Draft 1 of the album is complete! A dangerous time because it can lead to a slow down, there is still so much to do on it. I made 4 A4 sides of lyrics and story notes, exploring lots of possibilities. To some extent the album is about a knight questing for love (or an angel, the holy grail) because the track names and moods of the music overtly suggest this. I decided against words, however, and painted pictures for each scene.
We start in a strange, alien, technological, wind, then running or on horseback, the pace and pounding rhythm of the music suggests this. This heroic theme quietens to gentle flowing water, so we rest by a lake or river. The Angel theme appears, then this breaks into harsh wind and rain. This is a raw recording of the weather which is quite unusual. Usually 'wind' recordings are made fake and high pitch like a winding whistle. Putting a real mic to the wind results in a massive and normally unwelcome boom, but I've stuck with it, filtering out only the most bassy and troublesome frequencies. The stereo recording has rain in the left ear, but even that is so realistic is sounds like a Geiger counter, a pitter-patter of strange dots, not liquid, and something like the sound of being stuck in the rain when wearing a cagoule. This gives this whole sound an unusual environmental realism.
The next track, Dark Forces, keeps this wind flowing throughout and introduces the antagonist theme. It's somewhat mechanical, as the 'iron animals' name (later) indicates, and was originally inspired (back in 2008 when I composed it) by the evil forces in Princess Mononoke.
The next track explodes into a bright rainforest filled with life. It's called Lost Friends and there is a strong mood of reminiscence. This lights a narrative of remembering nature. I can't help but think of the end scenes of Soylent Green, the death of Sol Roth, when listening to this. Of all tributes to that wonderful film, the most unwelcome is probably 'prophetic'.
Next we re-visit the Iron Animals again and this ends in suburban garden with car and aircraft noise. The next track seems to shift indoors and the album narrative switches here. I had the idea of the listener transforming into a moth or butterfly, then captured by a Victorian naturalist, man's classification of nature, though considered more like an exploitation or mechanisation of it. Orb Of Prophesy ends with a moth fluttering.
Then we waltz a happy tune, the free butterfly perhaps, but we end fluttering in a jar, trapped. The next track starts with the moth sound robotized and we enter the Victorian collection room. There's not much audio to suggest this scene, I might think of something and yet add more. After this, the waltz melody reappears as a happy polka-like tune. The butterfly is captured and pinned in a glass box, trapped, awaiting death. The Iron Graveyard, next, is a tune full of doubt and worry, the march of fate, and at the end a great church bell rings, and a flame stutters into life, then the glass of the box is smashed dramatically and we are freed.
The flying 'knight' theme from the start reappears, and dawn appears with beautiful birds to accompany the beautiful angel theme, the happy ending. A dawn chorus of birds end the album.
I felt somewhat sad at the end. The dawn chorus sample was recorded in July 2003 from my bedroom window, here, as I type, to my left. Of course the birds are all dead now (probably, some may have been long lived, perhaps) but almost all of the species and mix of birds here are gone too. The dawn chorus is still here today, but different. It also made me think of the birds who sing for their song to be lost forever. In some ways the live recordings of nature on here are, then, a memorial, and do evoke something like that suicide scene in Soylent Green. The old Infinite Forest was a mix of themes of heroes, friends, and villains, arranged in a pretty pattern, but the new album contains a lot of nature vs. mankind, and this is, ultimately, what the album is about.
The old album will be deleted today from the internet and its fickle shop-window. No CD copies, or digital downloads, were ever sold. The new album contains almost everything the old one did and more. For the record, almost all of the actual music is the same - I don't think I added or deleted any patterns or structural elements, although I've added more variation to the more repetitive sub-melodies. The harpsichords on The Photograph, for example, were all simply ascending chords in the original album; now they mimic the melody a little, and I made similar changes to most of the other tracks. The tempo (and volume of each note) was rigidly fixed in the old version, so the new one is a lot more expressive; the instruments now at least try to swell, grow, attack, etc. with the mood.
Here is the new cover.
