As soon as Six Consequences was completed work began on the follow-up. The overarching ideas behind this particular release are those of contrast and leisure. A piece may have contrasting components or even simultaneous voices, and can take either a longer time to develop or may remain within one particular place without feeling a pressing need to move on to the next. It is not for everyone - it requires patience.
The other guiding principle in this release was to make an overt mixture between the clearly synthesised and the clearly organic; the mixture between (say) pipe organ and the synthetic voices of the Mellotron, or between a string section and a Minimoog bass. Rather than attempt to merge the sounds (as in the preceding release) there was also a conscious effort to reduce artefacts such as compression to allow sounds to be hear more naturally, something helped by the way that there are fewer instruments playing on the following pieces than on the previous CD. The orders of the day are sparse and restrained.
The four 'bookend' tracks came first, almost in the order in which they appear. The only slight exception to this is Shutter on the Scene which started life as a candidate for the previous CD but which needed more work and inspiration before it could be included. Originally, these four were meant to be released on a shorter EP but the development of Metamorphosis went far faster than was expected.
Inspirationally this release clearly owes a great deal to Philip Glass but also makes a nod in the direction of Steve Moore and DAC Crowell. Of these three, Glass clearly served as inspiration (and composer) for the central set of compositions, but Moore lent much in the way of feel (especially if you listen to 'The Way In') and Crowell for textures, especially those found on 'The Sea and the Sky'.
All tunes are presented as high bitrate MP3s which accounts for their large size. A Nero layout file for this release can be found here, an Adobe PDF file for the cover can be found here and suitable CD label can be found here. A Microsoft Word version of the artwork is also available here. If you wish to lay out the CD manually then all tracks are separated by one second gap aside from tracks 3 and 7 which are preceded by a two second interval to break the Metamorphosis pieces away from the others. A CD Architect layout can be found here and a Winamp playlist can be found here. Also, under the title of each track beneath there is a link allowing you to listen to a streamed preview. The 'start' button on the left will stream the music to you via Last FM. The band link will take you to my last FM web page and the track link will take to to the Last FM player page for that track .
Comments and criticisms are more than welcome!
Mike Dickson, Edinburgh, November 2007
The origins of the name of this piece will probably remain a mystery to all but the uninitiated.
In some ways this piece was an attempt to see what Philip Glass would sound like at quarter speed. Perhaps this is the reason why it took three weeks to think about this recording and just under two days to execute. Although apparently quite simple in execution, this piece uses over eighty separate tracks, many of which are used for the occasional bleeps and chirps you can faintly detect across the stereo spectrum, the majority of which came from the Moog.
Instrumentation:
This piece owes a lot to the inspiration served up by playing with a bunch of pleasant sounding timbres and seeing what emerged from them. The gentle sound of the combined treated harps (mostly through chorus and some slight flanging) create a third sound altogether, over the faded choir of strings and voice synthesisers, all of which lead up to what is for many a genuinely surprising coda.
Again, this largely improvised piece fell into place in little more than an afternoon with the arrangement and recording of the coda coming slightly later. As for the title, it simply reflects the fact that on first playback of the 'harp section' time did indeed seem to stop for just a moment; I had absolutely no idea for how long it extended and was surprised to find that the overall piece is as short as it is measured. Even now on listening to it again time seems to be almost elastic, with it either seeming to be quite long or very short, depending on one's frame of mind at the time.
Instrumentation:
Composed in 1988, these four pieces (from a total of five) are inspired by and used within the play from Franz Kafka's short story of the same name. Parts three and four are adapted from the incidental music to the play, whilst those in one and two use themes from Glass' other music for The Thin Blue Line. Originally written as pieces for solo piano, my versions use various digital choirs and Mellotrons to simulate trademark 'Philip Glass' sound found in his later works (notably in the soundtrack work to the themes of the Candyman films) as well as arpeggiated percussion, mallets and strings. In covering these pieces I hope that I have not only managed to convey some sense of colour, but have also imparted in them some of the characteristics that have made Philip Glass one of the most interesting composers we have today.
Instrumentation:
On Metamorphosis I
On Metamorphosis II
On Metamorphosis III
On Metamorphosis IV
Perhaps the most interesting thing to mention in respect of this particular track is that the credit to the Mellotron is actually bogus. When recording the tracks it became clear that the other sections built around it would have to be scaled up or down according to key, and rather than record and re-record the Mellotron tracks it was easier to record the entire Mellotron sections (strings and some choirs) via sampler through MIDI. The difference is that the samples used are not commercially available ones, but recordings of my own M400 placed into a digital sampler without any effort to noise reduce them, tweak their EQ, normalise them or generally mess about with them to make them 'acceptable'. Sure the Mellotron is a noisy instrument - it has thirty five open playback heads for starters, not to mention a red hot output - but in my experience any samples offered so far by a variety of commercial ventures have been flawed by the manufacturers trying to edit them in some way. (Or loop them, heaven forfend) One other cardinal sin is for a sample library to be recorded directly from the tape or digitised tape source, instead of via a Mellotron. Not only does this make the sound far too clean, it also does not introduce the pleasing distortions that the instrument introduces to the music.
Mostly for this reason, sampled Mellotrons can be spotted a hundred yards away no matter how they are buried down in the mix. If nothing else I show here that making a sampled Mellotron sound like a Mellotron is still possible. Given the fact that there are precious few of these magnificent instruments in circulation, samples are the easiest (and cheapest) way to access the sounds that made this instrument famous. It would be a pity if their legacy was left to a handful of enthusiasts like me and some badly constructed and unrepresentative sample libraries.
Instrumentation:
Why Serendip?
Serendip was of course the name coined by Horace Walpole for Sri Lanka in 1754 from the folk talk 'The Three Princes of Serendip'. It's meaning describes the condition of making or creating lucky finds - happy accidents. It applies here primarily because the three components of this piece were created separately to each other and yet manage to work as an overall composition when they were placed together in the final mix.
On looking back over the whole album, it might be the case that Serendip would have made a better title for the collection as the four 'home grown' pieces were mostly constructed by bolting various pieces of existing music together. Cranmillion does have a sense of thematic unity to it as the sound wanders in and out in the same key throughout, but it was still put together by recording the pipes, the strings and the synths separately and then introducing them in layers. For A Brief Second... was put together in two parts between the main body and the coda. Shutter on the Scene was also constructed in parts, with the sense of holding the piece together given by the chord structures played by the piano and echoed within the choirs later; the percussion section of that piece was intended for another project entirely. Although these were all planned out in some sense, a certain degree of serendipity permeates through the whole project, which partly explains why it happened so quickly. Like someone else's experience, a good fairy - verte or otherwise - was watching over this one.
Instrumentation:
