OK, not my birthday, but the first anniversary of this blog’s first post. In that time I’ve changed the name of it three times and had to migrate the poorly-read opinions and observations twice in order to reflect project name changes. You’d think it would be simpler than it turned out to be– or maybe it is, and I’m just an ass clown.
Anyway, happy birthday to me, er, my blog.
I’ve been hanging out at Panera Bread quite a lot lately, in part because the aforementioned Chicken Pomodoro on Sesame Semolina Panini bread is to die for, in part because they offer free soda refills, and in part because they have free wi-fi. I find that when I am out of the confines of the sanctum sanctorum (the new one, not the old one, obviously) I am more prone to take care of the non-musical things that need taking care of. Including but not limited to updating the blog, here. Besides, the new s.s. can get quite chilly, it being in a basement halfway built into the side of a hill and this being a New England winter, and all. Anyway.
Several people out of the context of this blog have made sure I was OK, after reading the tales of woe and tribulation stemming from some entries here last September and October at about the same time as I was finishing up Luminous City (or rather at the same time as I thought I was finishing it up). A brief recap, and then, as William Least Heat-Moon wrote, I will shut up about that topic… until another four or five months pass and I am compelled to vent my spleen again.
I’m currently back at home with my parents, and on one side of the coin there’s a bit of guilt about that and maybe some mild embarrassment too that I should be there at my age, but on the other side the circumstances dictated it and what the hell, I’m damned lucky I had a place to land after the house sold. I could well have found myself out with the homeless veterans that Bill O’Reilly says aren’t really out there.
The divorce is not yet final; in fact it has not yet begun. We’re separated, legally still married but that’s about the only sense in which we could be said to be so. The good news is that the grand plan to stay friends seems to be working, so I guess we haven’t been in too much of a holy rush to rock the boat.
My church asked me to become a member of the Board of Deacons for this year and next, and after more trepidation than I could remember about any recent decision of mine (including the ones to ask my wife to marry me and the one to agree to separate from her), I said yes. My fear ran mostly along the lines of the amount of time I could give to the cause, my ability to carry out the extra-ecclesiastical responsibilities incumbent, and my ability to get along with the others– never mind that I’ve known and liked them all for years. As I write I’m to be on retreat for part of the day tomorrow with the other eleven Deacons, and am still nebulous about my role and what I might be able to offer.
The job search is coming along. I have interviewed twice with the State– once in mid-December and once in late January– and, it being the State, I have not heard back on either position yet as from this writing. I interviewed at an IT consultancy at the beginning of this month and at a major insurer about a week and a half ago, and have not heard back on those either.
Hmm. I registered as a Democrat in my new/old home town. In elections past I stayed an independent, but in the wake of this wretched administration, I could not conceive of any possible instance in which I would ever consider voting Republican again– and racked my memory of previous elections to recall whether in fact I ever had, and came up empty. So I was happy to vote in the Super Duper Tuesday primary, and I hope my American readers (both of you) will vote when it’s your turn at the primary pinata. (I have not yet figured out how to make n’s with the tilde character over them on this new MacBook Pro. Which reminds me.)
I began putting together a brand spanking new live rig in anticipation of doing a lot more gigging this year. The rig so far consists of an M-Audio Keystation Pro 88 controller keyboard– weighted piano-style action so as to minimize the mini-clusters to which I’m prone with my fat fingers; a MOTU Traveler interface, not only to talk to my keyboard and my computer but to record the follow-up to Luminous City with much higher resolution; and this MacBook Pro, which is to be the brains of my rig. The soft synths load in here, I play from the keyboard, the Traveler sits in the middle and mediates. That’s the plan, anyway. And that leads me to…
I have actually been gigging quite a bit, though not with the rig I’ve described. Monday nights mostly, at an open jam halfway across the state, but it’s led to a number of very good musicians throwing some live work at me on the weekends, which in turn has led to some phone numbers being exchanged between me and (a) other musicians and (b) a few of the ladies. Having lived with Luminous City for so long, I figured it was OK to start playing other people’s music again, as long as I could do it and could actually make some bread doing it. And that brings me to…
Luminous City is done… again. I have tentatively added a seventh song to the running order: tentative because I hope to use the CAPE version of the song with the performances of a variety of other individuals. I’ve obtained permission from most of them. The song more or less ties in with the album’s loose theme of The Things We Do That Hurt Other People.
I think that’s it– the last four or five months in a nutshell.
Other than plowing through the first three Earthsea books, Bird By Bird, and Genesis Chapter And Verse in a vain attempt to catch up on my reading.
http://thenewcube.blogspot.com/2007/05/cake-or-death.html
Jem Godfrey, driving force behind Frost* (the album Milliontown is perhaps my favorite 2006 release, maybe even of the last five years) holds forth on music, piracy, prog rock, and treading water. As always when he gets his mad on, his thoughts are trenchant and the beginnings of a discussion that should take place somewhere but likely won’t.
Having just discovered the 10MB limit on MP3s at MySpace, I now need to go and re-encode the four Luminous City tracks I had planned to upload in order to fit. That’ll happen later tonight. And here I was, all set to drop our art on y’all.
Although all the performances are mine, I still reflexively think of that music as “ours”– me, the bassist, and the drummer (both of whom shall for the time being remain nameless here). I have been in touch with them recently– my soon-to-be-ex and I visited, and it was a good afternoon and evening all around, and it was more healing for me than I think anybody realized.
I’ve had a couple of people ping me about that last post. I should hasten to mention that my wife and I are going to try to remain friends after all this is said and done– it’s an amicable parting. As my pastor tells me– and I think these are her words– some people are just better at being friends than spouses.
It’s true, I think, that God doesn’t give you more than you can carry… appearances sometimes to the contrary. That there’s a lot of things happening relatively quickly shows that this is the right path.
Having discovered all th0se other Fulcrums out on Myspace (this was before I opted not to maintain a presence there), I went ahead and changed the name of my project to Son et Lumiere, and almost immediately came to regret it. I sounded like a chansonnier, no one could pronounce the name, and any one of a multitude of other potential kisses of death for an American prog/jam band. The flash of inspiration came finally when I added the at-symbol to the former name—an allusion of course that maybe God could use me as leverage in some small way.
I am honestly going to try to be more proactive on this end, for the one or two of you who might still give a damn. In the last four months I have:
So the project, and the album (with a new, improved, truncated title!) has had to wait while I got settled elsewhere. The studio is still not at 100% functionality while I’ve been dealing with the other stuff, and neither has this blog, and to be blunt, neither has my head.
But I’m still more or less alive and optimistic. Doors have closed, and while my second-sight is not yet such that I can find the open windows, I can sense that a breeze is flowing in.
The songs were posted last Saturday and I completely forgot that I promised to provide a link to them when they did.
I have got to say that this might be the strongest batch of songs yet. Twenty teams got songs in, which you would think would dilute the quality somewhat if Sturgeon’s Law holds true, but damn if these don’t raise the bar.
Over to the left you should see a link to The Womb; follow that link to the Collaborations & Connections forum, where all the CAPE V songs live. You can either stream them from Radio CAPE or download them to your hard drive.
My team is Team Resurrection. But all of it is worth your time not just because it’s a proof of concept that nowadays musicians need not even be on the same continent in order to make music together, but because it’s really good, quality stuff that you might just wish you heard more of on the radio.
I’ve been scarce.
The reason is that I’ve been looking for work. Just minutes after my last post here on May 31 (not the one I just posted) I got an e-mail from my contract company telling me that my contract was over. So I’m on the market again and pondering my options.
It’s possible that I will not work in IT again– the market is just too soft. I expect that I started my Associates’ degree work just in time for all the decent IT jobs to go offshore to Brazil, India,Thailand, Taiwan, etc. Story of my life; in 1994 I sat a Novell curriculum just in time for Novell’s market share to be superceded by Windows NT.
The other reason is that the cover art for the CD is killing me. It’s a matter of not grokking POVray quite as well as I ought to in order to achieve the results I’m after. It didn’t help that my previous work some months ago all seems to have gone off missing and I had to start from scratch– including relearning the syntax.
I will be on vacation next week, which will appear to you to be the same posting frequency as if I hadn’t left at all.
And I’m pleased with my team’s (and my) work on it. Everyone brought good ideas to the table, and everyone executed.
The Big Reveal was supposed to be today, but the guy who is doing the mastering for our team (and all the others’) ran a bit afoul of Real Life and paying, high-profile gigs. So I expect that will happen in the next couple of days; a link will appear when one exists.
The song itself is a cool little funk-lite jam that wonders aloud whether the singer would have had the sack to do what Jesus did– reaching out to the poor and the infirm, eventually giving up his life to show and bridge God to man and vice versa.
It took me a while between posts, but that’s what happens with job conditions being what they are.
I would hate to think so. It seemed to me that the interest was simply no longer there, or rather that no one else shared my ongoing enthusiasm for the project. If that happened to be true, or if I was merely seeing what I wanted to see, I find myself unable to determine.
Re-reading that, I am pretty comfortable with the assumption that interest in the @Fulcrum né Radiant City né Fulcrum project (outside my own interest) did not and does not exist among those who took part. I would like to think I would have been in more regular two-way contact in that case, but viewed through this particular prism everyone but me seems to have moved on, from Fulcrum/Radiant City music and from me personally.
I am also comfortable that I did the music justice with my production and didn’t make anyone who originally played in the band out to look a fool. Where possible, I based my performances on theirs, and did so without irony; they were good parts played with people who at that time were as committed as I was. Those who wrote (all of us) will get their royalties, if I can help it.
Clearly I can’t keep obsessing about this. So, my next post on the subject will announce the distribution of Luminous City, and there will be no further between now and then.
I had resolved that I wasn’t going to write any more about the album until I had some form of distribution lined up. As far as that goes I’m still looking at Tunecore but am also considering CD Baby on the recommendation of certain fellow habitués of The Womb Forum. Decisions, decisions.
However, while cruising the Yesfans fora earlier today, I came across a fairly pointed argument in a thread about Roger Waters’ relationship, such as it may be, with his ex-bandmantes in Pink Floyd… which made me reconsider the methods I had taken to finish the album and in some sense brings me back to my first post on the subject.
Orbert writes, in response to the suggestion that to hold grudges is a somewhat childish action:
I don’t have any problem with grown men harboring bad feelings. Not in this case anyway. If someone says something bad about me, okay, whatever. If someone totally screws me out of the work I’ve done, and destroys the band I helped form and put 20 years of my life into, am I supposed to just say “Oh well. People make mistakes.” It was not a mistake; it was a deliberate and calculated series of acts designed to optimize his power to see his vision fulfilled, at the expense of everyone and everything else, including the very band that made any of it possible. He totally shat on everyone around him. Everyone else is being petty by not simply forgiving him and agreeing to work with him again?
And I started wondering to what extent I had emulated Waters in the course of following through with the @Fulcrum album and not inviting anyone else to take part in it. I could well have invited, for example, the bassist and drummer to have a boo at the old songbook– whether they would have said yes or no, or how long I would have had to wait on their schedules, I couldn’t even guess; I never asked.
You could be forgiven for thinking, does it even matter? The album isn’t even out yet, and you’re not famous, and if you keep chopping that tree down with a herring like you’ve been doing, and no one reads your blog, is it still a shitty thing to do, and you’re not famous anyway, you egoist, and for all you know none of the other musicians even care one way or the other, and by the way did I mention that you’re not famous, and–
No. I’m not famous. (Maybe only slightly notorious among a miniscule cross-section or two of the populace.) I have a few close friends, the best of whom is my wife of almost ten years; that’s all I require as far as companionship. To suggest that fame exempts one from behaving decently towards one another is self-evidently ludicrous. There are ripples even in a small pond, and to paraphrase the song, ripples never come back…. at least not in ways we can predict.
Consider this scenario:
When Ian Anderson first started to track the album that would become A, he enlisted the help of a few sessioneers, including Eddie Jobson on violin and keys, Mark Craney on kit… and Martin Barre from the day gig on guitar. That last inclusion might have pushed the album over an edge somewhere in the mind of some accounting department mook. When the record company convinced Anderson that the album should not be marketed as an Ian Anderson solo record but rather as a Jethro Tull album, Anderson effectively gave the sack to three musicians who had been with the band for quite a long time and had done nothing worse than not participate in the solo album-turned-Tull album. His own hand-wringing over the subject is documented; the reactions of Messrs. Barlow, Evans, and Palmer (well.. nowadays it would be Mme Palmer) are not, to the best of my knowledge.
To what extent we can consider that dismissal an honest mistake is an argument in which I am not prepared to engage, by virtue of the fact that I wasn’t there and I only have Anderson’s side of things.
Waters’ moves to have Rick Wright dismissed from Pink Floyd may have been honest, or not, depending on whether you’re talking to Waters or to Wright; but there was no mistaking his intentions. Gilmour and Mason shrewdly determined that Waters was going to dismantle Pink Floyd and rebuild it in his own image, by first getting rid of Wright, then Mason, and then, if need be, Gilmour. Gilmour and Mason were not willing to allow that to happen– they had invested too much of their time and effort over the years– and Waters wound up quitting instead, on the assumption that the true Floyd fans would follow the work of its chief auteur (there’s that word again) and dismiss anything the others might attempt as a Pink Fraud.
Which, as you knew it eventually must, brings me back to me.
Did I, in Orbert’s words, totally shit on everyone else, the way he accuses Waters of doing?
I would hate to think so. It seemed to me that the interest was simply no longer there, or rather that no one else shared my ongoing enthusiasm for the project. If that happened to be true, or if I was merely seeing what I wanted to see, I find myself unable to determine.
Maybe there is no relationship. Maybe I’m just waiting for the caffeine to kick in.
I wondered if having that NY&CH album in my head all day long for a soundtrack wouldn’t be a hassle. Not really, it’s been quiet at the day gig, touch wood.
But I just got up to Rapid Transit in my head and just now heard the punchline– which reminds me that modular synthesis, like pretty much everything else if you think about it for a moment, comes and goes out of fashion… as people who have been working with it for ages decide they want to streamline their work methodologies, and as kids with ROMplers wonder if that’s really all there is to synthesis.
“Every wave is new until it breaks.”
I’m in search of a correlation between these two occurrences of the term in my private cranial relational database.
Maybe there is no relationship. Maybe I’m just waiting for the caffeine to kick in.
Really. I spent the next three or so years rebooting Win 98 SE every time the graphics interface got confused and froze my machine, and intermittently getting work done and cursing the fact that I could not automate my fader moves. The album’s playlist changed here and there along the way, but to list all those permutations would take more time than I have or more than you would care to devote to hearing about it. (It’s probably enough that you’re listening to these rants.)
My wife, halfway sick to death of my incessant complaining and the other half tired of the way this project was keeping me from her, authorized funds allocation for a new machine in 2004. I chose an Abit AI7 mainboard (thereby not repeating the same mistakes I had made with the previous system, namely that it was not a PC Chips board, had no onboard graphics, and possessed a real Intel chipset as recommended by Echo Audio), 2.8 GHz P4, 1 GB DDR SDRAM, 550 watt power supply. An upgrade of 98 SE to XP Professional, and of Cake Pro Audio to Sonar, and that was that pretty well sorted. That is still my production system today; the old machine is now relegated to staging/development status.
I made various passes at the album over the last three years, picking up some of the Radiant City canon and discarding other bits, and generally getting discouraged and letting it lie for a while here and there before picking it up again. Up until this last attempt at it, which I started in November, I never truly got the results I was looking for.
The tracks were already there, more or less– that is, they were in a state I could work with. (Translated: they didn’t sound like I was playing with my feet.) It was the actual balancing that had always given me grief in the past, but now– I found I was managing quite well. I think what did it for me was discovering and using the mono button on the 2-bus. That’s all I’ll say about that particular revelation.
I managed to force my attention on pieces the band had had a hand in writing, as opposed to things I had written and the band had played. More often than not this represented music that had come from jamming in the rehearsal space, or snippets brought forward by the others, which I fanned into full flame. (The next record, I believe, will feature the remainder of that material and quite a bit of the solo-written stuff in the Radiant City repertoire, and maybe a surprise or two.)
But I think the main difference with this attempt at mounting Everest was that this time, I assigned a drop-dead completion date (in this case, February 1). After that date, I reasoned, I would have it behind me and know it.
It… didn’t quite work out that way. As alluded to in previous entries here, I’ve done some tweakies since, and have a few more yet to do. But hey… it’s almost ready to drop.
Almost.
The CAPE team is proceeding at a leisurely pace. We lost one member to a new job, and I can’t say I don’t know what it’s like to get a new job and devote yourself to learning it, at the expense of all other pursuits. I did quit music while I was in Binghamton after all. Other than that, we’re yea close to backing tracks and getting set to track solos and vocals in the month remaining.
I hear one or two little things that I know are going to annoy me on the Luminous City master unless I fix them– the odd instrument buried or poking its head out a little too far– and I will probably rebalance those in the next week or so.
At the moment I’m reading up on a place called Tunecore which looks like it might fit the distribution bill quite well, at first glance.
I’m slowly getting my voice back again after a week of sinus woes. The weather is changing, slowly, and my head always feels it when it does. Nice to see the first crocus leaves poking out alongside the house though.
I smell Froot Loops. Don’t ask me why.
Oh, if only a GPS existed back in 1996. If only one existed now that could help you find your way out of internal disillusion back to emotional well-being.
I posted a few days ago about having had the “living bejeebus” disappointed out of me. It would come back, or I would rediscover it, for long spells afterward, up till the last of the Fulcrum sessions in the above-mentioned Chateau de Colicky Baby, but it was around about the time I went to live in Binghamton that I first noticed it had gone off missing and I simply couldn’t find it again. So if you see a living bejeebus up that way that might resemble me, do let me know won’t you?
Carlos Santana had a very telling thought which I’ll paraphrase here (because I don’t have his actual quote handy): that music is a very stern, unforgiving mistress, and if you allow her to leave, eventually she will. Perhaps the fastest way to allow the muse to leave is to just not pay any attention to her. Well, I ignored her for as long as I could, as I struggled to learn a new job in what I believed then would be an exciting career in IT…
… And visualized myself as an old man wondering if I had really given it my best shot, back around the turn of the century, when I was still relatively young.
When my job moved back to Connecticut in 1997, I began playing loose jams again, here and there, trying out for other people’s quasi-prog projects and never getting a second callback. Looking back at those auditions it wasn’t that I couldn’t cut the material, but that rather I went into them with all the hubris in the world, thinking that once they got a load of my compositions they would want to relinquish control to me on the spot.
That didn’t happen. Everyone’s an auteur, after all.
And so, proceeding on that assumption, and sensing that no one was going to take my own claim to that title seriously unless I could do it myself, I decided that I would.
And here is where a GPS would have come in handy. I was not an engineer. I had only the vaguest idea of getting things on tape, only the faintest scent of pushing the needle into the red without overly distorting one of the four tracks on the metal-oxide cassette. Hell… while we’re on that subject, I was using four-track cassette, and not a name brand either. That might have been fine for Bruce Springsteen, but clearly for my purposes it would take better equipment than that which I had available to me.
It took me until 2000 to obtain it: a 400 MHz P4, with a whopping 384MB of RAM, that ought to have run Cakewalk Pro Audio under Windows 98 SE without any issues whatsoever. The sound card then is the sound card now: Echo Layla 20-bit.
And, as far as it went, it did. At least, Cakewalk didn’t seem to be the cause of the routine system freezes that would occur every half hour or so. The problem was of course on the mainboard, a cheap PC Chips board which I had bought because it was cheap (remember, money was an issue). It used a support chipset that was not an Intel BX7 chipset but an incredible Taiwanese simulation. Which is to say, an incredibly bad simulation for my purposes. The BIOS made reference to features that were not on the mainboard, for example overclocking and AGP. The onboard graphics were barely up to the task– I cannibalized an old Matrox board from a PC my brother had gotten rid of, and that seemed to do the trick.
From there it was a lot of trial and error: first, learning to get the sounds onto disk and not having them sound limp-wristed, as both previous opportunities had done. I could not for the life of me figure out what was different about those all-digital albums that I had listened to and revered– besides the fact that the studios had about ten times as much equipment as I had.
On a lark, one night, I patched my old Carvin powered PA desk inline between my K-2000 and Layla. And the answer to that question at least came clear. Here was the color, the warmth I had been looking for.
Which only left the trial and error of deciding which of the old Fulcrum né Radiant City né Fulcrum songs I was going to record, and the trial and error of actually recording them and not making myself sound too much like an assclown.
I find myself strangely unmoved by the fact that the “classic” three-man Genesis lineup have reformed and are touring this year and possibly next.
Genesis were an abiding musical passion for rather a long time in my musical development, ascending over Emerson Lake & Palmer when Works Volume 1 came out in 1977 and disappointed the living bejeebus out of me; and lasting until the mid-1990s at least when I found myself finally devouring more Pat Metheny Group than Genesis. Even had I not been a Metheniac, Calling All Stations would have pretty much closed the door on my fascination– a game effort to regroup, but the songs quite frankly sucked across the board.
In retrospect I don’t think there was any way Ray Wilson was going to get a fair shake taking over as front man. He wasn’t going to make anyone forget Phil Collins while Phil was still elsewhere in the solo limelight and the public consciousness; people simply never stopped identifying Collins with Genesis.
That said, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford could have salvaged something of the band’s reputation by the simple act of sticking with Wilson and cutting another record with him as vocalist, if not inviting him to write with them. God knows the songwriting couldn’t have gotten any worse– Calling All Stations was sub-Gentle Giant in its affected poppiness. But a second record would have legitimized Wilson as having once and for all taken the job and made it his own, quite potentially giving Genesis legs into the next decade. Instead, the Genesis front man gig came to resemble something bequeathed upon Wilson at the pleasure of Messrs Banks and Rutherford, and just as suddenly taken away again.
As it is, it looks like Banks merely had to wait for Collins to come back before resurrecting the venerable trademark– a risky gambit on his part since Collins didn’t have to come back and was indeed in the process of what he called a “farewell tour”. That Collins’ “farewell tour” wasn’t a farewell after all makes him look rather foolish, and makes Banks look a little bit desperate– and I think that’s part of why I can’t be arsed to go and get tickets to see them reunited.
I don’t want to associate Tony Banks, or Genesis, with desperation– and now I find that I cannot help but do so.
Because who stood to lose the most from Genesis not existing? Rutherford at least has, or had, Mike and the Mechanics, not that they’ve been making serious inroads Stateside of late, so he at least had something on which to fall back. Collins could have a solo career for as long as he damn pleased and when he didn’t feel like touring any more, he could still go hone the art of inane pap in the name of Disney.
What did Banks have outside of Genesis? A solo record of orchestral compositions (seven of them, hence the name, Seven) that sold only marginally well to Genesis fans and didn’t really convert anyone else. Not a terribly compelling reason for a record company to let him do another. Unless somehow Genesis were still somewhere on the scene…. Hmm.
Now, I understand a man’s got to eat. I just think it could all have been finessed a little differently– and the recent fracas involving their web site moving to a paid-membership model only underscores the point.
So when they come trundling their massive light show through the Northeast, I’m going to spend that evening going back over the old stuff– anything up to and including the so-called Shapes album (of course it’s actually their eponymously-titled album). Maybe I will use Invisible Touch for skeet shooting.
It wasn’t long afterward that the jazz-influenced guitarist with whom I had recently begun to work had managed to convince me that I was being held back by the drummer’s attitude. Internally, I reasoned that she had always had carte blanche before; but in the same breath, that I was doing a disservice to the music and to everything I thought Fulcrum could be if I didn’t stand firm myself in my quest to move into something more orchestrated.
The drummers that my new guitar-playing friend had in mind were not terribly compelling substitutes for the finesse she had brought to the gig, however, and the guitarist himself was as occupied with his own music as I was with mine. Things looked rather bleak– no band, no prospects for a band, and I was about to lose my day job.
But my guitarist friend had one last ace up his sleeve: he had done quite a few sessions with a local studio owner who sought to become a label entrepreneur, and the guy was looking for new artists. Moreover, the would-be Berry Gordy seemed to like what I was doing.
The paradigm for his label was that no one start to profit till everyone started to profit together. Of course there’d be the usual overhead associated with running USDA Grade A electricity through the various DA-88s, the LA2A, and the Neve; and he was still working out the details of getting all the music distributed; but the recording and engineering, to be done in his well-appointed basement studio, would cost nothing.
My jazz-happy guitarist friend would be happy to backslide into something more visceral for the occasion, and I managed to convince my old bassist and drummer to revisit the material for the session (over the mild protestations of the guitarist). About the only person unhappy with the way things were about to go down was: the wife of the studio owner, who complained relentlessly to her husband (and within earshot of the musicians in the studio) about the lack of money coming in from the studio. It was a good thing the vocal booth was well-isolated and the recording room was floated, because the control room wasn’t terribly well insulated and the sounds of a crying child– terrible twos, it sounded like– managed to filter down from time to time.
Two sessions later, wearing my producer’s hat, I was pretty much at everybody else’s throat, and they at mine; and to show for it I was no more happy with the sound of what we were doing than I had been two Januarys before. I couldn’t understand it. I had heard music that had come out of the studio, and the unprocessed DA-88s sounded rich and robust even before any processing. What was it that I was missing?
Money to pay for the sessions. The wife had finally won out, and the engineer was forced to abandon his pie-in-the-sky business model. He wound up keeping the session tapes, and as far as I know still has them, maybe, that is if his studio still exists.
I went off to live in Binghamton NY to work for IBM and thought at the time that I was abandoning music once and for all.
Two weeks ago or so I wrote this about the imminent completion of the Luminous City album:
I feel like I lost a few people along the way and may yet lose others, and I would like to examine whether coming up with this– this album, of which I am proud– was all worth that price.
I don’t know that I could have put this record together quite this way if I had tried, or if, had I started again from the same point and with the same point of view, it would have happened exactly the same way.
My prime motivation was to realize my vision of what the music could be. My secondary motivation was not to spend a lot of money doing it, because money was, and is, in short supply.
The band began as Fulcrum in the early 90s as a cover act performing primarily Police and Genesis covers from a decade previous. To differentiate that time in our lives from the one I proposed to move the band in– writing material that owed to progressive but wasn’t itself– I renamed us Radiant City (after Le Corbusier of course, and I later discovered that there were at least two other great minds out in the world who had named their bands that as well).
After a few months of gigging and accruing a handful of fans, we took third place overall in a battle of the bands series in September 1995, thereby winning an hour’s worth of recording time at a local studio in January 1996. Gee, an hour should be enough time to record 45 minutes or so of our best material, I thought.
If I recall, it was in December that our guitarist announced that he was getting married and was in the market for a house. He would henceforth have little or no time for music. Somehow I managed to convince him to at least record the session with us, which I felt would make it a bit easier for us to find another guitarist afterward.
At the studio, we ran down the 45 minutes of music we had rehearsed, and rehearsed, and rehearsed. We had not taken time to write anything new since, oh, July, before the battle of the bands series began.
Something sounded awfully funny on playback. And not in a ha-ha funny way… we sounded flat, lifeless. It could have been that we were recording to ADAT. It could have been that we were ready to move on from the material we were recording, and had in fact been ready for that back in September. But the music, our music, just lay there and didn’t leap out at us, the way my four-track models had done when I had initially presented them to the band.
Moreover, we discovered that one of the mic cables had shorted and not been working for the entire session. As this cable was connected to an overhead mic– one of the ones the recording engineer had hung over the drum kit– the drums especially sounded like they were under pillows, with no dimension to the sound from the kit. We discussed the engineers’ blunder for just long enough for them to laugh at our suggestion that we re-track the drums on their dime at some future date.
Then… then the fatal thought presented itself in my mind, the one that would seal my fate for roughly the next decade and a half.
I can do better than this.
Never mind that I was not an audio engineer of any variety– recording, mixing, mastering. I would just learn. How hard could it be? I have good ears. Should be a wizard wheeze, a veritable piece of piss.
Not long after the session, our bassist advised me that he just did not have the patience to go through another protracted search for a suitable guitarist, so he would be leaving the project himself.
So, in February 1996, that left me and the drummer (the now-departed bassist’s girlfriend, now wife). And with me writing again and pushing the project (now once again called Fulcrum) into a more old-school-progressive direction than the post-progressive direction Radiant City had taken, she let me know in a dozen subtle ways that she wasn’t going to be terribly happy with playing parts that were scored out to even a minimal degree.
Something was going to have to give.
I should have seen this coming.
A couple of days ago I mentioned CAPE. That’s starting to take my life over, now that I’ve also gotten into the routine of guitar classes on Mondays and hatha yoga on Tuesdays. Choir on Wednesdays, half an hour south in New Haven. And learning POV-ray for the album art is turning out to be a bigger curve than I had anticipated.
On top of that, my sound card is starting to introduce significant latency when I want to record MIDI– on the order of 300ms between striking a key and hearing the note. So that’s going to put a crimp in my CAPE activities till I can get that sorted.
On the upside, I did hear from a fellow in Perth, who advises that he is at least marginally entertained by this blog. So someone’s reading… which in spite of my lousy timing in starting this more or less makes it worthwhile to keep doing.
I did warn you however that this would be a sporadic thing.
Obscure references to Vonnegut aside, I’m sure no one has particularly missed the fact that I haven’t been posting very much over the last couple of days. Been trying to get myself up to speed on POV-ray to see whether I can contrive anything decent for the front cover of the Luminous City CD… and been thinking about a keyboard part or two for my team.
I use the term “team” quite pointedly. This is CAPE time at The Womb. (I have a link elsewhere on this page, I think.)
What happens during CAPE (Collaborative Audio Production Experiment) is that members at the Womb fora sign up to be placed on a team– a temporary construct consisting of musicians, an engineer, and a point man. I am my team’s vocalist, keyboardist, and point man this time out.
The point, beyond producing a song in three months’ time from a standing start, is accumulating relationships with musicians and engineers from all over the world– my current team has members from Australia and New Zealand, and Texas in addition to New Hampshire and Nashvegas. (or was it Memphis? I’ll edit this later). In previous CAPEs I’ve worked with and befriended cats from Sweden, France, England, Canada, and Los Angeles (think about it… if you noticed, I also singled Texas out, above).
No drama to report, which makes for smooth sailing and lousy blogging.
I’ve been telling myself for the last couple of weeks now that Scenes From A Luminous City, Fulcrum’s first album, is 99% complete.
The first thing holding me back from signing off on it is the packaging. I’ve got the text laid out– haven’t assembled or rendered any of the graphics. The photography will probably take care of itself but the digital imaging is a bit of a learning curve. That’s the least of my worries at this stage.
Then there’s this annoying problem with the way Wavelab (and before that Samplitude) has interacted with my CD burner: the very end of the program is punctuated with a loud, speaker-tearing pop. I have to conclude that it’s something with the burner itself, since this occurs no matter whether I author in Samp or in Wavelab. And as I’ve just flashed my burner’s firmware to its most recent (and presumably final) version, I’m pretty well stumped as to why.
There were also issues with some of the individual WAV files magically losing 3-6 dB of overall program volume. Some, not all. I have no idea what caused that, but switching from Samp to Wavelab cured it, so I think I’ve tamed that one for the most part. That and the pop are the last things I truly need to fix before I move on to the album art and layout.
At the same time that I am proud of the work I’ve done on the production and engineering, it will be a relief to have this behind me. I mean, it’s taken me a dozen years to get to a point where I could safely say that I’ve documented this properly.
Writing that, it seems I must be among the privileged few who can honestly answer the question: why would an album take a dozen years to make? And as often as I have perused the music news sites online, I don’t see Peter Gabriel or Tom Scholz going out of their way to discuss what the hell takes them so long– but they are widely reputed to be perfectionists.
So what’s my excuse? I’m not a perfectionist (anyone familiar with my sloppy keyboard technique will attest to that– including and especially the people whose parts I recreated in the process of documenting this music); and besides, computers were supposed to make all this stuff easier. Weren’t they? Huh?
If I had to sum up: I glommed onto the music I made with my last band and, like a pit bull shaking a slab of raw meat, refused to let go (even after it became apparent to me that everyone else had let go) until I was finally able to force it into a recording that didn’t embarrass any of us.
Now that we’ve established that I can answer the question honestly, do you reckon I should?
You should be so lucky that I had said, “no.” Because I feel like I lost a few people along the way and may yet lose others, and I would like to examine whether coming up with this– this album, of which I am proud– was all worth that price.
… is just a tunnel. And sometimes it ties in to other things.
This blog used to be presented on one of the other stock presentation templates here at WordPress, the one with the tunnel under fluorescent lights (which gave it the usual green cast), but I kind of liked it for its starkness.
The soundscape of the album– 99% done as I type– takes place in an urban environment. By that I don’t mean that this is the kind of music you might necessarily hear in the big city, with jokers in hatchbacks grinding the pavement beneath them to powder with their subs, or a four-on-the-floor beat to hypnotize you into a stupor.
That the music on this album resides in a city is just background knowledge. You don’t need to know that to enjoy it– you do need to know that it is somewhat progressive in nature.
And if you want the truth, I guess I also needed to maintain a bit of tunnel vision to finish the damn thing.
