Elation was a tape named after an instrumental I wrote and recorded with a serious deficit in equipment: I was using two tape decks, my Casio and Yamaha keyboards, a $79 Radio Shack mixer and a Radio Shack reverb box, and was desperately trying not to make it sound like crap.
Things changed when Mike Scully stepped up to a new multitrack recorder, and gave me the four-track cassette recorder we’d used to record the GreenSkulls material. Inspired by the notion of not sounding like crap, I went and re-recorded everything. There’s no MIDI or sequencing here – just me playing keyboards, guitar and “drums” (manually played on the keyboards). It’s some of my best stuff, and a window into my mindset at the time.
Time Apart
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/apart.mp3]
1994 notes: This is the first song I recorded with the intention of featuring a guitar track or two, though I’ll admit that they’re the kind of guitar tracks that are played by a single finger on a single string. This song was recorded around Christmas of 1992, and was the last recording I laid down until February 1994 (!). If you’re wondering about the unfamiliar Oriental style percussion, that’s the nifty sound of me beatting the door of the clothesdryer at my old house with a metal soup ladel for a different percussion sound. I’ll do anything for a different percussion sound. I just hope the dryer’s warranty covers different percussion sounds…
I still like this one a lot – a relaxing favorite. The “sampling” mentioned in my old notes above was done with a Casio SK-1 sampling keyboard, which was a very early consumer sampler and was just this side of being a toy.
Here’s the original, pre-4-track demo of Time Apart; there are still a few things about this rough version that I think are superior to the better-sounding version.
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/aparty.mp3]
Here’s a “remastered” version – really just better EQ’ed – of the 4-track recording.
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/apartment.mp3]
3 A.M. Special
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/three.mp3]
1994 notes: You want loud, annoying, boisterous music? This is it! It is what it says, something I cooked up one morning when I couldn’t sleep because Dizzy, Louis and Duke were playing a set in my head – thanks so much, guys! I tried to do you proud. This piece has a programmed background drum track, though most of it is covered up by louder percussion tracks which I played manually. This is one of the most intricate songs I’ve yet recorded, with three layers of drums, one organ, one pinging synth part, the “grungy” bass, the synth-accordion part, and the clarinet solos, not to mention the pre-programmed piano part. (Say that five times fast!)
If this was real jazz… it’d be a lot more chaotic and cool.
Here’s the original, pre-4-track demo of 3 A.M. Special.
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/threee.mp3]
Here’s a “remastered” version – really just better EQ’ed – of the 4-track recording.
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/threeee.mp3]
Pursuits
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/pursuit.mp3]
1994 notes: A real oddball piece in my repertoire for a number of reasons. First off, principal recording took place late one night in the production room at KLSZ radio. Second, there aren’t any real instruments per se, but rather me beating every metal surface in the room with a couple of big screwdrivers (the tool, not the drink). The victims/instruments consisted of every possible facet and surface of the microphone boom (the springs of which I dragged one of the screwdrivers along, actually creating a steady note sounding like the wonderfully nasty sound which characterized the first two Star Trek film scores) and the turntable, which provided the bell-like tone. It’s all percussion, recorded on the station’s open-reel four track recorder. I gave it the reverse-echo treatment at home. I’d love to do another piece like this someday, though possibly with a more tonal component.
Man, I wish I’d kept clean isolated recordings of that “drag the screwdriver along the spring” sound to sample later; that’s close enough to the Blaster Beam for government work.
Here’s a “remastered” version – really just better EQ’ed.
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/pursuith.mp3]
Elation
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/elation.mp3]
A very simple instrumental, but I still like the feel. It originated as a Satan Brothers song with words, but the words have never been sung – it was a bit too straight-ahead and normal for the Brothers. It showed up as an instrumental called “Elation B.”
The Satan Brothers version:
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/elationb.mp3]
Deep Sky
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/deep.mp3]
1994 notes: Be thankful; this song used to be eight minutes long, but it’s feeling much better now. I tried to make it sound a little less “synthesized” than usual, but as often happens with keyboard “string sections,” they wind up sounding like an organ. Also note that I used that weird howling-whistle sound a few years before Mark Snow used it in the X-Files theme.
Listening to it now… the counterpoint is far more interesting than the melody.
Perseids
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/percy.mp3]
1994 notes: This is meant to be an Alan Parsons-ish piece which sonically describes stuff falling out of the sky – in listening to it, you might just pick up on the musical metaphor. I’ve always wanted to go back and redo this one, just to beef it up a bit and make it more substantial. That wild oscillating howl of feedback at the end, though, was pure serendipity.
A “remastered” version from 2009, which was a more radical reworking than most of my EQ tweaks:
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/percyy.mp3]
What Do We Do On Sunday Morning?
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/sunday.mp3]
1994 notes: Recorded between midnight and 2:30am on February 1, 1994, it sounds like it was probably recorded less than a week after “Time Apart,” though there’s a gap of just over a year between the two songs during which I recorded nothing.
Wish I could go in and redo some of the guitar work.
Here’s a “remastered” version – really just better EQ’ed.
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/sundaze.mp3]
The Slink
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/slink.mp3]
At the time I was recording circa 1992, the Twin Peaks soundtrack was still getting a lot of play in my CD player; this was an attempt to try to achieve a similar sound, mainly by reverbing stuff and playing with some very weird attack and decay settings – weird enough that I remember having to play the keys well in advance of the sound making itself heard. Any “off” timing is down to that.
Here’s a “remastered” version – really just better EQ’ed.
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/slinky.mp3]
Rotation
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/rotation.mp3]
This was a piece where I was trying to play some weird music/mathematical theory games with myself. With everything after the first track, I’d only mix up the original track in my headphones so I’d know when to start playing the new track, and then I’d reach over and knock the volume down as soon as I started playing. I’d worked out in advance what I was playing, but I was leaving the timing completely up to chance, just to see how much “drift” would occur and how often everything would come back together when it was supposed to, sort of like noticing that everyone’s turn signals are suddenly in sync. That it’s even remotely listenable would seem to indicate that I was far too conscious of what I’d already recorded to “drift” too much out of the established rhythm.
Wanderings
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/wander.mp3]
A strange little minor key piece. I distinctly remember playing this for my dad, on one of those occasions when he was actually at home, and he said, “You should do music for movie soundtracks.” Given my soundtrack-listening tendencies both then and now, I was pretty happy with that.
Symphony In Sanity
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/sanity.mp3]
A conscious attempt to do something a little bit Jeff Lynne-esque, “strings” and all.
Here’s a “remastered” version – really just better EQ’ed.
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/insanity.mp3]
Under The Bloody Moon
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/bloody.mp3]
Another attempt to do the Twin Peaks-inspired jazz thing. I turned the tape over and did a backwards bit in here, which makes the whole song.
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