Interruptions

Interruptions (Demo)

This has been one hell of a couple weeks. We got hit with tornadoes, right in my neighborhood. Sucking the shingles right off of houses and planting them three counties over kinda for-realz tornadoes. Then we spent nearly an entire week without power, and watched one of our neighbor's houses burn to the ground from a lightning strike.

While all this was going on, we had two deaths on Kelly's side of the family. Kelly will be traveling to Florida for one of the funerals tomorrow. It's been, in a lot of ways an incredibly surreal and somber week. In other ways, though it has been nothing short of magical.

Last Wednesday, the day of the tornadoes was absolutely exhausting as wave after wave of storms came through. It was like a roller coaster of fear, culminating in that house fire I mentioned (everyone got out ok, thankfully), but it was one of the saddest things I'd ever seen.

Around a little before midnight all the fire trucks had finally gone and the power was out in the entire region. The weather had moved on, leaving a crystal clear sky in the chilly air.  It was absolutely, completely and utterly still. With the lights out in the entire city, the sky lit up like a celestial fireworks show. It was simply breathtaking ... such peaceful beauty after a day of unrelenting terror, all our digital umbilicals cut at once; all of us simultaneously disconnected from the matrix.

That was the other beautiful thing about the experience. It was like the entire neighborhood went on a camping trip together. I've lived here 4 years, and I didn't even know my neighbors until last week. With no distractions, we all crawled out of our respective caves and ... talked to one another. Children played in the streets instead of lapping up whatever half-assed treacle the Disney Channel is selling this week.

We had BBQs. Every night in fact and every breakfast and lunch, because with no power, you have an imperative to cook anything and everything you have on hand before it goes bad. On the first night it was just us and one neighbor, but it grew every successive night. We had over 30 people in our driveway and more food than a Southern Baptist pot-luck, the last night of the power outage.


Another less happy amazing moment was when I drove through Harvest this morning on my way to my one-year checkup at Vanderbilt. It's only 4 miles here (exactly) to what can only be described as a complete disaster zone. It looks like a bomb was detonated over there.

So anyhow ... this song is called "Interruptions". I wrote it last year, recovering from a major surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from my pancreas (a mighty scary time in it's own right). It was exactly a year ago, I came home from that operation in Nashville. What a year it's been ... cancer to natural disasters ... but all through it some truly amazing experiences.

Regarding the song ... I suck at drums. Just try to ignore them.

The Mars Underground Metropolis Project

This seedy-looking woman is not who she appears to be. She is, in fact an identity thieving robot sent by wealthy industrialists to infiltrate a gang of union thugs by impersonating their leader.

This is Maria from the silent film, Metropolis.

I have taken on what is by all accounts an insane, and daunting project. The Mars Underground (my electronic side project with Bryan) is going to re-score this most iconic, inexplicably beautiful (and the more I watch it, the more I realize -- also prophetic in many ways) science fiction film from 1927.

This is our score for the title sequence and opening scene:



Yes, this has been done before. No, I'm not trying to jock Georgio Morodor's style. I just really, really like this movie. It's creepy in that old timey way, and basically this film visually articulates my relationship to computers perfectly.

This is going to be awesome. Music for the next scene is already half written. It's like the project has a will of it's own.

Apathy (or 'the seven lies'): video shenannigans

This is a song I'm writing called "Apathy" ... or possibly "the seven lies" (though I haven't worked out what exactly the seven lies actually are or their significance -- the turn of phase just sounds cool).

I did this whole thing last night at like 1 in the morning. Normally when I'm writing, I'll pull up Logic, set up some instruments, etc. I've found that approach to really be kind of a bottleneck for creativity. So what I did here was really simple ... I pulled up the mainstage rig I use for live gigs, and I plugged the output back into the line in. Then I pulled up quicktime player and just started recording. Then I'd play one back and record another on top of it. No edits possible. A little like overdubbing yourself on cassette back in the day. It was incredibly freeing, and the lyrics just started to come out of the ether.

Last night was a very good writing night :-)

Also about halfway in, I discovered it could record video from the built-in camera. Also I discovered you could do screen recordings. The rest is ... well ... there it is. Once I've got the whole thing written, I think I'll do the whole thing out like this (though I might use soundflower to capture multi-tracks in logic so I can go back and mix it, lay down effects, etc).

I love the immediacy of working this way though.
It's a very cool technique.

Boombox Snowday Remix

Boombox Snowday Remix

This week, its a Ma-Yo joint, creamy and tasty.

I'd hoped to have some more recent work to post this week, but alas life gets in the way of art, and you gotta do what you gotta do.

I've got a few tracks I'm really proud of in the works. One is a production for a vocalist friend from work, that is very dark and emotionally potent (and has an insane number of tracks, making it a real learning experience to mix). The other is a new Mars Underground track ... a project that is really starting to find it's feet (in my mind anyhow). Having a clear vision of what you're trying to accomplish is always a good sign. This is probably the most complete idea for a musical project I've ever had, and what's more, it's right in my wheelhouse stylistically. But in the mean time, I bring you this ... whatever it is.

The story behind this track is essentially this equation:

ccmixter.org + snow day + tequila + rebirth = funk

The year was something like ... jeez I dunno ... 2005/2006, maybe? It snowed, a lot that year in the Northern Virginia D.C. suburbs. We were snowed-in, in fact. There was no going to work (and this was before the days of round-the-clock telecommuting ... good old days, really). There was however lots of liquor in the house (aah I miss the days when my body could deal with alcohol too), and rebirth was now a free download from propellerheads. Also I had recently discovered that GarageBand was installed by default on our new mac-mini.

Beats, and syncing of Japanese hip-hop vocals ensued.

Even though it's not my best work, and it's really old and dated, I've always had a soft spot for this track. It's very sparse, and I think really managed to capture a certain playful enthusiasm I had at the time ("you mean this computer can record audio??!!").

Personal nostalgia I suppose.
I got no idea what these guys are rappin' about.

Clockwork Daydream

Big Cycle Beat

This is a track that I cooked up last night with Bryan Bacon. We've been talking for some time about getting an electronic side project together under the name The Mars Underground. I don't know if that will necessarily grow out of this, but it's a pretty damn cool track, all the same.

I was going to make a joke and call this "chillstep" because it's basically chillout electronica, but I added the dubstep bass, because I just bought NI Razor, and I wanted to play with it. Razor can do a whole lot more than wobble basses, but it does make building really great ones stupidly easy. Anyhow, out of curiosity, I googled the term "chillstep", and sure enough ... there actually is a such thing. Proving again, that if synths and a drum machines are involved then someone, somewhere has described it by taking any adjective or noun from the dictionary at random and slapping "-step" on the end.