there was something heavenlike about being able to just attend lectures in college and sit in a cozy auditorium while someone told you about interesting things for an hour and you just did this with your weeks. i wont lie to you. unfortunately they killed you if you dont remember every minutiae of what they said.

Time Goes Backwards

So late Friday night, I went for a bite with a good friend I hadn’t seen in awhile. We hoped to dodge any drunken Cinco de Mayo foolishness by avoiding Mexican fare altogether, but when we arrived at the greasy spoon off the Highland Strip that was one of two places still open at that extreme hour, a DJ blasting salsa beats at top volume ended up driving us outside into the unseasonably frigid (for Memphis in springtime) night. We parked ourselves at a rickety metal table and continued the long, long talk we’d begun earlier in the evening; said friend is a musician whom I greatly respect, so I was eager for his opinion on a few matters. Among other things, we talked mixing challenges, DIY workarounds for lo-fi limitations, and of course this new album I’m working on. I vented my frustrations about having made less progress than I’d hoped thus far. And it helped, for whatever reason, as simply talking often does. Last night’s recording went much smoother than that of the previous weeks, and resulted in the first piece I’m considering actually putting on the album (For the time being, I put it in a folder marked ‘Definites?’). It’s a pretty good little piece, it achieves exactly what I set out to do, and hopefully this is a sign of even better results to come down the line. I feel encouraged by the considerable progress made.  The piece is a little over two-and-a-half minutes, likely to end up an interlude of sorts if it does end up making the album, and built around a gently-swelling bed of reversed, clean guitar chords, curling and echoing across the stereo field, lightly reverb’d and Dual Tape Deck’d. On this bed I built a few interlacing lead lines, added some delay, and maxed out the ‘Flutter’ tape simulation plug-in I love so much. I ended up recording one of these lines back to tape, and fed it back into the DAW, warbling in real-time with the pause button, letting the notes gleefully go off-track and lag behind the rest of the guitar sections, like a machine with broken gears and pulleys coming to slow and buzzing rest. A little dusty vinyl noise, some light EQ’ing, and that’s pretty much all she wrote. The real basis for the track is a dialogue sample, though, which runs the entire length of the piece. As I told my friend the other night, it’s difficult at times to make a dialogue sample match sonically with the music in a track, even if the content pairs well thematically. This time, I fed the sample through my trusty Izotope Vinyl plug-in, turned up the ‘wear’ controls to full wear, and set the age parameter to 1950, the RPM to 78. It aged the sample to the point I think it meshed well with the music of the piece, taking center-stage as intended without overpowering the guitars. The music and words play off each other well. We’ve used a great deal of samples and found sound/field recordings in Lost Trail, and in Nonconnah thus far. Sometimes they simply fill a space where vocals would go in a traditional song, and sometimes they significantly add to the emotional core of the music by saying something at just the right moment, over just the right sounds. One of the themes I repeatedly find myself fascinated by is that of passionate belief, especially unusual or extreme belief systems. Before I became a fairly devout Quaker in 2012, I was agnostic bordering on atheist my entire life, and joining the Friends only deepened my interest in the more radical side of religious mania. The Satanic Panic of the eighties and nineties, where parents and fundamentalist groups really threw themselves a field day blaming all sorts of social unrest and violence on heavy metal, horror cinema, and the occult, especially when it came to teenagers, is a subject of great fascination for me, an interesting (and thankfully fleeting) time in this country’s history that makes me think of the Puritans and their assumption that the great forest spreading beyond their isolated villages was populated by untold throngs of demons and witches. I don’t believe in a hell, nor demons, but I have always had a sense of another shadow world lurking beneath the surface of this one, barely glimpsed at times through the thin-stretched fabric of our decaying age, of the reality we construct over the real nature of forces at play beneath. I think passionate zealotry and extreme devotion to an ideology is a product of that tension, and Satanic Panic is a fearful example of people willing themselves to believe in a bogeyman, in something, anything, to blame for their teens being teens...whether it be that loud newfangled music or those gory movies. I find myself returning to this subject in my art time and time again. So this sample is a true gem, from a multi-part lecture series I found on YouTube concerning ‘signs of Satanic abuse’. There’s a real dichotomy between the soothing tones of the woman’s narration and the imaginary fantasies she’s enumerating. The section I used concerns the concept of ‘backwards programming’, i.e. spiritual brainwashing of a subject to encourage belief in opposing reactions to stimuli or perception. Up is down, left is right, pain is pleasure, time moves backwards, etc. This lecture goes to some really wild places - implantation of a ‘backwards room’ through ‘magic surgery’, the latter phrase tossed off in passing and never explained...it’d be funny if people didn’t actively persecute others using such outlandish and paranoid beliefs; we’re not far away from West Memphis, Arkansas, after all, where three innocent young men were jailed for the murders of a group of children based on zero evidence save for- ‘they look evil, and there’s rumors of Satanic cults around here.’ So for now I’m calling this little song ‘Magic Surgery’, because I find that phrase both hilarious and very haunting. This sample’s even given me a working title for the album, one I think may line up nicely with all the themes I hope to cover - For now, this album is called ‘The Backwards Room.’ ZC 

Listening to: Forest Swords - COMPASSION Reading: Rick Moody - GARDEN STATE Watching: FIVE CAME BACK, Netflix