i'm going to need to spray the apartment this morning, so i didn't want to get too involved in finishing the concerto - not enough time to sit down, let the tubes warm up and get some tracks down. instead, i set up the basics for inri043, which is the next project.
this is the first release under the rules of my new subscription service, which means you won't be able to hear it until it's done. nonetheless, the rss will update...
you'll also notice that i got track five up for the gestating elephant. and it's really a beast of a record. one more track, but not inri043.
inri043 is likely to remain a stranded track. it was remixed for inri051.
inri044 is the last track to complete for the gestating elephant and will take some rime.
inri045 is the gestating elephant and will be completed when inri044 is....
inri046 finally begins period 3, and finally shifts out of 2002 to 2003 - which will certainly be a short year, in comparison to 2001 and 2002. i spent a great deal of 2003 without a formal "home" and without access to recording equipment. most of what i got down didn't become coherent until 2004...
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this track was initially written as a folk punk song, but i jumped to the scorewriter with it almost immediately. it was initially less about explicitly creating a techno song and more about ordering the parts in a way that could be deconstructed more effectively. i wanted a more flexible approach to production.
i may have gone over this in this space before, but my mixing process up to that point was considerably unconventional. i would record tracks in one by one using a wave editor and then paste them on top of each other. i worked this way because i just didn't have more advanced tools. while there are benefits to this approach (it's additive synthesis, which blurs the mix for soundscaping), it meant that each additional track was destructive. i could not remove tracks once they were added.
i also picked up a copy of cakewalk to help with this, but i quickly learned that my system couldn't really handle it. at around eight tracks, it just became unresponsive. with less than eight tracks, it didn't matter if the mix was destructive because it was easily reconstructed. so, i went back to the wave editor approach until 2007, when i upgraded to a modern pc.
the taiko drum part was initially just to keep time; it wasn't supposed to be a part of the song. but, as i built it up i began to realize how interesting it sounded as a techno tune and sort of ran with it. once i'd notated it, i had to convert the drums into a soundscape because the midi render just wasn't good enough. this was done using a mix of software drum machines, midi snippets and isolated jimmy chamberlain samples. i then performed the score i had notated, with the exception of a few synths which were sequenced back.
the mix never came out well, partly due to ram issues with cakewalk and partly because i got a little pretentious with some of the parts. i was also extremely distracted over this period. i attempted a few different things over late 2002 and early 2003 to try and salvage it for my own purposes, but in the end i shelved it as unworkable.
when i first set up the bandcamp site around 2010, i realized i had a collection of tracks that fit a sort of techno-guitar description and compiled them together under the name "tetris" (jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/tetris). i uploaded an incomplete mix for that project, but it was never really done and i never really felt good about it.
it wasn't until late 2014 that i came back to the track, to authoritatively finish my discography. first, a mix was reconstructed from source to include all of the existing sound files. next, three separate sequencer mixes were sculpted out of the score - a jazz fusion mix, an overture mix and an ambient mix. pieces of these sequencer mixes were then isolated and mixed into the reconstructed original mix. finally, a series of extra lead guitar parts were recorded and mixed separately into a final mix. the recording process for this was very lengthy, which was ironically partly due to consistent distractions.
written over the summer of 2002 and initially recorded in the early fall of 2002. additional recording, production and mixing occurred from dec, 2014 to apr, 2015. track completed on april 13, 2015.
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/untitled-6