I'm still working on the Retro Project, which was originally going to be a single song for a compilation of 80s inspired/produced songs without guitar, but it's looking like it will be at least an EP and maybe a whole album.
In addition, I'm working on an album called: "The Orange Album, Kaossilator + Kaoss Pad". What's different about the orange project, from everything else I've done, is, it's all improvisational. There is no plan for any tune, just an unscripted jam using two instruments. I may later add vocals, but that too will be improvisational. The real beauty of this project is that it takes 3 minutes to make a 3 minute song. If I add vocals, it takes 6 minutes to make a 3 minute song. You can do the math for songs of other lengths. But the point is, it's a very fast way of working. And, like the retro project, it takes me out of my comfort zone, and uses process to redefine the way I make music.
The idea I had over the weekend was to apply some of the process of the Orange Album to the Retro Project. Since I am using the Casio VL-1 as a drum machine for some of the Retro Project tracks, I thought it might be a fun challenge to incorporate the most boring rhythm included in the machine; "March". BTW, you cannot program your own drum beats with the VL-1, you are limited to the pre-programmed ones. To make them interesting, you have to filter. The "March" is a 1-2 pattern of a bleep and some noise. It sounds like this: bleep, crunch, bleep, crunch, bleep, crunch, etc . . . Not very interesting, unless you can filter it to make it interesting, which is exactly what I intended to do.
In a previous post, I mentioned the Classic Albums episode for Fleetwood Mac's Rumours album. One of the more interesting songs, in terms of how it came about, was The Chain. It started life as a heavy up tempo jam between John the bassist and Mick the drummer, but that all it was, there was no intro, or opening. Stevie Nicks offered a song she was working on, to serve as the intro to their jam. If you listen to the song, you can hear where her contribution ends and the jam begins, but, if you don't know the story of the song, it flows so naturally, you can't imagine the one part existing without the other. They feel organically linked, even though they were authored by different people at different times in different places.
This is kind of what I was referring to, in the title, juxtaposition. When you take to completely unrelated things and put them together in a work of art. The surrealists did this most obviously, but their version of juxtaposition makes no attempt at reconciliation. Unlike The Chain, where the two parts are seamlessly tied together, in surrealism, the unrelated things maintain their distinctness. It's often compelling, and can be used to make very interesting arguments using metaphor, but one could also call it lazy. I'm not suggesting surrealists are lazy artists, but relying on shocking juxtaposition for the sole value in one's art certainly seems lazy.
One of my first experiences in "Art House" cinema was attending a documentary and retrospective of the collaborative film work of Dali and Buñuel. Based on my fuzzy memories, it seems Buñuel said they should make a movie together and Dali was up for it. Dali described a dream of Ants walking on his hand and/or a razor cutting open an eyeball, but complained it wasn't enough material to make a movie with. Buñuel dismissed his fears and said it was plenty to make a movie with. Watching the film right after that interview, I have to conclude, Dali was right, those two shots do not justify the whole picture, but Buñuel was right to think that they were enough of a starting point, because both images were very strong.
What the filmmakes completely failed to do, in my opinion, was to develop ideas springing from those images and incorporate them into some disturbing, but more logical whole. They might argue with me, that incorporating the images "logically" would undermine the whole point of surrealist film, and they might be right. But I think they would have a much stronger film if it could be both logical and surreal. I think the American filmmaker, David Lynch has got the mix of logic and surreal right a few times in his career, to very strong results. But I digress.
So I opened up my music software, Logic, to start a new project, an improvisational one, using the VL-1's rhythm section, but whenever you open Logic, it opens the last project you were working on. In this case, the first song from the Retro Project, which I have, for the moment, titled, I C U. And then it dawns on me, maybe, instead of doing this on a new project, maybe this with be the winning rhythm for I C U. And it was. So, something I was intending to use for a different song, wound up being incorporated into the current song, and making it so much better. I got rid of a bunch more temporary tracks in the sketch version of the song, and figured out what the bass line would be.
I finally was able to lay down the first layer on my old cassette 4 track, incorporating, VL-1 drums, Synsonics drums, and the bass timbre I described in the first post about this project. Listening to the playback in analog was so sweet. I hope it continues to go this well.
Going back to "less is more" vs. "more is more", if it's more of the same, then less is certainly more, but if it's something different, an inspiration from another place and time, more is more. I always try (but often don't succeed) in trying to have three distinctly different inspirations for each project. Putting them together, in the same project, is what I think of as juxtaposition, though I try to really integrate them, opting away from the surrealist model. But I love surrealism, though, that's a post for another day.
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