this track was meant to be a new beginning, but, instead, exists in a sort of purgatory. musically, it's radically different than anything else labeled 'inri'; thematically, it's a logical extension of inri. i really wanted this to be a fresh start, but in the end i had to leave it in the inri pile. in places it's sort of evil, in other places it's just a little too precious.
my dad swapped houses in mid 99. again. this would be a frequent annoyance over the next few years. i can date this clearly to the summer of '99 as the first thing i did in my new basement. that change of surroundings contributed to the feeling of wanting to do something different...
while it is an original track, it ended up on the covers disc for two reasons. first, the lead guitar loop that cycles through the track came out of a stoner jam session in the basement of a friend of mine. it's sort of hilarious to realize it took three years for another human being to get an influence here, even if it was a throwaway jam session. that was really just an excuse though. the real reason it's here, rather than on inridiculous, is that it fits in better on the prog theme of this disc than the noise theme of that one.
the lyrics have been a problem since they were recorded. sex sells. shock sells. i had to psyche myself up to do it. it's all tied together, though. where was i going with this, anyways?
'99 was the summer between grades 12 and 13 ("oac"). yes, ontario had a grade 13. get your laughs in. it was actually a pre-university year. universities would take the grades from the "oac" year as the entrance requirements. we didn't do SATs or anything. most universities have something like this for "mature students"; the weirdness is in making high school kids do the extra year. a few places (like quebec) still have similar types of pre-university screening...
anyways, i'm going into the oac year and i haven't even really given the whole vocation thing a passing thought, other than to reject the idea of defining my life through the concept of labour. there were a few weeks in the summer where i had sort of decided not to go to oac at all. i was actually *excited* about escaping school, focusing on a minimum wage job and spending my free time smoking pot and writing music. i really didn't want anything more out of life than this. and, if i happened to get lucky and sell some records, even better. i was eventually talked down from this position through a process of bribery. that didn't magically construct vocational aspirations, though; i ended up overloading on oac credits for the simple reason that i didn't know what i wanted.
(i ended up grudgingly accepting entrance into a software engineering program, literally switched to cosmological physics within a few weeks, switched to math after that, then bounced around from music to english to women's studies and ...)
so, again, i'm stuck between grade 12 and 13 and really dreading what the future holds. finding a way to sell some music would be an escape from this. i concluded that, tactically, my best approach at the time would have been to focus on something sexually explicit that gains it's power from it's shock value. there's a bit of desperation underlying this.
so i wrote a sort of graphic depiction of sexual domination within a male homosexual context. see, the thing is that it isn't very convincing. it isn't very convincing because it's contrived for profit. i'm being bluntly honest about the logic that produced this track because seeing myself in the mirror like this actually had a large effect on me. once i realized what i'd created, i was completely disgusted with myself. in it's initial form, liquify was the first 3:36 of this track. it sat on my hard drive for several weeks, waiting for me to finish questioning myself - who i was, what i was doing, whether it was worth it.
i came to two conclusions.
the first was that contrived music sucks. i realized i wasn't going to get anywhere faking it, anyways. if i wanted to build an audience, the only serious approach i had was honesty.
the second was that, even if it works, being fake isn't worth it. i was rejecting the beaten path because i didn't feel i belonged on it. accepting some kind of Official Alternative Beaten Path wasn't solving anything.
so, i should just do what i want, and tell anybody that doesn't like it to fuck off.
the second part of this track flowed from that epiphany. it's a pure prog workout, discernible from 1972 solely in it's updated use of technology. probably for the first time, the notes really mean something to me, here. if you listen, you can tell.
the ending scene of the jim carrey masterpiece, the truman show, fades the track out. it's meant to document the importance of the film in helping me work through what i was working through. i've mildly modified the track to fade out the truman show ending, which was just a little too cheezy & precious.
so, yeah. there's a few more inri tracks. but this is really the point where inri dies.
recorded over
the summer of 1999. edited on nov 23, 2013.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/liquify-inrimake