass model that Josh will eventually replace survived the purge.)

This track is kind of important to me, as it marks a reunion of sorts. The friends I’ve selected to appear on the track are my former partners in Radiant City, the mid-90s band that preceded @Fulcrum. In fact, they wrote a good chunk of the music on this track; I supplied lyrics and music to accompany the lyrics, and wove that and the music they’d written around each other. If I had to pin the song down to a specific style, imagine the three vocalists in Yes being backed up by mid-80s era Rush.

So it’s important that I have a session created against which they can track. Hence, doing it all again.

Nothin’ left to do but smile, smile, smile.

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Just when I thought I was out

… along comes a new piece of software to pull me back in. It happens every. Single. Time.

In this case it’s an acoustic guitar emulator called Spicy Guitar that has me replacing the acoustic guitar tracks on Downwind, which were frankly never that great to begin with.

The Luminous City remixes were just about done, I swear they were. Tracks from the original 2007 sessions that needed to be replaced, mostly drum and bass tracks that on closer examination were smashed to hell and back or else clipped over 0dB FS, got replaced; while I kept what I could of the original tracks. I upsampled everything from the original 20-bit 44.1kHz sample rate to 24-bit 96kHz, in so doing opening my original mixes up tremendously. Then, over the past several months I enjoyed a few moments when a lightbulb went off over my head, some new insight got insighted, and the mixes were beginning to sound like they were almost there… just in time for the album to rotate off iTunes, Napster, and Rhapsody. That’s probably just as well, although an Alert Listener (a friend of mine on Google+) notes that my original widget is still linkable at Tunecore, even though the albums themselves aren’t available at the moment.

The acoustic 12-string that opens Downwind was a Kurzweil K-2000 patch, which because of its limited sample ROM was chock full of conflicting body resonances and nasality that in all likelihood wouldn’t be present in an actual 12-string. What can I say, it was all I had at the time. I still don’t own a 12-string, and even if I could borrow one I’d have to mess about with putting a mic in front of it in just the right place. I decided that as long as the album was coming down anyway, I’d tweak a little more, and so I added an EXS24 12-string playing chord samples, which sounded little better than OK in the extreme, and the contrast between it and the K-2000 12-string was something I wound up not being able to overcome. I tried Sculpture’s physical modeling algorithm to get me close to an acoustic sound, and it might have worked if I’d been playing a single note run, but in the end it was three hours I wish I had back.

I don’t recall exactly where I heard about Spicy Guitar, but I figured that as long as the price was right (and it was) I had nothing to lose from giving it a try. It’s available for both Wintel (VST) and OS X (VST or AU). This tutorial helped me get up and running:

And the result as applied to Downwind is pretty spectacular. Spicy Guitar models an acoustic guitar—I wouldn’t be surprised to discover Karplus-Strong running under the hood—offering a host of tweakable features that emulate playing techniques fairly intuitively: nylon versus steel strings, hand muting, harmonics, the hardness of the pick, where the string hits the pick in relation to the sound hole, and so on. It automatically detects the chord I’m sending it, and allows me to strum it using two fingers.

So far I haven’t discovered how to capo chords or do alternate tunings, and it’s possible that I can’t do that at all. For all I know, the folks at Keolab could be working on those features for a “pro” version, i.e., one for which I might actually have to pay money. For now, this free version is more than adequate for my needs.

It’s taking me a little while to program a few nuances into the performance, and that’s what I’m taking a break from as I write this, but the end result will shine, I think.

So the re-release of Luminous City is getting pushed back a bit… thanks guys.

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A taste of Over The Curve

In part to convince everyone that I am still making music after all, and in part to convince myself, here’s a track from the next @Fulcrum record to whet all our appetites. By design, it’s not the best fidelity—but is (hopefully) good enough to leave you wanting more. If you need them, you can find the lyrics here.

Bass guitar and drums are to be replaced Very Soon Now, along with the current scratch vocal.

Beside my keys, kit, Rhodes bass, and voice, you are hearing the delicious talents of Lee Roberson on guitars and Chris Millikan on alto saxophone. Leester and Chris cut their tracks at Dark Pines Studios in Graham NC in May 2010 under the watchful eye of owner/engineer Robert Maxwell Dearing, who was assisted in the control room by either Michael Boyett, Sam Davis, or both of them. I cut guide tracks at the same time (Dr Bob’s Rhodes provided part of the bass track), I later replaced these when I got back to the Sanctum. Special thanks also go out to Kyle Poehling from Hot Politics, who cut drums that (alas) I wound up not using.

Please to enjoying the musik tovarishchi.

 

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Three hours and counting

So after a week’s worth of scavenging online fora and pulling my hair out trying to get the LaCie drive to mount and function (remember that I am bald by choice and please don’t ask me where I pulled the hair out), I think I finally have the issue sorted.

When last we left the issue, the drive had finally come back to life after an afternoon of trying to find its mind. I foolishly began moving files back to it from three separate locations—two external drives and my MacBook’s internal hard drive—and completed moving data from one drive before unmounting the drive in order to take the MacBook to a gig. I did not power the LaCie drive down.

After the gig, I re-attached the drive and: crickets. Wouldn’t mount. Bugger me on a moped, I thought. Now what? I left the drive to spin up overnight. No joy in the morning: drive still did not appear on the desktop. WTF?

Thus began the above-mentioned scavenging and follicle alteration. I cut power and opened the LaCie enclosure, discovering that the thing was comprised of not one 1TB drive but two 500 GB ones (Seagates). Figuring that it was merely configured as a JBOD, I appeared at my local computer parts store and then disappeared again with two freshly-purchased USB enclosures in tow.

I removed the drives from the LaCie enclosure and installed them into the two USB enclosures, fired them up—and received a message from OS X stating that the drives weren’t readable. Back to the drawing board, ejecting and powering down both drives in the process.

On further investigation and hair extraction, it turns out that LaCie uses a funky (i.e., proprietary) combination of JBOD and RAID on their controller chipset. In the course of my research I came to discover some rather interesting things about LaCie’s power supplies and controller cards, and narrowed my focus to the possibility of either or both of those objects on the verge of failure in my particular case.

I spritzed the enclosure’s various ports with compressed air, reinstalled the two physical drives, and allowed the drive to try to spin back up overnight. I could see the data light flashing excitedly as I left the Sanctum to catch some sleep, but come morning the drive still wasn’t mounted. Moreover, I noticed that the small fan was not spinning.

And I don’t know how it came to me, but a sudden poke in my third eye with a sharp stick suggested that I give my BFF a call. He uses LaCie drives regularly to stage the data he collects before he backs up, and I wondered if it was possible that his power supply might bring my drive back around.

An hour later I was in his version of the Sanctum, watching as my drive sprung back to life with his power supply attached. It did its damndest to mount the drive, and he ran a number of utilities hoping to at least see the drive, but it never did mount. A second poke in my third eye with an equally sharp stick had me wondering whether I had reinstalled the physical drives in the right places—only one of the two would have the file system loaded onto it.

At that moment he was called away on an errand, and so I had to leave. But with his permission, I left with his power supply.

Back in my Sanctum, I swapped the positions of the two physical drives, attached his power supply, fired the drive up.. and within about three seconds it mounted.

I am about three hours away now from having the data for Describing An Arc, Luminous City, the as-yet untitled Meditations 2011 album, and various sound libraries backed up to a second external drive. 282Gb of data, most of it in the form of 24-bit 96kHz audio files. Which means that I am about six hours away from being able to resume work on Luminous City for the first time in about two weeks.

I may not even need tryptophan to help me get to sleep tonight.

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Ah, technology, indeed

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.

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Lyrics added.. fear the power of the thesaurus

Your humble correspondent.

With a quill like that, you know you should be glad.

 

So I’m stoked. This is beginning to resemble a real Rock Band Web Site now that I’ve added the Luminous City lyrics to the hierarchy—as though I don’t go out of my way already to make the words listenable and aurally legible. Just in case you might still think I’m mumbling, you will find the words here.

I also created space (and appropriate disclaimers) in which to eventually add lyrics for the upcoming Describing An Arc albums. Inasmuch as one song from the second album of the two is already fairly well-known among some of you through the miracle of CAPE, I added that one too.

The next step will naturally be to add snippets of the songs, but I’m still undecided as to how to do that and still encourage you to go out and buy the album. While I’m waiting on that flash of inspiration, please enjoy the words in whichever manner you see fit.

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A few (OK, more than a few) notes on the new album

It's not just for breakfast any more.

Ever feel like you're wearing armor that not only prevents stuff getting in but also prevents stuff getting out?

I usually save this sort of reflection for one day a year: my birthday in April. Even so, one morning in October I woke up thinking about this, and felt like examining. Never got around to publishing it till now, with a few updates.

I’ve been at work on the new @Fulcrum record, Describing An Arc, for about 18 months. The version of me that started the album bears some similarities to the version currently blogging. Certainly the recording has taught me things about engineering and producing a decent mix; it’s probably taught me a few things about arranging, and refreshed my memory of the importance of thematic cohesion in a long-form work such as this album has become.

Going into the record, I had only the vaguest idea of what I wanted to say this time out. It wasn’t going to be autobiographic at all, but beyond that, I had no idea what it would be about. I recall wanting to do something a little more positive than what Luminous City had been: even though the album ended on a note of hope, the album itself examined some minor—and major—cruelties.

I knew that one relationship (then important in my life) had changed for the worse, and another was about to change. For the first time since the divorce, I was about to be as alone as I had ever been.

And I had never handled being single well. I’m not one of those who walk into a bar and leave with a woman—and I was about to confront my biggest fear, that of forced solitude and involuntary celibacy. When it seemed like all my friends (save for a handful) were enjoying a banquet of love and shared affection, I was about to be ushered from the feast.

Some of it is my own doing. For all the exuberance I project onto a crowd in concert, offstage I’m usually rather withdrawn and keep to myself. I hadn’t really ever gotten over the numerous rejections and cruelties inflicted on me when I was younger, when I was not only made to feel like I wasn’t worthy but was told so on more than one occasion, and that has carried over into my adult life: I am still told so, explicitly.

And of those who didn’t tell me so, who accepted me into their hearts, I found that most were broken in some way, shape, or form, and in our healing one another and in the vast majority of them eventually consigning me to the trash heap of yesterday’s news, I was playing out Einstein’s classic definition of insanity.

It suddenly seemed rather important to make that the theme of the new album. I went through the old back pages and assembled eight songs and a long poem into something resembling a narrative: the arc of a generic relationship, a composite of several I had experienced. Boy meets girl, girl hurts from some past pain, boy falls in love with girl, boy heals girl, girl promptly rejects boy once she believes that she can do better, girl finds happiness in someone else’s arms, boy is left alone again.

As I began tracking, I began to swing back and forth between states of elation at what I was achieving and depression over not having anyone with whom to share that elation intimately. Holes in the narrative began to show; I wrote new music to fill them. My moods mirrored the song I happened to be working on that day, and the songs fed back into my moods, which led to brief periods of mania and long periods of depression.

It became obvious that not all of the music was going to fit on one CD—and because it was a narrative I couldn’t just leave tracks on the cutting room floor. I decided to divide the album into two: the first depicting the integration and apparent fruition of the relationship, and the second depicting the disintegration and the post-mortems.

It never once occurred to me to be sparing of myself. It probably should have. But I felt at the time that the bad blood wasn’t going to flow out of me unless I was ruthless toward my own past actions and the character flaws that had led me back to this place, some days desperate to keep hope alive that someone out there really is looking for me, other days with no hope whatsoever, feeling that I’d had numerous chances and fucked them all up, that at 48 I was past my sell-by date.

Most of my friends proved supportive as I tried to make sense of my current state and find my bearings. But one upon whom I counted and depended, the one whose relationship with me had turned for the worse, used the opportunity to prove once and for all that her words about love and wanting merely to be friends were essentially lies, telling me that I could go deal with my pain somewhere else, that now that her own life was on the upswing she had no time for those whose life was on the downswing: that she associated with winners and that I was a loser. As the relationship had been important to me (at least, if no longer to her), it hit me hard, especially considering that I had played a crucial role in her own healing. She was, and still is, proud of the way she had played me.

We no longer speak; I no longer count her a friend. But the incident began a rather precipitous downward spiral.

Along the way I began to practice Reiki, and became Level II attuned. I practiced on as many friends as I could, and especially on myself. The Level II attunement was frankly more power than I could immediately handle comfortably, and for weeks I felt short-circuited, that I’d lost my ability to touch people and relax them. I couldn’t even relax myself. Emotions and revelations that had needed to rise for thirty years, and which I had done my damndest to drown, began to churn just beneath the surface of consciousness.

And if the Reiki stirred some unpleasant memories and attitudes, Merkaba work took a Cuisinart blender to them. Of the ten workshops I was scheduled to attend, I could only complete the first two before my insides were completely demolished. I literally did not know what hit me, ached in so many places and experienced so much roiling under the armor that I didn’t know where to begin to heal: everyplace seemed equally crucial.

Armor. The canonical Rider-Waite Death card began to figure prominently in daily single-card Tarot readings. The armor did a good job at deflecting things I perceived as bad for my well-being but other things that would have been good for me also never had a chance. And as for what was beneath the armor, I could not find a safety valve to release the building pressure. The only one I had was the music, but that was already written.

Then, of course, a few weeks ago I threw Rahdue’s Wheel, and while what I gleaned from it was mostly positive, the very last card left, the 78th, was in response to a specific question I had about where I was headed. The card was the Five of Pentacles. Whatever was coming was positive, but I would have to endure a long, dark night of the soul first. So it has been.

It’s only been in the last several weeks of not working on DAA and revisiting the Luminous City masters that I’ve slowly come to the understanding that these demons weren’t going to go anywhere unless I allowed them to go—that the blood I had hoped to let was never going to get out of me unless I stopped clutching at the wounds. It is possible, after all, to give your demons such free rein of your psyche that you mistake them for what you are, for actually being you.

I’ve turned 49. Seven sevens. I’ve started on Merkaba work again. I still attend Reiki shares. The third eye is still opening, as it has been for a while now. The dark night of the soul seems sometimes to be past, but elsewhen feels like pre-dawn twilight is inching up along the horizon and I am coming out of the woods.

The past is the past. Fear does not serve us—any of us. Be unafraid. Be very unafraid.

Such are the messages I’ve been getting. Less often these days it’s just easier said..

.. and more often easier done. And getting easier as I go.

I wonder, though, once Luminous City is trundled off to the streaming stations and I resume work on DAA, what kind of shape I’ll be in.

Returning to the differences between DAA and Luminous City, obviously the production quality has gotten a lot better. I went from recording Luminous City at 20-bit 44.1kHz to recording Describing An Arc at 24-bit 96kHz. Probably only the audio engineers among you will appreciate the difference 4 bits per sample and more than twice as many samples per second will have on fidelity, though I’m sure that debates rage somewhere over whether that’s overkill.

But also, in recording Luminous City, because I didn’t have those extra four bits or a proper understanding of digital headroom, I felt compelled to slam the levels just up to the point before things started distorting—and in digital, that’s not a good thing. I followed recipes set out for me in various texts and web pages as to how to get a good sound, and wound up with a fairly lifeless recording. In order to inject some life back into it, I played games with the sound stage, and wound up with music that sounded great in headphones (at the time), but lost half the mix as the sound collapsed to mono listening on loudspeakers at a distance. The new master corrects these issues wherever possible, and this master is the one I’m sending out to streaming stations.

I also find that I am not hiding my voice behind a screen of studio jiggery-pokery nearly as much on DAA as I had on Luminous City. Vocalists whose opinions I respect have told me that my voice has improved, and I’m inclined to agree with them. When I cut the LC vocals, I could carry a tune, but in the intervening years I worked with my church choir, and the more I sang, the better I got. I still might make Pavarotti spin in his grave, but I’m not as unformed a vocalist as I was then. And given the subject matter at hand in DAA, I needed my voice less distorted and more intimate.

The few who have heard my mock-ups of Describing An Arc have all assured me that it’s a hell of a ride both sonically and emotionally. It pleases me to hear that. But having begun to put the events of the past back where they belong, in the past—I’m looking forward to the day I can also put both the labor on this album, and the emotions that gave rise to it, behind me.

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Hello world!

Please be patient while I apply fresh paint to the walls and install the sound system.

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The demands of broadcast, or of self

Actually, broadcast probably has nothing to do with what I’m up to at the moment.. it’s more for myself than anything.

I’ve been hunting around the Innertoobs (be vewy, vewy quiet) in search of progressive-rock-minded radio streams that may wish to take a chance on @Fulcrum music. Silly me, I thought I could just throw my muse up to Tunecore, and it would automagically find its progressive-rock-minded audience. (bzzt) “Tell him what he’s won, Johnny!” “First, a grand total of three or four actual sales off iTunes in the space of a year and nine months! Second, the latest in ladies’ fashion with this Speidel gold-plated wrist band!”

So marketing and self-promotion come into the equation after all, at neither of which I consider myself too terribly adept. And having a listen to the two albums available for your dining and dancing pleasure, I find that one sounds great—this would be the one I did in three weeks, Movement Along A Path. The other, into which I sank three or four years and my marriage, not so much. That would be Luminous City, the current objet d’art under discussion. Mixes collapse into the black hole of phase cancellation; entire instruments drop out at unexpected places; the vocals sound by turns like I am singing from a great distance from the microphone, say atop K2 with the mic (not even an SM-58, but a clone of one) down in a valley, or as if someone were trying to cram marshmallows (or a down pillow) into my mouth as I sang.

While I knew it needed to happen sometime, I hadn’t intended on revisiting Luminous City until after the third (fourth?) @Fulcrum record was completed; I projected a remix for down the road a few years. But on revieing the album with a mind towards actual airplay, it was clear to me that I needed  to revise my plans a little, so as not to embarrass myself or sully the good name of @Fulcrum too terribly much.

And so here in the Sanctum, the Mac sits in its road case for the time being, waiting. I have my old home-built Frankincense pee cee running again for the first time in God knows how long, and am reacquainting myself with the joys of Sonar, Cakewalk’s flagship DAW. It’s been, um, enlightening:

  • Decisions I made at the time in order to conserve CPU resources, for example printing tracks too hot and with too much effect, are coming back to nip at my bum.
  • The tracks weren’t recorded all that well to begin with, a function of what I had to work with at the time.
  • My Traveler interface so far refuses to operate above 16 bit/44.1kHz under Windows XP. This is a head-scratcher. (By contrast, I’m recording Describing An Arc at 24/96 on my Mac, roughly 18 times the resolution of Luminous City.) I cannot work in Sonar’s preferred method of dealing with audio hardware, WDM, because then nothing happens: either the transport fails to move me through the audio, or it moves and no audio actually shows up at the Traveler. I have to use the slightly-more industry standard ASIO driver for any communication to take place, which Sonar will do, but it’s clear to me from working that it doesn’t particularly enjoy speaking a foreign language.
  • An entire track failed to get backed up to my dual-layer DVDs back in 2009 and needs to be recut entirely. I can’t find the session on any of my other backups yet, and it doesn’t still exist on my hard drives. Naturally, it’s the song I think sounds the worst of the lot. Maybe that’s a blessing in disguise.

To my relief, some of the stations I’ve contacted like what they hear and have consented to add Luminous City to their rotation. Just as soon as I can get them a CD or a halfway decent sounding empty-three.

I’d just rather not give them the thing as it stands. For the reasons I’ve described, I’d rather not take a chance that someone hears a song from it and gets turned off by the shoddy workmanship that went into the first mix—which I will readily admit came from the process of being on the low end of the learning curve of the craft of engineering at the time.

So that’s what’s happening down here at the moment. Work on Describing An Arc is at a standstill for now, as (wonder of wonders) I find myself satisfied enough with the models from the first disc that I can feel comfortable presenting them to other musicians for overdubs.

I’m also still working on moving this blog to my own domain, using the standalone WordPress software, but there are the usual technical hurdles to overcome first. As those stations and streams begin playing @Fulcrum, I will let you know here, or there, without fail.

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Good things, bad things, and chains

With the whiteout conditions out of doors, I canceled my trip to Woodstock this weekend and decided to continue working on the next @Fulcrum record. It has turned into an arduous affair, this recording.

Today I got tired of the 500GB Seagate drive finding, then losing power, and the constant nagging from the Finder that I didn’t dismount my drive properly. Well, I didn’t dismount my drive at all, it did it on its own. A few months ago, I had even replaced the enclosure surrounding it, took it out of the one it came in, and swapped it into another (keeping the name Free Agent—maybe I’ll change it to something more befitting its character, for example Holly Golightly). Same thing happening again now inside its Antec USB enclosure. I’m beginning to suspect that it’s the drive, not what I put it in.

What made it more problematic is that this is the drive on which I keep all my documents (my iPhoto library, various Excel spreadsheets and Word documents in support of that novel I still haven’t finished, and sundries accumulated over the last fifteen years)—including all my sessions for the new album. I had meant to back the project folder up to the 1TB La Cie Drive on which I keep most of my other studio-related stuff: AU plug-ins and sample libraries mostly, and today I went ahead and did it, at the same time swapping out the Firewire 400 connection for the Firewire 800 one just because I could (and because I had found the special connector that had come with the La Cie drive).

When I opened a session in Logic Pro 9, I could not believe what I was seeing. Little or no disk churn. The system was no longer coughing up a hairball when there were too many tracks. I’ll have to monitor this more closely in the near term, but so far, this is a Good Thing.

Then I realized that with this newfound throughput, I could conceivably bump my project up to a higher sample rate. I had been doing the roughs at 24-bit 44.1kHz, but my MOTU Traveler will do 24/192.. in theory. And in fact that was one of the main reasons I selected that particular unit: I did eventually intend to record the entire project at that resolution, again, just because I could. So I tried 192 first with the session I had loaded.

Hairballs. Digital clipping, project playing at 3/4 speed or so, what could best be described as smear with clicks and pops. Definitely a Bad Thing.

I backed down to 96kHz. So far, so good, although the CPU seems to be straining, pushing 85-95%. Actually it’s only one core of the CPU, the other is sitting twiddling its thumbs and waiting for something to do. To this point, Logic has done a pretty good job of allocating threads to cores, so I have no bloody idea what’s going on here. Another potentially Bad Thing.

That’s been my day so far, while the snow accumulates outside the windows of the Sanctum Sanctorum and the roads remain pleasantly vacant of cars speeding down the main drag a block south of the house and into the mall abutting the property in the back to the north. The album, and the quietude, have forced me to start to reconsider a few things about life in general and romance in particular, and my relationship with the universe as a side bonus.

I haven’t had a whole hell of a lot to be optimistic about of late, other than the new day gig and the fast start to this album: I’m already about 57 minutes into it if we lay all the roughs end to end. If nothing else, the album is throwing my past failures in my face and demanding that I confront them once and for all: a task I have been avoiding since I was a teenager. I am looking for, and not finding, a common thread as to why they all ultimately failed, and why I find myself alone again at my age.

It reminds me of one of my favorite Demotivators, one which I have bestowed with as much kindness as I could on a few friends in the past, and am thinking about bestowing on at least one or two others present in but fading from my life now, and which I know applies to me too.

Original lifted from despair.org. Go there and see the whole collection. Buy a calendar while you're at it.

And so I find myself in chain-breaking mode– chains I’ve imposed on myself, chains that have tied me to certain others in my life who no longer fit me—and I’m looking for that weak link. I live in hope that recording this album will help me find it.

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With CAPE behind me..

.. I can concentrate on new musical projects. Finally.

First up on my desk is tracking for the next @Fulcrum record, a loosely-connected 70-odd minute description of the rise and fall of a relationship that may or may not involve people I know and have known. It will probably lean a little heavier on prog rock moves than Luminous City did, but when I wrote all these tunes I did try to cram them as chock full of memorable riffs as I could. Give you something to hang on to, yeah?

Much of the pre-pro at the moment involves moving MIDI notes around: the drum maps that came with the Logic drum kits aren’t like those I used to track the original MIDI files, which adhered to the map on my trusty K-2000. Sonar had a relatively easy way to re-map from one map to another, which still involved some time and effort, but I haven’t discovered a similar feature in Logic yet. If I were thinking straight I would look into that now, but I’m about ready for bed after a night’s work.

I owe a couple of people in California, New Jersey, and Australia some tracks, too. Inasmuch as I wasn’t able to make it out to LA in late October to do it in person, and I promised a look in well before this.

Oh, and before I forget, CAPE 8 is here, if you want to hear what we all did this time out. Why not, it’s free to your pockets, with only a suggestion that you donate something to the International Red Cross. My team was Zeitgeist.. and I think it is worth your while.

What the hell.. all of it is worth your while.

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Luminous City: Avarice (Too Much Is Not Enough)

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.

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Luminous City: One AM Deluxe

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.

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Luminous City: Childhood Falls

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.

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Luminous City: Topanga Canyon Blues

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.

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Luminous City: Gaining On Me

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.

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Luminous City: Inbound/Storming Heaven

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.

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Luminous City: Good news and bad news

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.

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Luminous City and Movement: Won’t be long now

Tunecore updates me that they’ve taken care of their end and have sent both Luminous City and Movement Along A Path off to the various vendors so that they can do what they need to do to stock them.

I’m very excited… this is the furthest I’ve ever gotten to having music in which I’ve had a hand released to seek its public.

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Luminous City: Buy it soon

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.

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Still alive and well

Just a short break in the action here at the Sanctum Sanctorum.. lately I have been busier than a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest.

Most of the activity here has been geared toward the piano instrumental album I’ve been threatening for some time now. It isn’t shaping up quite the way I anticipated: I thought, initially, that I would collect some of the things I improvised at various church services over the last several years, spiff them up some, tie a bow on it and have an album on my hands. Easy, and furthermore, peasy.

Yeah, sure. At my church, the theme for this Lent has been (as I am interpreting it, and maybe even in reality) the Creative Spirit. Several of us congregants signed on to do a Lenten Project of some sort, to be worked on during Lent and sprung on the world around Eastertide. Some are quilting, some writing poetry, our minister has busted out her old loom and is weaving, and me, well…

I’m trying to prove to myself that, having taken ten years to do the first album, I could knock another one out in six weeks. Are you ready to take my temperature? (Please don’t stick that one that says “rectal” in my mouth, thanks.)

So since this is as much about the creative spirit as anything else, I opted not to be quite so dogmatic about the music contained on the project, and how I arrived at it. Since I had improvised the music at service to begin with– allowing the spirit to move me and my hands on the luscious keyboard of the Steinway in our sanctuary– I figured the spirit could move me just as easily in my studio. So it has proven.

And so to the point of this, my first care and feeding of this blog in some time: I have a couple of tracks from the album up at my personal MySpace page (not the @Fulcrum page) for your more contemplative moods. I’ve completed about another 30 minutes of music beyond that which I’ve posted there, and I may well have an album on my hands by Easter.

This doesn’t mean that Luminous City will be delayed in its release… now that it is complete– finally, mercifully complete– I am still working on the finer points of the distribution as well, and on aggregating some heavily-marked up text into something vaguely resembling a personal web site so that either of these fine specimens of music will be that much more readily available to those of you who want fine specimens of music in your collection.

 

EDIT: I no longer have a MySpace page of any description. Information will eventually be available here or at my personal site.

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I give up… how DO you record a show…

… with the microphone turned the wrong way?

My unheralded post of 7 April included a tidbit in the first paragraph that I had played a show (it was Gilo’s in East Hartford with the Steve Montano Band) and recorded it with the mic facing the wrong direction. It occurs to me that an explanation is in order, even though no one actually sought it.

Here’s the microphone with which I recorded the show: a Zoom H2.

Like I said, it's a Zoom H2.

And a side view of the same mic.

The same, in profile.

Now, if you look at the grill on the top of the mic, you’ll see that there is actually one on each side—the front face and the rear. The front grill houses a dual mic capsule with the two mics at a 90° angle to each other; the rear grill houses a second dual mic capsule, this one with the two mics at 120°.

The front of the mic faced the band, but I had inadvertently set the mic to only use the rear capsule… the one facing away from the band and toward the bar area. I guess I had intended to turn the mic around and capture the wider stage, but got sidetracked.

So on playback, I heard plenty of noise from the Yankees game on the TV and assorted bar conversations. Many of the people present at the bar masked the actual music we were making, which itself proved heavily comb-filtered thanks to wall reflectiions.

Mea culpa.

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This thing isn’t on… is it?

So, m’kay, I’ve been having a bitch of a time posting anything to my blog at MySpace under any circumstances. I wanted to rant and rave about the show I recorded the other night– with the microphone turned the wrong way– but got countless Unexpected Errors whenever I tried to submit.

That I went back every day for four days trying the same damn thing and hoping for a different result indicates either that I am a Republican (We can WIN the war in Iraq!) or that I am fucking insane. Now, we all know that I am now a registered Democrat, so by process of elimination….

I’m going to move all my posts from there to here, or try to, anyway. Had about enough of having to maintain two blogs, anyway.

Psalm 48 is dead, long live Psalm 46. I’m now working with verses 5-8 from that Psalm in hopes that that provides a more appropriate text for a harp to play over, under, and around. And for a synth in imitation of a harp. And for an organ to support an SSAATTBB choir. The working title of the piece is There Is A River.

I’ve started sketching bits and pieces of the Rick instrumental album– details of which will appear here– but the summary of which is, music derived from improvisations I perpetrated as service music. So far The Fireman’s Carry and Elegy are sketched but not fleshed out.

I’ve taken on an outside project, the construction of which is still being formulated beyond the vocalist and the guitarist; which has stoked a few embers of creative thought that had been atrophying. Yes, the muse is visiting again, thank God, and now she’s pushing me gently toward progressive electronica, examples of which I’ve submitted on spec. While I’m not really at liberty to talk more about it now, I am excited.

Luminous City is still in search of distribution.

MIDI exists for the next @Fulcrum album, and the 25-odd minute Unless And Until is almost finished, finally. Details would not appear here, but would be out at the @Fulcrum page and at WordPress.

Tonight is Open Jam night at June’s.

Thus endeth the project(s) update.

Maybe I was right the first time… taking on all this work I must be daft.

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