Two good days working on music, learning so much and very pleased with the music so far, much happier with it than the first version a year ago. One key thing about this project is that I'm aiming to embody much of the music philosophy extolled in a former blog post I made about authenticity in music. So much music since about 2000 has been way over-compressed, giving it a consistently loud, regular volume which can sound great on the first listen, but only gets more annoying, if headache inducing, over time. One of my key aims is to make pop/rock music with the dynamic range and depth of classical music, well, as dramatic as I can make it. Music that is emotional for its own sake needs dramatic dynamism. We are really not used to hearing that sort of music in the pop era, unless you listen to a lot of classical music instead.
That's the hard part about any vocals; you have a mix of phonetic accuracy (the words need to be heard), pitch (in tune), and emotion. Of course, the emotion is the most important bit. Any electronic processing affects these things. Nowadays, it tends to improve the pitch accuracy (arguably the least important component) and harm the rest. I can say now I have never and will never use any automatic tuning. I'll happily use vocoders, I've loved their robotic speech since Battlestar Galactica (pedantry note: the Cylons used something called a resonator, apparently, rather than a vocoder, although a vocoder feeds the signal through several resonant band-pass filters anyway, so perhaps these are similar).
A lot of my processing work now is wrestling with the technology to make it all sound naturalistic, no digitally regular rhythms here, not even for the dance tracks. Everything will defy convention. My aim is to make music with modern technology that echoes back to the peak of music, perhaps 1981, just before digital sequencers, those killers of human feeling. Of course, I'm sequencing everything rather than using 1981 tapes, but every note and is hand crafted. This takes a long time, but sounds so much better as a result.
I feel that this music is really exciting, better in dynamism and truth than a lot of pop music out there, and I'm making it the best I can for its own sake. One thing I need though is a new band name or alter-ego because I've released a lot of music already and if you find me on Spotify or something, you'll probably be inundated with a lot of old electronic game-style music that is nothing like this, and nothing like the music I write now, which is typically piano based and classical or faux-classical, or 'avant-garde/experimental'. Everything since The Anatomy of Emotions sounds much more naturalistic. Perhaps one day I'll re-record The Love Symphony, which sounds very flat and electronic to my contemporary ears, but I still like every note, from a musical point of view (one day, I'm sure an orchestra will play it, I must hope I'm alive to hear that). Generally though I'd much rather make new things than revisit old things.
Anyway, these songs are nothing like my previous work and need a new artist. I could have split up some past albums into different genres with different band/artist names, perhaps the more classical-sounding music could have had a new name to suit my new gothic performing appearance, but the evolution there was gradual, and some of the music on, say, Tree of Keys has echoes of both that music and older electronic music. I am pleased that 'Gunstorm' and 'The End and The Beginning', my electro-pop from over a decade ago with the fantastic Tor james Faulkner on vocals, is credited to both of us because that does have a unique sound, rather like La Roux, now I think of it, like La Roux if Alison Moyet was the lead singer.
As I work, I'm enjoying re-reading How Music Works by David Byrne, confirming many of my ideas and thoughts.
In other music news, my latest album, Music of Poetic Objects has its world-wide digital release on Friday. I've done zero promotion on it but have sold 7 copies on CD so far, making it my most popular music in years. Be part of this success story and order one of the limited first-edition copies today! You can order the CD now from my website.
