A few busy days. First, listed Masculinity Two on my website and Cornutopia Music, and updated the main pages to highlight these, then sent the music plus a short bio to Manchester-based Tariff Street Radio, submitted the track to BBC Introducing, created a listing for the single on Musicbrainz, then registered the track with the PPL database. All of this is part of the necessary paperwork for music registration.
Then, more work on some of the remaining music on the album. I've not listened to it in weeks, and the break was really useful in pulling the 'bandages of false' hearing off, allowing me to hear the music afresh again. A few more changes were needed. First I decided to try some new vocoder sections to Lookin' For A Lover which gives the track a wonderful 70s disco feeling. I really love this track now. It was always one of my favourite tracks, and a good candidate for a second single, or video highlight.
The track that needed and needs the most work was The Trees. It was always a strange track, with a mood of fear, something very rare in music. It follows a structure of four parts; a slow glowing in chords that cycle through complex fifths, yet the drone-like lead vocals fixate on G, making everything sound strange and discordant, angular like a lost child stuck in the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. This builds up to a climax and a powerful chorus in G-major. This was originally the finale, but this dis off to a quiet piano solo, as though we fall asleep to drift among the trees, lost in some comforting dream. After a minute or so, the solo fades away to repeat the climactic part again, but the music now overwhelms the screaming vocals, suffocating them with many melodies like a tangle of branches. The song ends with a second climax, a dead stop inspired by Sheer Heart Attack by Queen.
The Trees is the most complex track on the album, and one of the least like pop music, perhaps because it is the least overtly pleasant. Other tracks like the minimalist The Stars or Notes From Space are also rather unconventional, but still rather pleasant and the sound fits with the rest of the album more neatly than The Trees.
The Trees has been a challenge to put together, taking many months and many revisions, all because of the strange combination of changing, naturalistic mood and tempo; a lead melody that doesn't match any tempo or backing melody at all, and all sorts of reasons. I'm not really sure if this track is finished yet. This is the one track that persuaded me to pull the original recording of the album and re-record it. At some point, I'll have to say 'enough!' and move on. It is now the last bit of music left to do.
One other thing I've done over the weekend is convert and upload two new videos to the Mark Sheeky Music channel, converting Sabine Kussmaul's videos for The Anatomy of Emotions to accompany some music from that album. The track I liked most from the original performance was called The Stars (named Starscape on the album), but I've chosen the two opening tracks for videos; Passages of Movement (which has been combined with Tim Watson's vocals) and Memory. Both will premiere on the channel over coming weeks. All premieres take place at 8pm on Thursdays.
