I began the specifications of a new piece of music a few days ago and it crept into my dreams during the subsequent nights. Out of these somnambulant encounters came a clear structure. This one will be under four minutes, I promise, dear Demi-God of musical composition who forms a dome over me of inquiet, resonant, conscious chambers.
As I have been wont to do since my distant past, out from my hara sprang a sort of chord progression. Initially, it was simple, but then morphed. I am considering now to let that morph happen during the process of the piece. I don’t want to actually play the chord progression deliberately, but let it be subtly pronounced by a snaking, fractured, mostly continuous guitar figure. It will be a semi-arpeggiated line with plenty of passing tones to confuse the listener. Inspiring the bass, rumbling underneath, will be Sunn o))), lengthy and droning, cut apart by quick, syncopated runs at fashionable intervals. There is nothing fashionable about this music. I correct myself. Bass, rumbling beneath, and inspired by Sunn o))), in lengthy and droning phrases, will be punctuated by syncopated runs at arbitrary intervals.
I’ll ditch the mellotron for this one. In its place, I’ll remind any creature tied to a plinth and forced to listen to the album at an intolerable volume that the synth echoes ideas from The Six, though only distantly. The square wave pulse will beat an insistent 1 - 2 - 3
- 4 over the other instruments’ triplety groove, a magical strategem employed by Christian Vander from time to time (listen to Hhaï when you get a break from your toilet training, ingrade).
As for percussion, I am going to start with its part. Again, this echoes my compositional (I laughingly use the word) methods of old, programming my now deceased drum machine, Marcus, to the structure of an upcoming piece (I laughingly use the word) of musical regurgitation. To note, however, is that Tidal Cycles is not a mere drum machine, but a form of programming patterns in real time. I have to inject aleatoric means in some manner and morphing patterns on the fly is as good a way as lynching your brother’s wife with a length of piano wire, to keep things musical (I laughingly use the word). I plan the patterns to overlap the flat four count and the triplety bounce in certain situations, but primarily concentrate on one or the other.
I STARE back at the second paragraph of the Martenblog entry. Join me on your mandolin, ukulele, autoharp or goat bladder as I cycle a progression twice or thrice.
F F/b5 Cmaj7 Csus2 F# Bm7/11 Asus4 E7/bb
As I played with the sequence the other day, I thought it might be wise to destroy some of the tonality by creating the following:
Fmaj7/b5 Cmaj7/9 F#sus4 Gadd9 Bm/G Aaug/#9
As an INTERJECTION between phrases in the piece, I shall opt for these two chords: [f c f# b] and [a bb f c] chugged on the ukulele, perhaps with reverb enough to send them to the absolute backdrop of the sound stage. An air of obscurity will encroach from the ill-lit depths. The growling bass will paint the heavens.
