名作記

I’ve got all these “Untitled” songs for this new Eponymous 4 project, and hardly any lyrics. I think I’ve reached a plateau with writing new music, so now I have to concentrate on the lyrics. This set belongs to the song with the working title “Untitled (ACO 2)”, hence to be named “Your Gaze“.
“Your Gaze”
March 7, 2005
In a moment far too fast for me to stop and comprehend
There was confirmation maybe you just might return my feelings
How could I mistake the gaze that burrowed deep inside the heart
Of everything that makes me who I am?
And still I look for reasons to explain how I could not be right
Because I really can’t admit you have a power over me
But deep inside I yearn to meet your gaze and give myself a chance to feel
You dream of me as well
In a moment far too fast for me to stop and take a risk
You gave confirmation that you did in fact returned the feeling
And I wanted to mistake the gaze that makes me want to say
I wanted you and hope you want me too
And all the reasons I came up with have no ring of truth at all
And even faced with evidence that nothing could have come to be
‘Cos deep inside I yearn to meet your gaze and give you just one chance to feel
I dream of you as well
It was a moment far too fast for me to answer with the truth
Of how I wish I could admit you have a power over me
And maybe one more day I’ll get the chance to meet your gaze and make you feel
I dream of you right now
Look inside me
Feel the moment
Deep inside me
Seize the moment

I’ve been distracted all week.
When I’m at work, all I can think about is getting home so that I can work on my songs. When I’m in class, I feel impatient because the four hours twice a week I’m spending learning a language I may not even use at work could be spent in my “studio”.
I nearly blew off some social events this weekend just to maximize the time I felt was lacking in the week. (I didn’t blow off those events. In fact, I rather enjoyed them.)
Well and all, I’ve been one busy motherfucker. Tonight, I “released” three new demos and re-recorded all of my recent MP3s to include a two-second gap at the end of the songs — the better to simulate a CD with, my dear.
And I’ve even got something of a loose sequence down for this “album”:

1. Promises
2. Never Turn Back
3. Our Best Wasn’t Enough
4. Silver Sting
5. Take It Apart [with lyrics!]
6. Your Gaze [new! with lyrics!]
7. Imprint [new! with lyrics!]
8. Undone [new!]
9. TBD
10. Love and Pride [with lyrics!]

Usually, musicians write twice the number of songs that would eventually appear on an album, but I’m being reckless and writing only the number of songs that I would like on it. I’m aiming for 10 or 11. That means I have to edit along the way.
This momentum has also made me reckless financially. On Friday, I dropped about $140 on a microphone, stand and cord. Tomorrow, a sound card I bought for $160 should be arriving by UPS.
I tried recording my own vocals with Cakewalk, and I have to say — I need to audition some singers. I sound bad.

Yes, I know you all want to hear about the Duran Duran concert.
Yes, I know there’s a lot to talk about the new computer.
Yes, I know I’m neglecting not only this journal but also this blog and this zine.
But I’ve got a good excuse. Two good excuses, really.
One is titled “Silver Sting“, and the other is titled Never Turn Back“.
I worked pretty intently on “Silver Sting” over the weekend, and I dashed off a reconstruction of “Never Turn Back” last night.
And that does it, as far as reconstructions go — for now. There are still a lot of songs that need to undergo a facelift, but they can wait for other projects.
Right now, I have about eight songs queued up for whatever this second Eponymous 4 project will turn out to be. Of those eight, four were pillaged from A Ghost in My Shadow, two are new but need some additional work, and the other two were completed but could use more editing.
I have seeds for another two that I haven’t really expanded upon. One of them will attempt to rip off the drum rhythm from Duran Duran’s “Secret Oktober”, but I’m not having much success with it.
So, yeah — I’m probably going to stay under for a little while longer while all this stuff gets fleshed out.

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Mmmm. I covet.

Well, that was a short honeymoon.
I remember now why I found the Kawai K4 to be a limiting machine, and it’s funny — I can see retrospectively how the equipment actually had something of an adverse effect on my writing.
At first, I treated the K4 like my other boards. I can control assignment of channels to patches through Cakewalk, and it’s a pretty transparent process on my Korg N364 and Kurzweil PC-88. The Kawai K4, though, is different.
I’d forgotten that in my old set-up, I had to program the patches on the board itself, not on the sequencer. When Cakewalk would transmit program information, the K4 translated it in its own special way.
It took reading a PDF of the owners manual — I had thrown mine away a long time ago — and a few button clicks for the memories to kick in. “Ah! That’s how it’s done.”
And as a result, I have to do a work-around for the K4 that I don’t have to do with the other machines.
For a little while, I wondered whether $255 was worth the investment.
But now that I’m beginning to remember how to work the machine, I think it will be. It does have some irritating quirks, but today, it’s only part of a set-up, not the whole thing.
Which means I can depend on my other machines to carry the bulk of the work.

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I always had a sense I fell out of songwriting because whenever I went to create something on my old set-up, it never turned out how it would sound in my head.
And that cognitive dissonance can be pretty discouraging.
Working with the old machine again, it’s clear that’s exactly what happened.
The equipment I have now has enabled me to do different — perhaps better — work, but there’s still a sense that I’m still not getting the timbres I seek.
But I also see a potential for danger. And perhaps this is how the music gear industry works.
I got locked into my old set-up, not having the resources to expand and upgrade, and it effected how I perceived my work. I don’t want to fall into the same trap by relying so heavily on my N364 and PC-88.
At the same time, I don’t want to be continually seduced by more and more gear. My bedroom has already gotten seriously cramped with the addition of the old/new machine.
Too, I have to wait till April to see whether I can even afford more equipment.
Vicious, vicious cycle.

It arrived!
The Kawai K4 I bought over eBay was delivered today, and I ditched work half an hour early to pick it up from the apartment office.
It took a good hour and a half set up, including 20 minutes sweeping up the shipping popcorn that spilled all over the floor from opening the box up.
At first, I couldn’t get a peep out of it. I connected it to the second channel of my mixer, raised the gain till I got a signal, the raised the level — only to hear nothing.
I hooked it up to my bass amplifier just to make sure it was the mixer giving me problems and not the keyboard. The distorted boom that blasted out from the amplifier was evidence enough.
So I switched some instruments around and discovered it was “problem” with the channel itself. Or rather, it was user error. The first two channels of my mixer are mono inputs, and I was putting in a pair of stereo inputs on channel two. (I didn’t look closely enough to see I was plugging one of the channels into an Input/Output jack. Not sure what that does, really.)
Now I know where to plug my guitars, should I ever need to connect it to my mixer.
Once I got sound, I discovered some of the presets had been altered. I bought this keyboard because I have a lot of music that depends on some of those presets.
It took a few minutes, but years of working with this board before all came back. Navigating the LED displays felt like second nature. Still, some of the alterations were too drastic to fix manual. I had to find a way to reload the presets back into the machine.
So it took another hour of surfing and downloading and reading to come up with a solution — take a system exclusive dump of the original presets and dump it back into the keyboard. (But not without first backing up the banks already on the machine — some of those revised patches sounded pretty cool, actually.)
I had to disconnect one of my other keyboards so that my interface could use both a MIDI-In and a MIDI-Out port. I used a piece of shareware and the presets available for download by the manufacturer to load the sounds back onto the keyboard.
After that, I spent a bit of time configuring Cakewalk to speak to the new keyboard. (Note to self, which this entry really is anyway: Post the .INS file for other users to download. I found .INS files for my Korg 364 and Kurzweil PC-88, but not one for a Kawai K4.)
Now I’m all set to use some of the original timbres when reconstructing those lost songs.
Man, this is cool!
P.S. Sorry to bore you all with all this semi-technical stuff.

A few weeks ago, I had Kramer do a year-long chart for me. I put the text into XML and created a page that lists the relevant transits for the day.
Some the transits for this month state it’s a good time to pursue creative endeavors. It must be — I don’t think I’ve worked on so much new music in the last few years.
Last week, I wrote an entirely new song from scratch. It bears a very close resemblance to one of the tracks from the first Eponymous 4 project — and a glancing resemblance to Cocco’s “Mizukagami” — but it’s new (for me) nonetheless.
Today, I hooked my boombox — the only machine with a decent cassette playback — to my mixer and my mixer to my computer. I went through and digitized the rest of the only demo tape to survive the Burglary of 1998.
There are works on that tape that I would prefer to relegate to obsolence, but I’m preserving them anyway because who knows? Maybe there’s something in them that might yield a new idea.
(Highly doubtful since these tracks alternately sound like Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, Information Society and Everything But the Girl.)
Right now, I’m reconstructing one of my old songs and fleshing out another new one. And I’ve got three other files with scraps of bits of pieces. They’re too embryonic to even be considered sketches.
It feels nice.
I still don’t get the sense what’s coming out of the speakers is all that it can be, but it feels good to be putting ideas to bytes.
I usually work in waves.
When I get momentum going on a project, I usually work like mad till that momentum peters out. (It’s been a while since I’ve gone on a web development rampage.)
So I’m glad one of these waves deals with my own songwriting.

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All that to say I’ve posted two more MP3s to the main index of my site.
Of course, both are untitled since I’ve yet to write lyrics for either of them.
I should actually name “Untitled (ACO 3)” (download) to “Untitled (Cocco 1)” — it’s got more of a rock feel, but for some reason, I still want to include it with the more jazz-pop stuff.
The other track, “Untitled (House) [2005 Mix]” (download), is a reconstruction of a song from A Ghost in My Shadow.
It’s funny — I wrote “Untitled (House)” as an exercise to see if I could write in a style I didn’t like at the time. At first, I considered this track filler, but over the years, I’ve come to like it.

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[UPDATE: 2005.03.09 09:49]
I originally made part of this entry secret before I moved it to this particular journal.
Not because I had to say anything in confidence or because I want to hide something from my family or from my work.
No — I posted links to some of the work I did, but I didn’t want them to be entirely public.
It’s because, well, I’m embarrassed.
I thought some of these tracks sounded good at the time — and perhaps they did — but now? There’s a fine line between imitation and theft, and some of these pieces didn’t cross it.
But I didn’t set up a secret directory for this site, so I’m going to reveal these songs as they are.
Don’t laugh too hard when you listen to them.

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OK. So here they are … the outtakes from A Ghost in My Shadow.
And it’s still not everything. There are two tracks in particular that sound so much like the songs that inspired them, I’m keeping them under wraps. (I’m salvaging them in case I can grab something useful from them.)
You may actually end up liking these tracks. Maybe I might come to feel that way again one of these days.

But for now — it’s just between you and me …

• String Quartet (I. Allegro) I wrote this piece after having been introduced to Dmitri Shostakovich’s Quartet for Strings, No. 8, Op. 110. I even lift the quote of a quote of his own work. It’s actually an impressive piece of writing for a 19-year-old, and I’d include it in an application for graduate school with a bevy of caveats.
• String Quartet (II. Adagio) The structure of the quartet was inspired by Samuel Barber’s String Quartet, from which the Adagio for Strings was extracted. The first and third movements of the quartet are the same, but the second movement is slow and elegiac. This piece, though, sounds like a John Williams soundtrack.
• String Quartet (III. Allegro [Reprise]) See previous.
• Untitled (Acid Vogue) As the title implies, this song was inspired by acid house and Madonna’s “Vogue”. I’ve always liked the drum beat to “Vogue”, and maybe I just might outright steal it for something. My old synthesizer had a few neat sounds for songs just like this one, but I rarely wrote songs like this one. So I never used them. The chords are more like Depeche Mode.
• The Nature of Things I wrote the lyrics to this song first, then wrote around it. I listened to Information Society’s “I Wanna Know” as reference. I can now admit I was actually trying to rip Information Society off. Here’s a case where theft really did turn into imitation.

Since I mentioned “Untitled (ACO 1)” has lyrics, I may as well post them here.
I’ve never been through a break-up of a long-term relationship, but it seems I know quite a number of people who have recently. I didn’t really know what this song would be about, but I found some old lyrics that I never set to music. The first line of that other song fit this one, so I took it from there.
“Our Best Wasn’t Enough”
Jan. 29, 2005
Maybe I can change your mind
Tell you things you want to hear
But we’d know it’s just a lie
In the end it’s what we fear to face
This time the dream comes to an end
We both believed this moment
Was a time we’d never reach
Now we’ve got both eyes open
We’re awakened to the truth of what has been
We did our best
It’s not enough
Who am I to disagree?
Would it change a thing at all?
Should I keep the door unlocked
If you choose to throw away the key
To what was once a place of hope?
And if you ever think back
To the times we used to share
Would you remember wanting
Nothing more than I could ever give to you
We tried our best
It’s not enough
And if I ever look back
To the times I shared with you
I wouldn’t change a thing
Even all the points that brought us where we are
We took a risk
It’s all we had
We did our best
It wasn’t enough
We took a risk
It’s all we had

Amateurs imitate. Geniuses steal.

I’ve always found this idea comforting.

There’s no such thing as an original idea.

I heard that in a music composition class, although I think I read it in a Sting interview in high school.

When I was much younger and a lot more unchecked with my egotism — these days it’s reigned in but not by much — I prided myself on being a thief. I would write a song and say exactly where I took each idea.

I stole that drum beat from Basia. I took that bass rhythm from Duran Duran. That background noise is from John Zorn. I wrote those lyrics in the style of Robin Holcomb.

I was confident my theivery was blatant but unrecognizable once filtered through my own sense of harmony and rhythm and melody.

I’m doing it again.

I said I’m “studying” ACO’s absolute ego album to work on the second Eponymous 4 project, which is a euphemism for “stealing”.

But it occurred to me — is it really possible for me to know if I’m really stealing? What if my sense of theft is actually imitation?

What constitutes imitation anyway?

When DJ Danger Mouse deconstructs the Beatles and Jay-Z, is that theft or imitation? When MC Hammer lifted Rick James’ “Superfreak” for “You Can’t Touch This”, is that theft or imitation?

When Kurt Cobain lifted the chorus of “More Than a Feeling” from Boston for “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, is that theft or imitation? When The Killers sing about a “boyfriend who looked like a girlfriend” 10 years after Blur sang about “girls who are boys who like girls to be boys”, is taht theft or imitation? (Never mind both songs rip off the ’80s.)

Today, I bought Soul II Soul’s “Back to the Life” from iTunes because I wanted to use that song’s beat in a reconstruction of a song I wrote 12 years ago parodying their style. (The beat I came up with then was closer to Madonna’s “Vogue”.)

And just before I sat down to write this entry, I went track by track through absolute ego looking for more beats to steal. I’m finding it easier to play randomly to a rhythm than just plucking chords out of thin air.

When am I stealing? And when am I imitating?

And would the listener notice in the end?

Maybe ACO would …

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In a fit of irrational paranoia, I spent a few minutes yesterday jotting down the serial numbers of all my valuable electronics.

Now that I’ve bought the same model keyboard that was stolen from me six years ago, I want to make sure I can recover it should lightning strike twice.

There’s a superstitous part of me that thinks an object which attracted thieves way back when isn’t something to welcome back into my home. I think that’s culture — my mom was once adamant that we keep a moth fluttering about our porch light from entering the house. She said it was my grandfather.

However much that primordial sense influenced the act of taking down those serial numbers, really it’s just a smart thing to do regardless.

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The following section are a bunch of notes to myself, but I’m posting them hear to make myself accountable.

So far, I’m working on the following songs for the second Eponymous 4 project. I’m taking a few of them from A Ghost in My Shadow:

• Promises¹
• Never Turn Back¹
• Silver Sting¹
• Our Best Wasn’t Enough²
• Untitled (ACO 2)³
• Untitled (Oktober 1)⁴
• Untitled (House)¹

¹ These songs are reconstructions from A Ghost in My Shadow.

² Formerly “Untitled (ACO 1)”. I wrote lyrics to this song last night (Jan. 29).

³ This song is probably more inspired by UA than ACO, but since I’m “stealing” from absolute ego, I may as well label it ACO.

⁴ I want to use the rhythm from Duran Duran’s “Secret Oktober” for a dub song, but I can’t help but want to do something more along the lines of ACO’s “Intensity (You Are”) or Sade’s “Slave Song”. A member of Sade wrote “Intensity” for ACO.

Well that was reckless of me.
I was trying to reconstruct some of the music that was lost in the Burglary of 1998, and after spending a few minutes trying to finding the right timbres, I just was not feeling it.
So I jumped on eBay last night and plugged in a search for “Kawai K4”. Exactly one person was selling it. I thought about waiting till Tuesday to see who else would bite in the bidding, and maybe saving a few bucks from the “Buy It Now!” price of $200.
But the more I thought about it, the more I knew I wanted it. And the seller lives up near Dallas anyway, which means shipping shouldn’t take too long. So I bought it.
(Acutally, I have this nagging suspicion UPS is going to route the package from Dallas through Ottawa before sending it back down to Austin.)
However much I felt that old Kawai K-4 of mine was limited — the damn thing has only 16 sounds, compared to the 500 on my Korg N364 — the timbres I used to create those first demos nearly 15 years ago are the ones I’ve lived with the most.
I just didn’t feel like messing up what already turned out all right. (I can’t say that about all the songs on my demo.)
I didn’t think about where I’m going to put the thing or whether I can hook it up to my interface. I just felt I wanted something back from that lost era.
Besides, some of the preset sounds on that machine might work well with the arsenal I have at my disposal now.
I mulled a little bit on why I was so impulsive about this purchase, and I remembered — I’m not saving up for a downpayment any more, and I actually have some savings.
I don’t want to spend forever waiting for the next economic downturn.
Now I just have to keep myself in check so I can get a new desktop.

I’m hesitant to call two songs in two days being on a roll, but relatively speaking? I’m on a roll!
After posting “Untitled (ACO 1)” (download) last night, I went straight into recording another song I wrote right after completing the first Eponymous 4 project.
(Ed. note: Since the publication of this entry, “Untitled (ACO 1)” has since become “Our Best Wasn’t Enough”)
It’s called “Speechless” (download), and I wrote two drafts of lyrics, neither of which I’m particularly fond. But it seems like an appropriate title for the melody.
The levels were too hot, and the hard disk skipped twice during recording. It was 1 a.m. by the time I played it back, and I figured I’d give it another shot tonight.
I dropped the levels a bit and got a full take. I also re-encoded “Untitled (ACO 1)” to 192kbps, which doesn’t make too much of a difference.
So there. More music from me for you to enjoy. Or ignore. Whatever.
Here are the lyrics. Maybe they’re not that bad, but they kind of strike me as, well, predictable:
“Speechless”
When the clock strikes three o’clock
I’ll try not to make you stir
I’ll just find my own way out
We’ll talk later
Say the words to make me feel
That tonight I’d be remiss
Never to return your calls
Or messages
A string of words
A mess of thoughts
Sometimes they never meet
What I keep in
I can’t let out
And still I try to try
To make it all make sense
Feel the blood rush through your face
See the moon turn into red
I can’t think of how I’d spend
Now forever
Come into my mind again
Make me wonder what I’d miss
If I’d never hold you tight
Or felt your kiss
A string of words
A mess of thoughts
Sometimes they never meet
What I keep in
I can’t let out
And still I try to try
To make it all make sense

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I added a third verse last night, but there are no lyrics for them yet.
Oops.