名作記

Every so often, I’ll indulge in a bit of fantasy, proclaiming how I’m going to work on this project or that project, write this album or that EP. And at the time, I didn’t think I could actually come within striking distance of achieving that kind of focus.
Well, I’ve been revisiting this idea I had since high school — writing a musical.
I’m not sure how fond I am of that idea because I haven’t really been building the compositional chops for a theatrical work. But a concept album or song cycle? That would be a good step.
Long ago and far away, I kept threatening to write a musical called War. I didn’t know which war or what kind of war, but I wanted to write a heavy metal musical called War. I am not going to follow through on this idea. In these times, it’s distasteful.
Thing is, I’ve already been organizing the songs I have and the songs I’ve been working on into loose projects, and throwing a song cycle on top of that growing list? I’m afraid of overextending myself.
Then I realized — it’s been a while since I’ve actually reviewed all the half-assed brainstorming and concrete ideas I’ve been collecting. So I’m combing the archives and consulting the lists to make an inventory, much like this one.
Here goes:

「風の歌を聴け」

I’m calling this my Wayne Horvitz rip-off EP. Three-fifths of it is already done, and I’ve got a good idea of the fourth song. The fifth is a complete blank. But I feel I’m close.

A Ghost in My Shadow

The original project. Problem, though — I’ve been cannibalizing it. Four songs from it have already been reassigned to Imprint, and another two form the basis of 「風の歌を聴け」. So really, I’m not sure whether this project will exist by this time next year.

Revulsion (formerly, Stylish Number Girl)

I haven’t done much with this one, but then again, I haven’t been writing with a guitar. And that will be my gimmick for this project — to write with an instrument I’m not skilled at playing. I do have about six sketches, which is a lot by comparrison.

Shift Your Paradigm

Seven sketches for this project have been sitting around, so I would like to try to finish it. It’ll be more introspective than Imprint but not as bugfuck crazy as 「風の歌を聴け」.

8.0s

Ha! I keep thinking I’m joking about writing a full-on new wave project, but I’ve got a narrow window of opportunity here — the 80s are fashionable again, what with the Killers and Franz Ferdinand and the like. And honestly? I actually have songs written in the style, more closer to Duran Duran than anything. So this may still happen yet. But probably not in time for the Killers and Franz Ferdinand to go out of style.

Chronology Protection Conjecture

This idea so didn’t stick, I didn’t realize I had it till I read my archive. But one of my other hair-brained ideas was writing a song cycle about string theory. You know — The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene … Maybe.

Voodoo

This was a working title of what eventually became Imprint.

[Untitled covers album of Japanese rock songs]

This entry mentioned covers I wouldn’t mine doing, but I don’t have enough material to perform the kind of transformations I want to do. An album of Japanese cover songs, though, has a lot more potential — I’d be hard-pressed to narrow it down. I already know I want to try some Quruli, Supercar, Shiina Ringo, maybe Number Girl and perhaps “Count Down” by Cocco … Oh, and I’m going to use the moniker Deathcake Yumi.

Secular

I never think of this project till Christmas comes around. And maybe this year with my studio built, I may finally tackle it. The idea was to make a Christmas album entirely of sacred songs. Calling it Secular is sarcastic on my part.

Stigmata and Chess

I just like the idea of using these as titles. But now that I think of it, I could probably rename 8.0s to Chess and give the untitled Japanese cover record the code name Stigmata.

I haven’t posted anything about my fiction in, oh, more than a year. But my trip to New York City was just the thing to clarify a few points. I know approximately where my characters live:

• Crux — Starts off near Kip’s Bay/Murray Hill, ends up in Gramercy
• Shaun — Upper West Side, near Lincoln Center.
• Crash — East Village, definitely. Alphabet City, most likely.
• Gary Huang — Starts off in Chelsea with Sam; Ends up on Christopher Street after Sam; Moves Midtown to be with Mitch.
• Mitch Warren — Midtown. Are there residential units in Midtown?
• Eric — Central Park South.
• Steve Holt — Chelsea.
• Phyllis — Greenwich Village.
• Ben Chang — Chelsea. (I haven’t actually written anything with Ben, but he’s something on the side for Gary).
• Kevin — Christopher Street. (He’s something on the side for Mitch. He has a brief mention in the first book.)

I haven’t quite pinpointed where Crash’s love interest, Det. Cleary, lives, but I’m thinking Brooklyn. (I’m thinking of changing Cleary’s first name from Mark to Jack or Jake. It sounds more cop.)
Maybe I should try to write something now …

Five minutes after I wrote this entry, I figured it out — mix all the MIDI parts to a digital audio track, reverse it, then overdub the metal effect over the reversed audio, cut and paste the effect in the appropriate spot, and reverse it as well.
No more guesswork.
Duh.

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Tonight, I really messed up all the work I did on “Hear the Wind Sing” by pasting tempo information in places where I shouldn’t have. As a result, a good number of my audio clips were time shifted, and I had to re-record them.
I also spent a lot time on Japanese TV and radio sites, looking for a stream with a female broacaster. Most of the clips I found were done by men. I eventually found a news report with a woman correspondent, so I recorded that and manipulated it to create the babbling effect on the original file.
In the end, I used 19 tracks in all, six of them for digital audio. And damn, are the results really weird.
I have to say — I was proud of myself when I did this song on a four-track recorded, bouncing things around and creating all the same effects. Now that it’s spread out the way it’s supposed to be, I’m impressed by the sheer ambition of working within earlier limitations.
There’s still a lot to tweak though.

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By contrast, I managed to put together “Downtown Downpour” in a just about a single evening. (I don’t have the bizarre solo section in the middle, though.)
I added an acoustic bass part to this version that doesn’t appear in the earlier draft. You can barely tell it apart, though. I only have it playing on the downbeats, and the bass part of the electric piano masks it.
There’s still part of me drawn to adding more instrumentation to this song, but the song itself has resisted such measures, that I just may leave it as it is.

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I’ve budgeted another two tracks for 「風の歌を聴け」, and I’ve been working on this one song that consists entirely of two chords: D-major and E-major. (D/F# and E/G# finish off the four-bar phrase.)
I like the challenge of trying to write songs with as few chords as possible. It means the melody has to be all the more distinctive. The problem with this chord progression, though, is that it doesn’t really resolve. So I just may not let it.
I’m no fan of fade-outs, but if the shoe fits …

Tonight is one of those nights when I’d like to find the little druggie shits who burglarized my apartment in 1998 and beat the living crap out of them.
I spent the last two nights reconstructing “Hear the Wind Sing”, the first song I wrote using my 4-track recorder as much as my MIDI workstation. I’m definitely proud of this song, the least for which I used a 4-track recorder to make what essentially required 24 tracks.
I bounced a lot of stuff around and came up with a very thick, dissonant work that came close to the kind of music I hear in my head.
It was easy to control the recorder, to record a track backward if I wanted to achieve an effect, to boost one part over another, to mix down a gaggle of voices to one track, to sift a synthesizer through a distortion pedal.
I got what I was looking for pretty quickly. At the same time, I knew a 4-track recorder to realize something that needed six times as room wasn’t going to cut it.
But in the interim, the masters from which this song was created were stolen in the burglary. I couldn’t even begin to touch this song again without the capability to record multi-track.
Well, I had enough foresight back in 2000 to buy myself Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 as a birthday gift, knowing that while it wasn’t ProTools, it would one day help me get back what I lost.
So for the last two nights, I reconstructed as best I could the song and all its elements. (I’m missing a set of “Japanese voices” because that source tape also got stolen, and there aren’t any Japanese radio stations in Austin.)
And man — it needs much, much more work.
The biggest challenge is backmasking. I have a synthesizer effect called “Metal FX”. It makes a big whoosh! at the start, then fades away. On the 4-track, I recorded the effect backward so it would make a crescendo effect when played forward. I could easily time the beginning and end of the effect by listening to other tracks playing in reverse.
It’s not the same with Cakewalk.
I’ve had to record the effect forward, reverse the digital audio, line it up with the rest of the tracks, then decide whether I liked it. It’s a tedious process. And I dislike the amount time I have to spend on it, knowing there’s any easier way to do it.
There’s a patch on my original K4 — the one that got stolen — that somehow isn’t included in the Sysex dump I grabbed from Kawai. And it’s a patch that’s very central to another song I wrote a long time ago. I’m not sure what it’s called or whether I can even find it. But it has a better timbre — a better feel — than the substitute I’m using for it.
Once the digital audio elements are completed, I have to go back and fix the levels — I could do that on the fly with the 4-track, but with digital, I have to program that manually. I also have to do the same with the MIDI. Some of the parts that were meant to be background are just too loud.
In short, I have to go through a far more rigorous process than I had to with the 4-track.
And while it’s a creative challenge, it’s also very tedious.
I dislike tedium.
And that’s why I’d like to kick the asses of the little druggie shits who burglarized my apartment in 1998.

I’m a long way from even considering Imprint finished, and yet, I don’t want to get stuck working on just those songs.
So I’m continuing with my next project — a decidedly more dissonant set. I’m thinking a 5-track EP, along the lines of enigmatics.
It’ll include two songs from A Ghost in My Shadow — “Downtown Downpour” and “Hear the Wind Sing”.
I’ve already completed the first track of this new project — “A Simple Song“. It’s a solo piano piece, two voices — no real harmonic rhythm, just a melody and a bass line at total odds with each other.
It should give you an indication of how dissonant I want it to be.
And I may even use “Hear the Wind Sing” as the title track, except I’ll use the original title which inspired the song — Kaze no Uta wo Kike. Or rather 「風の歌を聴け」.

I didn’t really know till tonight the kind of effect my one-year-old nephew has on me. Even though he lives in Chicago, the idea of him is comfort enough.
I also never thought I’d be using an Andrew Vachss title as a reference point for a lyric, let alone write from the (what I imagine would be the) perspective of a new parent.
But nonetheless, I dashed off some lyrics for the music I just completed, putting Imprint all that much closer to completion. So here is “A Chance to Get It Right“.
“A Chance to Get It Right”
March 13, 2005
In the moment we first met
How could I anticipate what I felt?
Everything I knew before
Just didn’t seem to work
All you did was be yourself
It worked like a magic charm (perfectly)
Nothing I knew till that point
Seemed relevant at all
I thought that I was the kind
To pass on my own mistakes
You give me one more chance
A chance to get it right
In those moments since we met
You engage me with your charm (perfectly)
I just hope that I provide
A path you want to take
‘Cos I don’t think I’m the kind
To pass on my own mistakes
You give me one more chance
A chance to get it right
I may not have known the value
Of giving selflessly
But you are the reason I would
Do so much more
In the moment we first met
How could I anticipate what I’d feel?
Everything I knew before
Everything I know right now
I just hope that it’s enough
For me to get it right
You are one more chance
A chance to get it right

I just finished music on the 10th track of Imprint, and I don’t plan on writing any more new material for this project. This latest song — untitled, of course — seems to fit in near the end of the track listing just fine. Any other additions may throw the sequencing off.
I originally planned to write a dub-influenced track, a la “Slave Song” by Sade or “Intensity (You Are)” by ACO. I was even thinking about lifting the drum beat from “Secret Oktober” by Duran Duran. But it was an incongruous fit, and I couldn’t pluck out any sort of hook from that rhythm.
After I finished work on the title track itself, the mood of the album shifted, and a dub track would have stuck out.
So I had to write something from scratch.
I came up with this one chord progression, but it sounded a bit too inspirational. I think it was influenced by Sasagawa Miwa. I decided not to pursue it.
Then a few days ago, I took an inventory of everything — finished and unfinished songs. That meant scouring the entire contents of my old demo tape, in addition to browsing through this entry. I ran across a reference to an old sketch I made:

Untitled (“elevator”) I don’t know what this chord progression stands for, but I’m guess “elevator” refers to “elevator music”. Still evaluating the potential.

I vaguely remembered that chord progression and decided to unearth it. The sketch was dated January 1998 — seven years ago! — and it was eight bars. It fit well with the general tone of Imprint but was markedly different. So I expanded on it, gave it some typical chords and an atypical bass line, and by the end of the night, I had the skeleton of a song.
At first, I thought it would just be piano and voice, but in between the instrumental interlude (“Undone”) and “Love and Pride”, that barebones arrangement broke the momentum. It took a bit of trial and error to find a drum beat to go with it, but I decided to do something weird — I lifted the pattern from “Love and Pride” verbatim.
I’m thinking of making to the two tracks bleed into each other so that the final chord of the new song kicks off the start of “Love and Pride”. I don’t know if it’ll happen, but reusing that drum pattern worked out for the song.
So yes, after a month and a half of work, I’ve finished (what I consider) a full album of material. I’m already thinking ahead to the other songs on my old demo and how they may fit with other projects.
(The next Eponymous 4 “release” is going to be much more dissonant. It will probably be another five-track EP.)
I was about to take a stab at writing the lyrics tonight — I wrote four in the last week — but I shouldn’t be greedy.
I’m just glad to have reached as far as I have.

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Just in case you missed the previous links to this new song I’m talking about, let me be more explicit: “Untitled (ACO 5)”
I’m sure I’ll be adding more instruments to this song later, but right now, I’ve got a good foundation. It’s probably the most optimistic song in the entire work.

This song was originally called “Caught in the Dark”, and it was supposed to be the title track to what I imagined Project Imprint would eventually become. But there was a point after high school where I convinced myself I’m no Simon Le Bon, and keeping a bunch of lyrics without melodies was confining.
So I threw a lot of them out. And I don’t regret it either — most of those lyrics were Duran Duran rip-offs anyway.
But the original idea behind “Caught in the Dark” was to write in the style of Soul II Soul, which I went ahead and attempted anyway, even without the original lyrics as a guide.
For years, this song has been simply called “Untitled (House)”. Well, not anymore. Unwieldy though the melody may be, I threw together some hasty lyrics for it. This song doesn’t really demand much depth, so I’m not breaking my back being too literary about it.
In other words, it’s another love song. More to the point, a break-up song, the assertive flip-side to “Our Best Wasn’t Enough”. I think they suite the song just fine. You can’t get very Duran Duran with music that tries to be Soul II Soul.
Here now: “Take It Apart“:
“Take It Apart”
March 10, 2005
I could tell you, but you won’t listen
You could promise — I won’t believe it
We could try it, but would it matter?
Here we are once again
What would you do if one day you found
I would never return the favor?
What’s the point in another chance if
Once again here we are?
Tell me now — is this how you pictured it?
Round and round, it’s just the same, old conversation
You and me — the tension was fun
But tension is all it’s become
You could tell me, but I won’t hear it
I could promise — would you believe it?
We could try to remember back when
We were once good together
What would I do if come tomorrow
You decided it’s worth the effort
What’s the point in another chance if
Once again here we are
Tell the truth — is this how you wanted it, or
Maybe I’m the one who can’t let go of wanting
Everything to be like it was
The first time desire took hold
Here we are again, back to the point where it went wrong
But do we try to make it right, or do we
Take it apart, take it apart, we could just
Take it apart, and start all over
I could tell you, but you won’t listen
You could promise — I won’t believe it
We could try it, but would it matter?
Here we are once again
What would you do if one day you found
I would never return the favor?
What’s the point in another chance if
Once again here we are?
Tell me now — just how we could salvage it, or
Maybe we should let it come to its conclusion
You and me — we had all our fun
It’s time that our lives begun
Here we are again, back to the point where it went wrong
But do we try to make it right, or do we
Take it apart, take it apart, we could just
Take it apart, take it apart, why don’t we
Make a new start, make a new start, and we could
Make a new start the next time around
I could tell you, but you won’t listen
You could promise — I won’t believe it
We could try it, but would it matter?
Here we are once again
What would you do if one day you found
I would never return the favor?
What’s the point in another chance if
Once again here we are?
You could tell me, but I won’t hear it
I could promise — would you believe it?
We could try to remember back when
We were once good together
What would I do if come tomorrow
You decided it’s worth the effort
What’s the point in another chance if
Once again here we are

I have no qualms admitting I ripped off the harmonic rhythm for this song from Mikami Chisako of fra-foa. (And the shape of the chorus has a dash of ACO in it.)
Mikami herself used the progression — I-ii-VII-I — in at least three of her songs on fra-foa’s debut album, so if it works for her …
Thing is, I keep coming back to this song, so much so I’m making it the title track of the project. And I just finished the lyrics a few minutes ago. Here, now — “Imprint“:
“Imprint”
March 8, 2005
There’s a picture of you in my head
I don’t know where it’s from
You were smiling and your eyes were bright
The best was yet to come
These photographs strewn everywhere
Caught nothing of that smile
Was it really just a memory?
Did it exist at all?
It’s the one thing I count on
And the one thing I search for
There was something special in that smile
I don’t know what it was
Just a promise of a better life
Of something good to come
Those images strewn in my head
Convince me I’m not wrong
Where did it go? Why did it leave?
Did it exist at all?
It’s the one thing I count on
And the one thing I search for
It’s the one thing I’m missing
And the one thing I yearn for
Where did it go? It was no dream
I’ll find it, that I know
It’s the one thing to reach me
And the one thing to teach me
It’s the one thing to find me
And the one thing to touch me

I’ve never been much for writing political songs, and I thought the first few lines of these lyrics would turn into a liberal creed. Instead, I decided to speak from a point of view opposite of mine. The working title of this song was “Untitled (ACO 3)”, but now it will be called “Love and Pride“.
“Love and Pride”
March 7, 2005
Can you feel it? A change about to come
Can you sense it? Uncertainty of what’s ahead
A chance to turn the hands of fate
Back to a time when nothing was in doubt
Do you feel it? A chance to right the wrongs
Do you want it? Security and peace of mind
A bedrock of our moral ground
A certainty in what we know is true
Damn the ones who want to change our ways
Give me freedom, and all my love and pride
Will be yours
A chance to fix what didn’t break
A chance to right what isn’t wrong
A chance to fight for sanctity
Of truth we’ve held for oh so long
A chance to turn the hands of fate
Back to a time when nothing was in doubt
Is it dream, or is it memory?
Take me back now, and all my love and pride
Will be yours