Kose II (Alternate Portrait)

Cambridge, MA
24 April, 2008

Madame Lush

Fort Devens, MA
19 April, 2008

Slightly Panoramic

I wrote the main piano parts to this while improvising in a high school rehearsal room. My friend Nobie was there at the time. That was in May 2006. Over the following weekend, I recorded this at home, plugging the synth directly into my hard drive recorder. After improvising for a while, I decided to add that eerie middle section, which still sounds just as scary as it did when I first recorded it. The guitar in this song really stands out in that section.

The way out of the middle section is with that post-rock start / stop buildup. I like to call this part 'the ladder', for obvious reasons. I'd always wanted to insert a section like this into a song. I love how heavy this part gets. It reminds me of the louder, more aggressive guitar music I heard throughout the 90s. I'm talking about bands like Filter, Stone Temple Pilots, and (the heavy songs of) The Smashing Pumpkins.

Some people think the guitar part in this song is dull, and I only half agree. It's not supposed to be soloing wildly. It's merely adding texture by droning above the piano. The main point here is what the left hand is playing on the piano, which is those alternating chords. Listen closely, because the mood changes significantly from the first 'verse' to the second 'verse' when the left hand chords move up an octave. The drums are all produced by synthesizer / MIDI controller, which I played live by hand for the whole song, keying out each beat in real time. I love the timing of the 'chorus', and the way the drums hit real hard during those parts when the piano is rolling on those neighboring notes.

I'm taking a huge risk posting this song here, because the ending is part gag, part real. It's just residual improv that I played after the song 'ended'. I decided to keep it in the final mix, though, because I thought it was humorous. Over time, I actually started to like it, even though the drums are not tight for the first half. So, enjoy the song, but if you dislike the ending, then you can disregard it.

Impromptu (Kerouac-ian) Haiku

parcels and parcels of metatarsals
stacks and stacks of paperbacks
morsels and cracks in my genealogy.

Dakar, Sénégal
9 January, 2008

Pinto's Groove

'Pinto's Groove' is one of the strangest songs I've ever composed / recorded. I can't even remember exactly when the recording took place - all I know is that it happened somewhere between October 2004 and maybe February 2005. The funny thing is that this song is a complete accident - it was never intended to happen, but I've always liked it. It was discovered recently upon searching an old computer of mine in a folder full of other older recorded material that might show up here someday.

I had just bought an octave pedal, and was trying out some of the sounds. My recording device was a Tascam Porta02mkII analog cassette 4-track. I had an SM58 pointed at my guitar amp, running directly into the machine, recording everything onto tape.

Anyways, I started playing that main theme over and over, occasionally changing the riff. I wanted to just have a record of what the octave pedal sounded like on different string groups. After a couple minutes, when I had naturally cycled through every possible pentatonic riff, I stopped playing and stopped the tape. When reviewing the tape, I loved it so much, that I pointed my SM58 at the drumkit (back then a Premier Olympic 5-piece kit with 1 crash cymbal!) and laid down a one-take drum track. There are tempo issues in the beginning, and late fills, but this song always makes me laugh because it just showed up.

When I played the tape back, with the drums and guitar tracks playing simultaneously, the song reminded me of an old Ford Pinto, or maybe some leather-jacket-wearing punks riding in one, cruising down the street with that awful engine coughing and spitting all the while.

Michael's Shoes, Bumper, Muffler

Cambridge, MA
08 May, 2008