Well it has taken at least a week but The Dream of Wasps is complete after a final full day of work. Aesthetics is the balance between order and chaos and the first draft was too chaotic, the main vocal melody was improvised and too loose. I used this improvised melody, it stuck in my mind overnight, but repeated it and sequenced it into the song, then resung it; I've redone all of the vocals today. For the finale 'solo' which switches to a chord of A-minor, the rest of the song is in D-minor, I used the same melody transposed up 7 semitones.
I also subtly changed the backing in the song proper. Most of the first verse was all D-minor. A violin played random notes; literally, I gave it C, D, E, F, G# and A and told Prometheus to pick any note but fixed to a rhythm of 'x.......x...x.x.' for the sequence. This is the work of 'Edward', one of the two A.I. music generators built into the program, here a very simple one, you can give it a list of notes and timings and specify to use either at random, or cycle them. These notes can be entered by hand as a text file, or analysed from an existing tune or selection, so it's quite powerful. Here, this randomness adds a dissonant and dreamlike quality, but it was too much so I've bent the notes to fit the vocal melody here and there.
I reintroduced the ghost-cat sound (you'll hear it!) as this too remained in my head overnight. One draft had just the lead guitar, but now the cat and guitar play at once.
Then the main solo needed some tweaks. I added an organ chord as an experiment, using a rhomboid modulator to cut it up to the rhythm, like Pete Townshend did on Won't Get Fooled Again (well, apparently he used heartbeats and all sort of things, I just wobbled it to the beat and added a filter sweep). There was easily enough space in the mix for this so it remained. Then the finale 'Makes me better when I tell you about it' which I chanted using the Microkorg vocoder set to white noise, as I always intended. The effect it something like the chants of Kate Bush in Get Out Of My House. I played some heavy guitar over this, in A-minor, but with a bit of a 9th chord too to duplicate what the flutes did with D-minor in the gentle intro.
So generally, I've pulled a lot of chaos into a more structured form, though the result is still rather unconventional. It sounds more like a sleepy jazz song than a rock song then changes into wild, almost (gulp) Vangelis-Yes jazz fusion type sounds with the wild synth lead, with the few-seconds of finale sounding like Queen or Nirvana or any rock band.
Overall it's a poetic fusion, but certainly an evolution on from some of the work on Tree of Keys, certainly in the progressive mould. A sharp contrast to the electro-pop of Plastic Superman and Style Guru on this E.P., which is the point.
I really need, soon, to complete the We Shall See vocals, then at least I can release The Myth of Sisyphus.
