A bad night of agonising stomach pain, I slept perhaps 30 minutes. This regular pain always reminds me of Bergman and Beethoven.
Despite this, the morning was full of energy and I jumped into lively vocal recordings of songs for this Pyjama album project. The Year of Art song (previous post 'fun') and the Cherries song are just about finished. The 'fun' lyrics are sung in a high falsetto, sounding like the singer at the end of Blackadder II; rather strange. I can see how falsetto leads to a feeling of high energy itself; high pitch means high energy in physics. High pitch is youth, energy, life, fire, excitement.
In fact, these two unusual songs, really like nothing else I can think of, are the ones I've enjoyed most and found easiest. I've also recorded vocals for a new recording of Norman Bates, but the backing sounds too sparse and the melody too fixed. I'm wondering if my guide melody in the dub track is too restrictive, in timing especially, so I'll try some recordings without one.
I thought last night that surrealistic music barely exists. Perhaps Dali's Être Dieu is close, but Dali was not musical (he claimed to fear music). Surrealist poetry is common, and most surrealist music is jazz. Even David Lynch's music is lyrically inventive over fairly standard blues music.
I did make a few surrealist audio pieces, for ArtsLab, and some were featured on Tree of Keys. These were like audio plays. I decided to write a surrealist song last night and I conceived it, like the ArtsLab pieces, linearly one line at a time, dialogue or image or sound step by step, with no preconceived ideas about structure, perhaps like Dali and Buñuel when writing the script Un Chien Andalou. I then thought of breaking the result up into a verse and chorus structure to create an amalgam of play/audio montage and pop song. It is audio based, but, image based too, which is my favourite way of working. This is an important discovery and different from the other songs. I will keep experimenting with musicality.
It begins with the sound of sawing wood and a woman's sexual moans, and then a bass-line over this. I can imagine this being performed live, with one performer sawing, a world first for music! The general mood is fear, however, anticipation of something bad happening, and the sounds give way to surrealistic poetry. I'll record this over the next few days and may create others, well, I certainly will in future.
Today's singing was good practice, as was some live guitar playing to Roxy Music's Country Life last night, an album I don't rate that much because it's very rock based, very little synth or imagination of production, and the tiny red writing is impossible to read on the CD; the visual look of an album, I've found, really affects how I feel about it. Look, fashion, feeling; these things are so important yet are often ignored in musical art. Only in glam is it (was it?) considered important, when, I think, it is always important and does end up complementing the sound. I must aim to sing or produce or play guitar as often as possible. All artists must be learning a new, challenging skill.
