Gravitas

In keeping with the continuing decline of humanity’s attention span, or at least my own, I’m starting a new series of songs that will be around a single minute in length. Here are the first two.

I asked OpenAI to “write three haikus in the classic 5-7-5 structure, on the theme of experimental music.” It did pretty well, I think.

Electronic noise
The thrill of exploration
Innovative sounds

Unusual effects
A journey of sonic waves
Dance of the future

Noise is the key
An exciting musical path
Breaking the silence

The title is a reference to a psychedelic French prog album from 1975 called “Forever Blowing Bubbles”, which is itself a reference to “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”, a popular American song written in 1918. It’s bubbles all the way down.

Floboes = Flutes + Oboes

When it came time to come up with some kind of topline or lead for the middle section, I ended up combinating (to combine using a Combinator) flutes and oboes from the BBC Symphony Orchestra library. Most of the rest is via Reason Studios “Scenic” instrument.

This is the first proper track I wrote and recorded after getting my first music production software (Opcode Vision) in 1994. It would later be released on my album “Gravitas” in 2010. But I just couldn’t stop picking at it. Various versions using various software were brought to various levels of completion over the years, but now at last I have a version I’m as happy with as I was the original. Actually, two versions.

The first version is somewhat similar in tone to the 1994 version, but with bits snipped out here and there, a new foghorn-based intro, and some tighter MIDI editing to correct some original awkwardness.

The second version, developed in parallel with the first over the last several weeks, is quite different, though it does make use of much of the original recording data. For this one, I thought it was time to put my BBC Symphony Orchestra library through its paces (and vice versa). This straight-up orchestral version gets its instruments almost entirely from that library.