I'd hoped to finish the War is Over album today, and it is largely done. This has been a lot of hard work for a mere 18 minutes of music. Each track has been extended and augmented somehow, usually with some sort of lead in to blend it with the others. I love adding sounds that evoke images, a scene, a world. This is my aim and my way of working; vision vision! This craft takes essential time and lots of listening, as well as recording. I've used a huge soundscape of special effects and live recordings from all of the place. My experience as a sound effect recordist (not to mention my 2000+ strong library of self-made sound effects) is incredibly useful.
The remaining track today was the finalé to the album, and I added some rock guitars to it, reflecting the dramatic Viking opening. These lead into an extended piano solo with improvised variations on the main theme. This is a little scrappy from a technical piano playing point of view, and part of me would like something more perfect or ideal, yet, this reflects the sort of playing I love and play often; it's about live expression, the expression of instant emotion, embodying the piano in a sort of love-symbiosis. I've decided to let this music run raw without edits or changes. I've recorded a lot of my piano music over the years, since Cycles & Shadows, but I tend to pull back to make it as neat as I could, but at the expense of the drama and expressiveness that fills my live playing when I'm at my most energetic and at the limits of control.
This track, the finalé at the end of Struck Lucifers, will be one of the first recordings of this sort of playing. A few other tracks have been raw takes like this; One Sided Duet, The Love Reliquary tunes, Notes from Space, are all examples, but those pieces are relatively slow and full of a certain Romantic feeling. It must be my destiny to play more complex work of power. In piano I must work on timing, the accuracy of different finger pressures and timings when playing chords, and large spatial movements.
In guitar, I am just beginning to learn scales. War is Over, along with Burn of God, will be my first albums to include live guitar.
