Gravitas

Title is just my politically incorrect way of saying it’s in the key of C. An improvement on the working title “White Notes Matter”, arguably.

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/mSQ9fYfFRp8

No relation to the world’s largest rubber ducky which recently paid a visit to our inner harbour, in celebration of Canada’s 150th birthday.

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/5zyalWRDIj4

Most recently, here’s a song called Soul Patch. The last half, from which the title is derived, is very much not like the first half, so hang in there.

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/ot8VnmNqfkI

Prior to that, this is a not-quite cover of a song you might recognize.

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/Ukb1DutOYN4

A dreamy new song that you can sway to.

(YouTube link: https://youtu.be/TiQFYrEqMUQ

I wanted to do a cover of that song “Tequila” by The Champs, except where the music stops and they shout “tequila!” I would shout “covfefe!” Only the title survived from that idea. Instead, I ended up with whatever this is.

Alongside various sampled mouth noises, the notable lead instrument is a Circuit Bent Lisa Simpson Saxophone that I bought off eBay.

(YouTube link: https://youtu.be/Gg5FCJz_kLs )

Not some kind of existential statement, the title is just a play on the word “ambient”, which starts out apropos enough, but then less so as the song progresses.

YouTube URL: https://youtu.be/gYHoiQLYzMg

The title refers to the tiny little variations in the primordial soup in the moments after the Big Bang, which were the seeds of the eventual structure of the universe, galaxies and so forth. At least that’s how I understand it. Using it more as a metaphor, I suppose, and because it’s better than “Working Title”.

YouTube URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRVsvNh6JgE

It’s been about a year since I posted anything here — I’ve been super busy doing not much of anything, but I’ve got a little time now so I thought I would catch up.

The last song posted in this blog from 2016 was MakeMake ( pronounced maw-key-maw-key). Three more songs found their way to YouTube after that, during 2016, after which things dried up for nine months or so. So let’s start with those three:

A bit of a palate cleanser, ‘Prov ‘Tude in C is a short improvised piano piece, a sort of antidote for all the meticulously architected and complexly layered songs I usually do.

(YouTube link: https://youtu.be/_ScC5qcaHX0 )

Next is Something From Nothing (the title a nod to both cosmology and the creative process). It’s a fairly cheerful mid-tempo groove-based thing. with a short, darker interlude. The interlude relies on some spacey audio clips made on my Mac back in the 90s, and featured in a song at the time called I Don’t Understand. More on that later.

(YouTube link: https://youtu.be/NmhNL0Dn-xI )

Rounding out 2016, the last “something” before nine months of “nothing”, and continuing the spacey theme, a deliberately paced groove thing called Sonic.

(YouTube link: https://youtu.be/89yENO6iyjs )

After a lull of nine months or so, during which the dust cover mostly stayed on the MIDI keyboard, I recently got back in the saddle with another short little “palate cleanser”, courtesy of J.S. Bach.

(YouTube link: https://youtu.be/wyh2Fs3VFTU )

Next is something called I Still Don’t Understand, which utilizes some of the same audio clips mentioned above in Something From Nothing and which were originally used in 1998’s I Don’t Understand. That song didn’t lend itself to a remake in the same way I revisited other tracks from that era, and I struggled with how to use those clips, which formed the lion’s share of the original song. This then is the second (and last) new context those clips will find themselves in.

(YouTube link: https://youtu.be/_js7Clf2YNQ )

Finally we have Active Mal, the most fully realized of the three recent songs. A slow groove slides into a slightly faster groove in 7, and ending in dramatic fashion with Jimi setting his guitar on fire.

(YouTube link: https://youtu.be/LFWx5qrVrnc )

Okay, now we’re caught up.

A new song, named after the dwarf planet Makemake (maw-key-maw-key) which in turn derives from the mythology of the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island, a propos of nothing in particular. Maybe I’ll do a suite of dwarf planets that Gustav Holst did not cover. 🙂

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/3RpGobCcy4k

Do not adjust the horizontal. Do not adjust the vertical.

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/vp4ABNChaUY