Recital Album Title
I really struggled to write this album - I think I was feeling a little bit sick of doing assignments. I just want to relax. So I procrastinated maybe a little too much, I felt like there was a block for me. Usually where I'd be able to sit and write a song with no problems, now I just couldn't? Dan and I have a couple of theories - I feel that the most accurate is that I felt too much pressure thinking of it as being for my recital. I didn't realise but my thoughts were something like I did get a decent mark for my last recital and now I had all this pressure because this recital has to be better than that recital.
Theoretically that shouldn't be hard to do because my last recital was a bit of a mess.
But then I couldn't write anything! So I just sat around procrastinating. In the end, the only thing that helped was thinking of a kind of setting for my work which I think might be the key for me since this is what I did for my last recital as well and I made that track relatively fast. I know it's a little bit silly but I used the imagery of a Hanging Garden (or The Hanging Gardens of Babylon) to write this recital. I will say it right now: I have been pretty obsessed with ancient history this year. Real archaeological antiquity as well as alternative histories such as Atlantis conspiracies. I can't get enough.
Whether it's real of not, the feeling of Christianity is very comforting and also fascinating to me so I have also been watching a lot of documentaries by biblical scholars and archaeologists. I'm not sure if I believe every conclusion they come to but I really have a lot of interest in it and so I think some of the lyrical content in my album this year has stemmed from that as well.
Interlude
I didn't really know how to start my recital so this was the first track that I actually did. I had a lot of people around me telling me to just start working and that you should be doing little bits on a consistent basis and if you just put enough work into something it will turn out well. I don't know if I agree but I tried it - still I did a lot of procrastination but this track was easier to create since I had a process already set up from my last recital. I want to get away from the guitar amp composing but I found it useful in being able to actually start this project. I didn't have a score for this track - I knew I wanted it to be kind of static or peaceful though because I knew where I wanted it to sit in the album but I just had to start something. It leads into Hanging Garden pt.2. This is what the session looks like:
Hanging Gardens Part II
This is the second track that I made - it comes just after the Interlude and I used some of the sounds from that track to link them. By duplicating the first session, I was able to keep exactly the same sounds and arrange them in different ways. I deleted most of it except for the main theme in the interlude and also the guitar amp recording. I wrote a song called Hanging Gardens Part I during semester 1 which I intend to put at the beginning of the project (just after the intro), after this track there will hopefully be a big, noisy, percussive track to symbolise a kind of cataclysm or traumatising event. That's when this track (and the one preceding it) come in - they represent my desire to accept things how they are. This practice of acceptance has been very useful throughout my life, I learnt it from my little stint into buddhism (I'm not a buddhist) but I think you can find it in a lot of new age ideas and also Christianity. It just takes different forms. Anyway I'm a really anxious and sensitive person which manifests in a kind of controlling behaviour but that is so exhausting and often makes everything worse so it's really hard for me to practice acceptance but I try.
Again, I actually didn't have a score for this one - I did have a general shape or direction that I wanted the track to follow. I'm not sure how effective I was. Elise taught me how to make "good" percussion in a track so that was the kind of focus for this one - it's actually my first attempt at using samples (I would normally use acoustic sound/instruments and record it because that always felt better to me and made more sense). It is fun to try new things though so I tried to incorporate what I'd learned from her in our principle study lesson. I think it is a little bit of a mess but my aesthetic is kind of noisy and messy anyway - I'll call it consistency.
Hanging Gardens Pt. 1
This is a song that I wrote based on the story of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Apparently, King Nebuchadnezzar married this princess from a far away land and so she came to the desert to live with him. There were no trees around and so she became really sad - she missed the green colours from her home. So he built her these huge, elaborate gardens. I remember watching a documentary of this archeologist who suggested that the Hanging Gardens would have had an irrigation system coming in from a river. I have also seen a couple of biblical documentaries about the Middle East - particularly in Jordan there are whole cities which rely on the huge stones to collect water and they store it underground. So I thought maybe if the gardens are on a huge stone than they can collect water too although maybe not, I am not a scientist! But that is where the lyrics came from.
As I was writing this song, I was thinking of it from the perspective of the King and Queen welcoming new strangers who have come to visit the gardens. I wrote the actual song in about an hour but it was much more of a challenge for me to record and arrange it - I am working along on this and so I used some synthesis techniques and sine tones. Elise helped and I remember some things from Synthesis class with Stuart but holy damn using MIDI bored me to death!
