名作記

After deciding “Faith in Religion” wasn’t going to be the right fit for Imprint, I felt I had to fill the slot for which I made room. I don’t know if anyone still thinks in terms of side A and side B, because when I listen to CDs, I sure don’t make the distinction any more.
(Well, except for music dating back to a time when there were sides A and B.)
But for some reason, I’m perceiving Imprint as having two sides, and side A ends with “Take It Apart“, which means the track following it has a difficult task — to feel like the beginning of a side B but still flowing seamlessly from the track before.
“Faith in Religion” at first seemed like it could do that, until the temperament of the song got in the way. So I had to start from scratch.
And I was at a loss.
I’m not sure what brought Sade’s “Paradise” to mind, but that song struck me for being incredibly minimalistic. The bass line doesn’t change at all throughout the song, and there are barely three chords to it. What’s remarkable about the song is how unremarkably it develops. It kind of starts, goes along, then fades.
I took away from that song the idea of a pedal tone. Two chords, one bass note — it’s been done before. Heck, I’ve done it before.
The “Funky Drummer” beat I used in “Fatih in Religion” was still in my head, so I cut and paste it into a new file and changed a few notes to make it slightly more hip-hop.
I slowed the tempo to 90 bps, and I started playing. In about an hour, I had the harmonic rhythm for a new song. I’ve spent the last two days fleshing it out with a bass line.
Now I’m stuck.
The chord structure and the melody of the song came out on their own. I’ve got a drum beat. And I don’t hear anything else.
With other songs, I could intuit a guitar riff or a melodic embellishment. This new song is all infrastructure and no detail.
Not yet at least.
But this is where it gets dangerous. I’ll throw the first bits and pieces together and get attached to them somehow, and soon enough, I’ll have arranged myself in a corner.
Still, I mixed down what I have so far to an MP3, stuck it in with the rest of the mix and felt it was doable — it didn’t feel too awkward sitting between “Take It Apart” and “Your Gaze“.
So the new sequence of Imprint looks like this:

1. Promises
2. Never Turn Back
3. Silver Sting
4. Our Best Wasn’t Enough
5. TBD (jazz trio)
6. Take It Apart
7. TBD (paradise)
8. Your Gaze
9. Imprint
10. Undone
11. A Chance to Get It Right
12. Love and Pride

And with those additions, the total time of the album is approximately 44 minutes. Now that feels like a proper album.

I spent this past weekend piecing together one of my old songs called “Faith in Religion”, thinking I may include it as part of Imprint.
I decided against it.
It’s a bizarre tune, very precociously written back in the late ’80s when I lusted after Sting — his music and his body. I’ll post a mix of the new version on the Eponymous 4 web site later, but for a work by a beginning songwriter, it sure has ambition.
It starts off very ominously, then half way through, it breaks into a dance beat till a classical chorale interrupts it, then it goes back to being ominous. I changed the end in my new mix and made the dance beat a bit funkier. But it’s still an incredibly strange tune.
And it doesn’t fit the tone of Imprint.
So I’m filing it back in the catch-all A Ghost in My Shadow project, where it originated.
It’s strange — the song has this grand ambition, but every time I try to approximate what I want from the song in my demos, I’m disappointed.
The very first time I recorded the song, I wasn’t technically schooled enough to get the feel I wanted. It didn’t help the technology I was working with was sorely limited.
And this past weekend, I had to make substitutions for crucial parts in the song. Since I’m not a guitar player with an e-bow, I couldn’t get the ominous sound I really wanted. I also wanted power chords sustained for long stretches of time, but I’m not properly equipped to handle that either.
But most importantly, I don’t have the classical chorus to deliver the break toward the end of the song. I think I could really get a kick out of this song if I could hear an actual four-part chorus disrupt it.
Maybe down the line, I can blow the money to make this song a reality.
But right now, I’m not sure what I feel for this song. The lyrics are terribly dated, written in the language of a high school student, but after all these years, I can’t think of the music without thinking “Faith in Religion”. So the song is pretty much locked thematically if I were to rewrite the lyrics.
But that’s not the issue — I’m questioning whether I actually like this song.
I can admire the grandiosity of it, and the bravery to throw in all the weird stuff in it. And I think on some level it works. But I’m reaching a style of writing where I’m trying to grab a lot more material from a lot less source.
If I can write an interesting song using only two chords, I feel like I’ve done something really impressive. I really like “Imprint”, the song, because the melody evolves over the same four chords.
That’s why I couldn’t include “Faith in Religion” with Imprint — it’s not simple enough.

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Speaking of simplicity, I finished the music for a new song this weekend as well. It repeats the same four chords and requires only voice, piano and bass. No drums. I even removed a string part I put in at the start.
I won’t post it till I get the lyrics done.
It’s a bit of a filler, but a demonstration of that new style I mentioned a few paragraphs ago — getting a lot of mileage from a small amount of fuel.
Maybe I’m becoming a minimalist.

So remember how I said I wouldn’t write any more songs for Imprint? Well, I’m thinking of writing a few more songs for Imprint.
However much I like the mix of 10 songs I have already, there are times after I listen to the entire album when I think, “That’s it?” Right now, it clocks in at 38 minutes, which is a good length for an album written before 1987. Most albums nowadays offer an hour’s worth of music, a decent one at least 45 minutes.
I know I need at least two more songs, three if I can possibly find a place to squeeze them. There’s a song I wrote originally titled “Faith in Religion”. It’s a weird little number — the verses are quiet, the choruses loud and smack dab in the middle is a classical chorale. I never much liked the original demo I made on my first workstation, and I forgot why.
Then I remembered — no guitars. “Faith in Religion” was the kind of song that needed a lot of long power chords, and now that I think of it, an e-bow would really do the trick.
So I may comandeer that song. It was originally supposed to be in the same set as “Promises” and “Silver Sting” anyway.
I’ve spent a few hours over the last two days hammering out some chord progressions, but one of them sounds too much like “Imprint” (the song) and the other takes after “Initializations”, which is another new song I’m polishing.
And I may just revisit the idea for a dub song, but I think this time, I’ll leave out the “Secret Oktober” drum beat.
Thing is, I feel like I’ve tapped out the particular sound I’m aiming for these songs. Since I started working on 「風の歌を聴け」, my playing tends to be a lot more dissonant. The chords I’m playing would fit better with that project than with Imprint.
I’ve been listening to Yorico’s Cocoon album quite a bit, and it’s pulling me to write a quiet piano ballad in the vein of Onitsuka Chihiro (or Carole King, for you Western types.)
We’ll see what develops.

I’m making no progress on anything. Of course, I’m not actually working on anything to result in progress …
But ideas about everything have been floating around in my head. It would probably be good to jot them down.

• I think I have the fourth track of 「風の歌を聴け」. I’m giving it the working title “Initializations”. The bass line consists of two famous musical initials — “D-S-C-H” from Dmitri Shostakovich, and “B-A-C-H” from Johann Sebastian Bach. And for contrast, I’m throwing in my initials, “G-E-B”, which I could consider something of a Duran Duran quote. (“The Chauffeur”, anyone?) It just might fit with the general harmonic complexity of the rest of the songs.
• I’ve chipping away at the first Crux novel. I added a couple of more pages to Chapter 5. I’m not reading anything into that progress.
• There’s a short story I’m picturing for Gary Huang and Mitch Warren. Gary’s abusive ex-, Sam, returns to New York City for a business trip and runs into Gary. Sam, now sober, seeks Gary’s forgiveness, but Gary is having none of it. Thing is, Gary suspects Mitch is having an affair. It turns out Mitch, at various times, has hooked up with Kevin, the man Mitch slept while his late-partner was gravely ill. Gary finds out and seeks Sam out, and he and Sam spend the night together. Gary still very much desires Sam physically, considering him the best man he’s ever had sex with. Kevin serves the same role for Mitch, especially since Mitch and Kevin have little else in common. It’s an interesting story, but I don’t want to use it if I’m going to have Mitch and Gary fall into becoming a family with an orphaned nephew later.
• I’m getting a better sense of who Adam Fulton is. Adam Fulton is a drug dealer who dates Crash for a while. Adam is found murdered, and his death spurs Crash to dust off his legal training to find the killer. Adam is, by nature, a bright guy, a survivor with sharp mind and a desire to rise above the criminal world he finds himself in. He never uses any of the product he sells, and his modest living allows him to save up for tuition. But after having first sold his body on the street, then dealing ecstacy in clubs, Adam’s sense of vengence and bitterness also became honed. He was thrown out of his home in a small town after his parents find him having sex with a male classmate, and he ran straight to New York City. He’s drawn to Crash because Crash obviously had a good education and strong work ethic but defies other people’s expectations by choosing to live a somewhat bohemian lifestyle. They could have fallen in love, but they didn’t.
• I want to resurrect the Shoyu Bunnies. I think it’s because I’ve been listening to too much TLC and Kylie Minogue.
• I really ought to get back to reading The Elegant Universe.
• I unearthed a bunch of old paper journals I kept between 1992 and 1997. There are some song lyrics in those journals that I’d like to try to set to music.

When I first started writing songs, I would begin with the lyrics. I didn’t know the melody usually came first, but I had thumbed through Duran Duran: The Book of Words so much at the time, I thought the way Simon Le Bon wrote lyrics was how all songwriters approached lyrics.
Thing is, I had an easier time setting melody to lyrics than the other way around. In fact, it wasn’t till earlier this year that I managed to write lyrics last.
So this vague notion of writing about string theory that I’ve mentioned in the journal? I think I’m going to go back to that old process.
I’m making my way very slowly through The Elegant Universe, and when something clicks, I’ll write around the ideas in the book. However much inspired by Stephen Sondheim I may be, I’m not fooling myself into thinking The Elegant Universe would make good musical theatre. (Actually, it might — but I’m not the person to write it.)
All this expository to say, I wrote a lyric tonight.
It’s something to do because truthfully, I’m at a block where melody is concerned.

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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」.