As a side series to my currently non-existent series on explaining my methods of composition I'd like to go back and talk about old albums. You can imagine your own justification for this.
The plan for starting this tangential collection of posts was to go back to the very beginning, because duh. The Cobalt Rod was my initial foray into making music on my own and the first full length product of that ongoing experiment was Three Hits Off The Chaos Triad, an album that even the harshest of critics must agree exists. As you might expect this will make a perfect starting place.
Of course, you probably read the title and are familiar with words enough to know that that isn't what we're talking about. You can imagine your own justification for this.
The Crimson Rod, for those of you are not aware (which is all of you), was created as roughly the antithesis of The Cobalt Rod. I had been wanting to experiment with actually playing and recording solo music instead of programming all the time but The Cobalt Rod had become a very defined entity and non-programmed music simply would not fit. The Crimson Rod was born to fill this vacancy and was obviously opposite then in both instrumentation and name, but the idea rapidly grew to oppose the older child much more fully. Out of necessity from the medium The Cobalt Rod is rigidly defined, nearly every note (with rare exceptions to be discussed in other posts on methodology, perhaps) being meticulously placed by fingertip. In stark contrast, songs for The Crimson Rod are very often loose and organic, sometimes being comprised solely of off-the-cuff improvisation.
Vacant Charcoal Snowflakes was going to be a deviation of sorts from this practice. With Robber Stop I had wanted to write and perform a rigid math rock album but as will be discussed down the line this was not meant to be (instead of waiting, you could go to bandcamp right now and listen to it to see how not rigid the math rock turned out to be), so VCS would rise up to salvage the idea and claim it as its own. One thing I like to do before writing a new album is to come up with a vague genre descriptor to guide the early stages of the process and in this case the buzzword was "atmospheric math rock." Thin guitar lines arcing over angular drum patterns, all in entirely different meters and slathered in reverb. The effect would be dizzying and quite... well, atmospheric. Would be.
Oh yeah, while reading feel free to start listening to the album (y'know, after you get done with Robber Stop): http://thecrimsonrod.bandcamp.com/album/vacant-charcoal-snowflakes
So, things went awry again. Don't get me wrong, I had started to write it as it was intended to be, there were a few song notes floating around (and they are still floating around somewhere in the other room where the drum set was at the time) and I had practiced them to the extent that I could usually get through something resembling a song after a few warm up runs. By all accounts it was well on its way to going as planned, but what I hadn't counted on were the issues of actually recording it.
If I had a damn sound proof room you probably wouldn't be listening to the album that you are listening to now, assuming you are listening to this album. I can't perform with people listening, I can't even perform if I think people might be in a position to listen so all recording has to happen during those rare periods when I get the house to myself. The problem with an album in the style of where this was heading is that for someone of my skill level it would be playable only after actually practicing each part and recoding would almost certainly take several attempts. When you consider the small windows of opportunity and the need to move the entire drum set back and forth between the practice room and the recording/sleeping room the whole process starts to sound very, very tedious.
Now, I didn't give up right away. I'll admit, things didn't get off to a perfect start but the plan was to work on filling out the album with more defined tracks as it went. I believe Tar Parade was actually the first song recorded and I am certain that it was recorded at a time when I didn't realize I would be able to record and really wanted to just get anything at all finished before the opportunity elapsed. I had scribbled out a verse/chorus drum progression on a whim during my break at work that day. I hadn't practiced it and didn't even know if any of it sounded good in reality but that was the piece of paper in my hand when I realized the house was empty.
So, I quickly set up the kit and did some practice runs. It wasn't going great, as I recall. With time running out the strategy had essentially devolved into "fuck it, just play something." I hit record and improvised, kind of. The opening was actually the original intro that had been notated, just held for longer than indicated and with impromptu flourishes thrown in. The transition into the second section was pulled out of my ass when I forgot the planned fill. During earlier practice attempts there was a recurring idea that roughly resembled what ended up being the main pattern for the second section and the plan was for that to be a sort of "home base" with several unrelated improvisational passages littered throughout, so that's what happened there. The 3:4 section just happened organically, and I decided while playing it that I would like to leave a silent section for a guitar spotlight afterwards. The closing statements roughly follow from the earlier improvisations.
Well, that was kind of a clusterfuck. Is it good? Can I salvage this? Where's that guitar?
Screwed around with the tuning and settings for a bit, coming up with the riff for the gap in the process. That was the only thing I knew going into the recording, everything else was in the moment. The vocals? Improvised, along with the lyrics. I think there was a vague idea of the imagery, and the opening idea was probably hummed or something, but for the most part that was entirely in the moment as well. A little time and the addition of some effects saw the production of the first song, a bizarre freeform quasi-post-punk ramble.
Well, not the first song. The eighth song. Why are we doing this out of order? And I spent three paragraphs on that? What am I doing with my life?
Coral Citadel was actually one of the last songs to be made, I think. This seems to be a recurring theme, the opening track is so important to get right that I usually don't even try until much later into the project (unless something just happens to turn out right for the part). By this point we were way off the "rigid atmospheric math rock" rails... hmm, maybe chronological order of writing would be better.
Ok, look. The first three songs were Tar Parade, Liquid Hitting Metal and They've Moved On. None of which fit into the original formula and all of which were rocking my socks off multiple times per day. Spires came about somewhere near the end of the beginning as well, which is what really changed the game. We'll get back to this later but in essence after finishing the song I said "hmm, this is just Robber Stop in a big cave" and then it clicked. I should be making Robber Stop in a big cave! It's the obvious progression and it will sound awesome.
So, Coral Citadel. We're already making Robber Stop in a big cave, so at this point the plans boiled down to "make noise-y math rock and then throw sheets of reverb and delay everywhere." Amusingly, this is actually one of the most rigidly performed tracks on the entire album. You wouldn't think it given that it is just a single drum thumping along while guitars screech aimlessly but yeah, it totally is. I wrote out the entire floor tom part on a sheet of paper, it's still sitting next to me in this pile on the floor. I messed up one measure but other than that every single drum hit is exactly where it is supposed to be according to the notation I was reading at the time. The guitar parts are less defined but I said this was one of the most rigidly performed song on the album, not that it was rigid.
The vocals here are also a good point to talk about the vocals for the entire album. I don't really like my voice that much and definitely don't like to let other people hear me sing, but that creates a problem when you want to start making rock albums that aren't instrumental 100% of the time. The solution? Sing but hide it. Thankfully shoegaze made this fashionable so my album can still chart fairly well. Uh...
Right, so there are vocals in this song. You can even hear them clearly towards the end but they are they for almost the entire thing, it's just really hard to tell what is a mouth and what is an amplifier freaking out.
Then we get to They've Moved On, the obligatory anti-pop pop track. I remember this day pretty clearly. I had Chinese food for lunch, people left and I quickly busted this out. The riffs were roughly figured out beforehand but the leads were improvised. Also, believe it or not but it was entirely accidental that the entire song (barring certain chorus permutations) is in 11/8, I wasn't thinking about counting at all when playing (given that time was a serious factor). It's weird how that happens, especially when the three main riffs all have fairly different accent patterns. Not a huge fan of the vocals here, in hindsight I probably would have buried them even more but it is what it is.
Did you know that this is a "lead drum" album? What does that mean? Well, it means that the drum set is the lead instrument in the ensemble. That must sound pretty stupid considering that out of the first two tracks only one even had percussion and that was just a floor tom. How can we resolve this confusion for the listener? Drum solo, drum solo everywhere. Nine minute drum solo, fuck society.
Third track drum solos are also starting to become a recurring motif. Robber Stop had Howling, so Liquid Hitting Metal mirrors that. An upcoming Cobalt Rod album has a third track drum solo. I think there are more, I dunno, it's late. It'll become a trend if it isn't already, if only to prove this paragraph right.
Sunny Disposition was either the last or second to last song finished for the album, I can't remember. It and Undrown were recorded at around the exact same time and the production work on both of them was done on the same day or two so it's hard to remember which one actually finished second. The idea for this song was actually to do an absurdly overproduced "pop" track relative to the rest of the album. The pop idea was quickly shot in the head but the rest made it ashore. This song easily has more voices than any other track on the album; synth, drums, vocals, harmonica, guitar and even the sound that your amplifier apparently makes when you poke the end of the chord that is supposed to go into your guitar with your finger while it is not going into your guitar (it's that distorted thump-thump sound in the chorus). That's actually more voices than each of the adjacent songs put together.
Speaking of instrumentation, one of my greatest regrets with the album was that the two songs featuring chain are adjacent. What's that? You didn't realize I had draped a chain near my drum set and hit it like a dumbtard? Well, I did. That was actually another one of the main features of the original album, the drum set was going to include a chain as a main voice and no crash cymbals, only rides. The "static kit" notion was quickly thrown out the window, I think just about every song with drums has its own set up. However, the chain stayed, kind of.
See, it's kind of a pain to hang a heavy chain in such a way that it is available for you to comfortably hit it while not pulling everything down around it, and since I had to set up the drums from step one every time I recorded this meant that the chain didn't get nearly as much love as it should have. In Spires I just kind of suspended it between a bedpost and a cymbal stand and then here I think it was literally just sitting on the hi-hat so that when I played the hi-hat I was really just playing the chain. Anyways, these songs are next to each other so the chain is kind of relegated to this one tiny corner of the album but there just wasn't a way around that in the end.
Also, yeah, the vocals are kind of crazy. Bit of a tangent but I had actually recorded another Crimson Rod album in the middle of this one. Oh yeah, did you know that this album took over a year to record? Seriously, when I said it was a pain to find opportunities I meant it. Anyway, so there was this one night when I realized I still had an opportunity to record and was messing around with my ukulele when I stumbled upon something insane. That something turned into an album I recorded that night in essentially one sitting, falling asleep by the final track but loving every minute of it. That album is Acidic Majesty and not only are you not ready to hear but I am not ready for you to hear it. This description will need to suffice: Spastic ukulele improvisations (like Apprentice, if Apprentice hated you and your family) accompanied by equally spastic and dissonant vocals performed at the same time.
Everything had been recorded but these final two songs, Sunny Disposition and Undrown. So when I discovered a new way of singing that suited my tastes much better than anything I had been doing on the album up to that point of course those songs got that treatment. This isn't noticeable in the chorus but you might be able to tell in the verses that at some point "singing" became less of an objective than "make disruptive vocal sounds and stumble through the lyrics."
There's a funny story about the synth part too but that will fit better in another post and we've been talking about this damn song for a long time.
Spires.
Spires!
I love this song. I know, I wrote it, but I write lots of songs that I don't really care for in most circumstances. Not this song, this song is always welcome in my ears. For me it's the perfect mix of varied structure and coherency with a track length that is long enough to help it stand alone but short enough that the aforementioned coherency doesn't suffer. After I made this I listened to it almost constantly. I'd listen to it, go to work, come home and listen to it, eat dinner, listen to it again, do some stuff, listen again and possibly get a few more in before bed. There is so much going on here that it never got old.
So what is happening here?
There is a structure. This structure was written on a break, much like the proposed idea for what would become Tar Parade. Unlike Tar Parade, this structure mostly made it into the actual song. The idea was to take a verse/chorus song and tack a verse/chorus song onto it, then tack a third verse/chorus song onto that and then wrap back around to the chorus of the initial part of the song. That is exactly what happened, but the precise execution got fuzzy. See, I had vague ideas of how each section would go and I had even played through it a couple of time beforehand but the key was that it was still almost entirely improvised. I think the only parts that were really by the book were the first chorus (which ended up with random variation anyway) and the second verse (since it's a polymetric phrase of 3/4 against 7/4 it had to be somewhat rigid, but you probably can't even tell that the guitar part is in a different meter since it's so thick).
So, it's highly amorphous and yet follows a distinct and coherent structure throughout. I'll say that again because it should be sending chills down your spine: it's highly amorphous and yet follows a distinct and coherent structure throughout.
Also, it's noise-y, it's prog-y, it's math-y and it's shoegaze-y. I will definitely be exploring this further, don't you worry.
Shit, just listen to that thing again and again and again. I don't care if you find this egotistical, you will eventually love it if you have any sense about you.
Trivial Human Bullshit is also a song.
Fixated is balls awesome as well, I think. This one is definitely the most rigid track on the album in that I actually performed all of the parts as written, even the guitar parts. The genesis of this came in the shower from a fairly complex melody that I was humming. Of course, I couldn't remember that, but this tiny fragment of it remained and became the vocal part. The drumming is standard math but it's also cool math. I've toyed with the idea of doing drum youtube videos, if that ever happens I'll be sure to do a video breaking down each of these patterns.
There is some improvisation of course, because that's just how it goes. The intro, the first half of the bridge aside from the drum part, all of the second half of the bridge and then the abrupt snare outro thing which occurred as one of those "in the moment" musical tantrums. It's a drummer thing. Maybe, I don't know.
Ok, that wasn't fair to Trivial Human Bullshit. It's a good song, for what it is. A simple song, sure, but you have to admit that it does have a cool riff and the leads fit pretty well. Whatever.
We've already talked about Tar Parade, keep up.
Hit The Banister is also a song. The original reverb mix was better but the volume was too low and when I redid the track the effects weren't as great. Whoops. Would redo it but it's canon now.
A Sighting Near Elsewhere turned out really great. There was going to be more layered over the initial guitar improvisation but it was just too cool to ruin with unnecessary baggage so I did the quiet vocal part, added reverb (remember, big cave) and called it a day. It actually kind of sounds like a modernized Slint song to me, and you know how much I love Slint. Doesn't it though? Kind of Don, Aman-y? Whatever, it totes does.
That dark chord at the end is really beautiful too. One of the many joys of microtonal tunings, and it makes a perfect transition into...
Undrown! Like Spires, I've spent many, many, many minutes sitting in a chair staring off into space with this playing. It's the same thing, a long song that isn't too long and takes you on a varied yet coherent journey. Avid readers will notice that this seems to be connected to Coral Citadel lyrically. Wonder what that is all about?
I actually like the vocals on this song. Yeah, I know. I don't even like my vocals, but here it works. Something about taking that overly strained Acidic Majesty style and running it through the reverbodelay ringer just works.
Um... the opening guitar riff is entirely composed and played to the notation. The 5/4 drum part that starts the little verse/chorus-ish section was written beforehand. Everything else was improvised but improvised with a narrative arc in mind. There are still only two guitar parts during the outro.
I haven't told you anything, really. I don't like to talk about meaning in my music, only methods. We've talked about meaning, it's hidden from you. You have to supply your own. I like knowing that meaning is there in some objective sense, in contradiction to my last post it does keep me engaged with a work. However, I often don't like to actually know the meaning, y'know? If you know it's there you can spend time trying to figure it out and discover many interesting other meanings in the process. Once you've been given the answer it ruins that experience. Often the actual meaning isn't even as interesting to you anyway. So I could tell you what these songs are about but that would ruin the experience for you. Instead you've been given the gift of listening to this album over and over, lost in a land of mystery every time with the answers just out of reach. You could capitalize on this gift or you could just go back to listening to whatever you normally listen to and ignoring my musical output.
I suppose that means I could tell you without ruining the experience that you wouldn't even end up having but now I just won't tell you out of spite.
