A full day of music work, incorporating the vocals recorded yesterday and slowly carving the existing tracks. The Always in the Morning vocals are strong and epic, but perhaps too much - perhaps this song will benefit from less of this and more feeling. In vocal recordings, feeling is often noise, gravel, mess... what might be called inaccuracies. Of course, I will never use auto-tune - apart from the fact that my software is incapable of using it (blessed be this!) - I loathe the sound. This kills emotion with each notch; I'm too romantic for this. I avoid tuning instruments too much to any degree.
I've finished Passive Aggressive, I think. I've added a quick stab of a guitar chord (a stab of insult). And added some deep boom. Part of the unity in this album will be using similar sounds like a motif, and here the gravelly booms from Hitler in High Heels will appear here and there like signatures.
So, complete so far are Hitler in High Heels, Boring Ceefax Lift Music, Passive Aggressive, The Ones We Love. The latter track is more like something from Cycles & Shadows. It's a rather beautiful track inspired by an improvised synth piece played and recorded in one go at a certain sunset, using the super-expressive Reface DX. I was trying to capture the slightly melancholic mood, and to brought mind a festival that Sabine and I took part in during the solstice, and a piece on theremin which captured something of the midnight so very evocatively.
Teenage Dreams has a lot done, as has the very complex Always in the Morning - this could be called finished now at a pinch. I played a new guitar solo for this today, and a new piano solo, as well as adding a new intro about dreams and loving sleep from the film The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. I also recorded all of the vocoder parts - now there is a vocal sound I love - vocoders sound like electronics brought to life, autotune sounds like human voices defiled and killed.
Be My Jesus is in its infancy but the vocals are complete and good in one take. There are stages of learning and performance. I'm so pleased that I learned piano by simply expressing and enjoying the feeling, rather than anything like formal lessons, even playing live this way without any thought to details like technique or 'accuracy'. When in doubt, I enter this mode, this 'raptus', and it works when playing any instrument; guitar and vocals - though for any instrument there is also the intellectual learning, accuracy, technical parts which involve the right muscles (or hand position etc.), knowledge of notation and scales, etc. The path of learning is first fumbling, learning and mastering technical skills, then learning to control this, to forget it or recall it at will. The latter is vital. Performance of an instrument, like painting or any art is not about repeated practice and repeating that practice, it is about technical mastery of an instrument and choosing whether to use that or not; choosing this automatically by feeling, on an emotional level, live, as needed.
