Casting a Shadow of the Fantastic

I just walked home from Ivanečka’s place to my filthy domicile with the “cat” stowed “safely” in the backpack I use to transport her. It is supposedly especially made for transporting such creatures though I am uncertain that she likes the experience very much. Being “uncertain that she likes the experience” is actually greatly understating the rage she feels when she is placed in said backpack. She seethes! Or at least she does during the first seconds of being placed within its narrow confines. After we are moving, or, rather, after I am ambulatory, she seems to quieten, to calm, to seethe in silence. When finally the journey ends and she is released from the suffocating womb, she is, once again, jolly ol Peiločja.

V každém připadě, I just walked home from Ivanečka’s place to my filthy domicile. During the walk through Folimanka, which undulates at a glacial pace, across the small community “under the bridge”, under another bridge, then up countless steps, I listened to my most recent version of Protivný Pták Nad Bouřícím Oceanem. One of the greatest joys I have in life is the point at which I am working on a piece of music and, during a listening session, I am struck by the reality that both I created this thing and that this thing is becoming something that I shall soon regard as exceedingly fantastic. In fact, in part, it is already fantastic, even if all of the parts are not yet in place and even if all of the parts that are in place are not yet “perfectly” played. This joyous moment is when the piece of music begins to cast the shadow of the fantastic thing that it will become.

I had myriad ideas for additions (and even subtractions!), of course, but I have gotten out of the habit of stopping a walk every thirty seconds to jot something down about the piece. This is certainly a habit I should reattain. However, the main conclusion I came to dealt with melody and voice leading during the last portion of the piece. I wonder to myself, and now to the Martenblog in which I now write, whether I should write a simple part with fantastic voice leading (because I already hear a portion of it in my head) for Christian to sing or whether I should just go ahead and make it a vocal-like synth line. My original idea was to give him a clump of the chords and let him do some la la la over it and use whatever he came up with, but the voice leading possibilities are too amazing to not take advantage of.

I also have reached an ideal configuration on my pedal board with its two marvelous audio pathways that entwine within Herr Scarlett to paint wide swaths of primary colors and then jagged, geometric figures in rambling, fluorescent combinations upon the aural canvas of my filthy flat. This means that Drone Day approaches and I should begin creating the “material” which will spew from https://drone.thurk.org/stream when the, as they say, “time” comes.

That time is soon.