As a few of you might have heard, I am currently working on a full length album entitled “In the Hearts of Seeds.” It’s a collaboration between myself and one of my best friends Madam Roar, a talented singer/songwriter with a bent well towards the experimental side of her craft. This album is fully avant-garde, a balance between acoustic and electronic, between waking life and dreamscape.
A few weeks ago, we recorded Ms Roar’s sister Jamie singing some parts on a few of the songs. It was her first time ever being recorded and she was a tad nervous. It took her a few takes to get into it and find her pace, but when she did the raw beauty of her voice totally blew me away.
At 52 seconds into the song (listen below) Jamie sings “I’m letting go” a few different times. I was so inspired by these few seconds of singing that it ended up being the pivot point around which I built and balanced the production and mix for the whole song. I was compelled to carefully frame her in this way.
I’m coming away from this experience with a renewed understanding of how inspiration builds on inspiration. This methodology is the life blood of truly uncompromised art and innovation.
Thanks Jamie, this wouldn’t be half the album without you!
I spent this past weekend making some experimental hip hop with a very good, old friend. Whenever we get together to make some tunes we invariably end up talking about music almost as much as making it. We both are super passionate about the topic and have lots of thoughts about it.
We were talking about the various musical cultures around the world and sharing our thoughts on what we feel are the unique contributions of these cultures to music as a whole on this planet. We both feel that western music has contributed a lot in terms of harmony and orchestration. Places like India and Africa, among other things, have contributed a lot in terms of rhythm/percussion. Western music is still in rhythmic kindergarten when compared with these cultures.
We both feel that electronic music has become an important component of the world’s musical pallet. Where we were once limited to the sounds that could be made by instruments constructed out of wood, metal, bone, etc, a computer with the right software provides an absolutely endless organic salad bar of sounds and arrangements. With the right computer and software combination you can do almost anything you can think of.
You can combine a hundred different human voices and make an instrument out of these that you can play on your keyboard. You can record drops of water falling onto various surfaces and play an intricate percussive pattern with the sounds. It’s endless.
Entries (RSS)