Sunday, February 7, 2010

Tone Poems

A lot of the time we start out a session with no agenda – Essey lays down some beats, or I start some riff or other. The mood of the piece evolves as we add more sounds. Sometimes, the music starts to suggest a story or an idea, and we follow the suggestion. Other times, we start with a specific idea in mind. This week, we spent a Saturday afternoon working on a Bhangra-inspired construction whose working title was “One Thousand Lawyers” (more about how we come up with track names in a future post).

Bhangra is a form of music from the Punjab region of India. Its origins are in folk dancing, but the infectious rhythms and the unique sounds of the folk instruments have spawned a whole genre of Indian house music. I wanted to see if we could replicate that sound and add our own stamp to the format, pulling in a funky bass line, and atypical instruments such as the Afro-Brazilian berimbau and our usual assortment of found-object percussion.

My typical attitude towards vocals in music is to treat them as musical elements, not as lyrical elements. The actual words, if there are words at all, are often an afterthought. But as we evolved the Bhangra construction, it seemed to call for a vocal, and so we started scribbling down lyric ideas, starting with a melody and a rhythm, and trying to fit vowel sounds to the shape of the music. What we came up with evoked the idea of stumbling home in a monsoon rain through chaotic streets after a night of clubbing in Mumbai. Here are the words, starting at 2:52, to what we’re currently calling “Acid-Washed Dreams”:

    It’s not raining, it’s steaming
    Virgins blaspheming Shiva
    And in weaving these visions
    To believe is to leave her

    Cars and bars and whores
    Among the the Bollywood nights
    The lights and the stars making the boulevard soar
    Until they lock the doors and it’s just me, alone
    Walk in the warm rain
    Steam rising from the street in the heat
    To be alive in the city of flowers and songs and mycelium dreams

Here are a few other examples of constructions that started with no specific idea and evolved into stories:

The Possum and the Pea
Whimsical woodland creatures go about their oddly anthropomorphic business with a happy demeanor. In the evening, they go to a rave.

Nice Driveway
A down and out Slavic musician belts out a traditional Russian folk tune on the street outside a seedy bar after too much vodka.

Corruptional facility
Students are routinely brainwashed at a school staffed by jack-booted fascists (I imagine this is the same school we met in Pink Floyd’s “another brick in the wall”).

First Frost in the Garden
Adam tosses and turns through the longest night in Eden, his head filled with disturbing dreams, while Eve is off on a sinister and unprecedented errand.

That's all for today, cradle critters. Enjoy!

-Snake