Description : Thought I'd share one or two tracks I did with my friend Lisagaye Tomlinson back in Florida. Did this one about a year ago. I wrote it after a car accident - felt the swoosh of the reaper's claw just missing my neck. It was to be a part of our 2nd album, which ground to a halt due to lack of funds. Kept the music stark - just the drum and the vocals (bg vocals from Lisagaye too, of course). Actually added live bass at one point but then took it out. I think LG sounds amazing on this. When we recorded it, she was sick and had never heard the tune; I taught it to her line by line. Somehow it came out great. To me anyway. Love to hear your take.
Description : Jazzy groove with a mix of woodwinds playing tag over a heavy beat. I think it's chill. Love to hear what you think.
Description : Weird, dark track of heavy sounds and eerie vocals. The vocals come from Sylvia Plath's reading of her poem "Daddy" back in the '60s (before she killed herself, of course, head in the oven). I set the entire poem to music at one point - she read it at 100 bpm with amazing consistency - but didn't like it. Here, I deconstructed the poem, pulled random phrases and tried to use the fragments to convey the traumatic emotion of the poem without the entire poem itself. As a technical note, I played a bit with breath as a musical element, something I've done in other tracks yet to be uploaded. If you know the poem, does this piece take you there? If you don't, does it make you feel something?
Description : Simple song of longing from Lisagaye Tomlinson's album "Food of Love." I wrote lyrics and melody, she wrote piano. Did a hip-hop-y remix of this recently, but I keep coming back to this version and its simplicity and wanted to share it with y'all.
Description : Chill track that loops, and could loop forever just like life - hence, "another day." I had some fun laying in the finger snaps, claps, cymbals, etc.; I like that intricate stuff, but very tedious on Audacity, and that's where the loop idea came in. Anyway, hope you dig a little chillin'. (Oh yeah - the "another day" vocal is from a 1950s radio show.)
Description : Dark groove. For those nights when you feel like dancing on a fresh grave, or lighting fires in the forest. Rock? As usual, stumped on the genre. At any rate, I like to play it on headphones so loud it makes my eardrums bleed.
Description : I chose "cinematic" as the genre because to me this piece is like scenes passing by on a train. There is a basic structure to it, with verses and a chorus, but a lot of variety within. I have lyrics for it which hold it together, but hopefully it holds together without them. Hope you find something in it to like.
Description : I should be committed. Spent many hours putting this weird piece together when I should have been making money (alas) and then in a fit of self-recrimination deleted the Audacity files (plus, was running out of disk space bcuz of dozens of huge, half-finished loop comps). Just listened to the mp3 , which I'd saved, and still dug it, despite myself. The main vocal is from a 1950s radio ad (tho Biotex, apparently, is still on the market today). The "bridge" (if you will) vocal is from a '50s radio show (forgot the name). I love that line - "lovely because it's sooo lonely." Well, if you like weirdness like I do, just soak.
Description : Yo folks - dance? Well, I dance to it anyway. The vocals are acapellas by the great Gizella, which I reversed and played with in various ways. Feeling toward something strange and beautiful, was the idea. Seemingly intimate meanings ... just out of reach. Like music from a sister planet in an alternate universe.
Description : I never know what genre to call my stuff. There's spoken word, yes, but it ain't really that. If you can't dance to it - if it doesn't make you want to dance - it ain't worth much. This one is sort of my New Year's resolution. My wife and I are separated, and I'm trying to get to a place where I act out of love, not anger and bitterness. But it is hard, my friends. The words/vocals are from Wallace Stevens reading his great poem "To the One of Fictive Music" - I selected words and phrases to say my own thing (forgive me, Mr. Stevens).
Description : As usual, no idea what genre to call it. This one came out of deep pain transformed into dance through orchestrated noise. For me, there's a primal power to it - cathartic. If you're angry, bitter, depressed, desperate, tears streaming down your face, put this on, crank it up, and let it move you with the dance of pain.
Description : Was depressed after talking to my brother about the state of the world, so I made a happy song. The vocals are from JFK (his Berlin Wall speech), Barbara Jordan (mostly from a speech about Nixon's impeachment), and Barack Obama (mostly his Berlin Wall speech). "We the people" are of course the 1st 3 words of the U.S. Constitution, but the song's about needing to broaden that idea to the world, or we are screwed, people of the world.
Description : Genre? Stymied again. This one's about the bash of conflicting and searing feelings that fill me when I see my wife (we're separated). The desire, the rushing blood, the rising heat - the fear of the knives. Maybe you've been there, too. If so, maybe you'll hear something in this piece that ring a bell... As always, it's 100% loops.
Description : Lately, I've been messing with tracks built on scavenged spoken-word vocals. This one started with a phone message I found on the web, and I just went from there. Would be great to hear what you think...
Description : This is another odd track that started with a scavenged phone message that I ran across on the web. I used to be a playwright and really dig the normal rhythms of human speech. So that's what I'm playing with here, working around the rhythms - largely untouched in this case, though I did tweak just a bit here and there - that are there and letting the music of the voice inspire the music that I add. Which all starts with loops which I then manipulate in an all-night trance until cool things start happening. Anyway, blah blah blah, hope you like it. Please tell me either way.
Description : Another spoken-word piece, this one based on a Winston Churchill speech. Starts w/ 2 variations ("verses") of the same speech section to highlight the modern power of these nearly 70-year-old phrases, then a "bridge" that spins that power down (the battle Churchill's talking about was a major disaster) and then a 3rd variation of what we've already heard where the past starts spinning away into the dust motes of history. Maybe that's all bs, but it's what I sort of had in mind. Main thing is, do you dig it?
