Like many music lovers of my vintage, I've spent the last six weeks or so listening to
David Bowie CDs and trawling Youtube for clips, interviews and rarities. There
is plenty I could say about how important Bowie was to me, but plenty of other
folk have pontificated on that topic and I’m not in the mood to add to it. All
I will say -for now- is that Bowie, an inspirational figure in life, has become
an even more inspirational figure in death. The fact that he could produce
interesting work as his life was ebbing away seems to be entirely in keeping
with his status for my generation. If he can do all of the things that he did while
knowing what he knew, then perhaps those of us who undertake artistic pursuits purely
for pleasure should get our fingers out and get on with writing that book,
painting that picture, making that film, or –in my case- recording that album.
A few
months ago, having pulled together more than enough material for an album and having
pretty much decided which tracks were going to make the final cut, I started to
labour a bit over the lyrics for the four final songs. It was not so much a
case of writer’s block, more a demonstration of the power of laziness to facilitate
an extended pause for reflection. I had most of the instrumentation recorded
for these tracks and had even put down some guide vocals, but I just felt that somehow
I wasn’t in the right place to write the words or, indeed, finish the album. Needing
to take a break from the task I had set myself, I embarked upon what I
thought was a little detour. As a way
of avoiding (or postponing) finishing off those last few songs, I started to
record some instrumental pieces and, before too long, found myself absorbed in
the process. This diversion into the instrumental domain extended to my
listening habits and I wallowed once more in the beautiful lush soundscapes of
artists like Jean-Michel Jarre, Kraftwerk, John Barry and Angelo Badalamenti. The
touchstone, as ever, was Bowie’s ‘Low’ which –even 40 years on- still sounds
like a work of art.
Compared
with writing a song, working on an instrumental can be quite liberating. As I’ve
stated previously, the songs on my album are all quite tastefully arranged and
have all the building blocks of what a certain kind of music bore might call
‘proper’ song-writing. The instrumental, however, pays no mind to many of the
rules that apply to the song and will often rely almost entirely on atmosphere
and ambience. One
piece, for instance, started with me finding a weird sound on a synthesiser and
playing a constant distorted drone in A flat minor. No rhythm was involved and I
didn’t move from the chord, because I had no sense that it had to go anywhere;
the sheer noise of it just felt good. I added a simple string melody and saved
it as ‘Not The Thing’ (just to give it a temporary name), because the feel reminded me of Ennio
Morricone’s superb, eerie, minimalist soundtrack for John Carpenter’s classic movie.
A couple of months down the line, that piece, based on little more than a crunchy,
distorted tone, has turned into something quite powerful and evocative, a really
fun piece of music to work on. Over several sessions with producer and engineer
extraordinaire Eddie Macarthur, I’ve added various layers, melodies, synth
parts and bits of treated electric guitar which, if you asked me to play again,
would have me utterly flummoxed. I’d be unable to reproduce any of it, because
I had no idea what I was playing and have no intention of ever trying to perform
these pieces live. Morphing and squeezing the guitar through a variety of
effects, I played by ear, riding the effect –as opposed to playing the part and
adding effects later in the mix- and trying to respond instinctively to what
the mood of the piece required.
This is not
something I normally do when I’m writing a song. Aware that the vocal is king
and that a solid foundation must be in place, I will already have worked out the
chords on acoustic guitar or piano. In song-writing mode, I’ll avoid jarring
or clunky chord transitions, because I’m always thinking about what the vocal
melody is going to be doing and what the lyrics is going to say; I’ll usually
want to tell a story or make some observation on the human condition. When I’m
recording an instrumental, all I want to do is make something that sounds good; this may seem like a banal observation, but I would regard it as a liberating
statement of intent. The
instrumental makes no statement other than: I’m here, I exist, I’m making this
noise, while a song always has to have something to say, even if it’s just "I
love you, baby" or "I’ve got a brand new combine harvester". My album of ‘proper’ songs requires a degree
of personal exposition, but these mute atmospheric pieces allowed me to revel in
the lack of any requirement to write lyrics. It is, I believe, this absence of
‘self’ that has made the instrumental music so liberating to work on; in that sense,
it feels like a purer art form.
As I developed
more and more of these new pieces, unencumbered by any obligation to tell a
story or make any particular statement, I soon found that I had accumulated
enough material to produce at least another album. So successful and fulfilling has been this
detour (although you may disagree if you listen to the tunes) that I now intend
to complete an instrumental album at more or less the same time as the album of
'proper' songs. The name
for this project is Analogue Hashtag and the working title for the
album is ‘An accumulation of detail’. This is because, on several of the
pieces, I have started with a relatively simple theme and added layer upon
layer, counterpoint upon counterpoint, until the piece has swollen, wandered
and (hopefully) soared. By the time five or six minutes have passed, the
listener may have lost trace of the original riff, but it will still be there, a
modest little motif still somehow carrying the accumulated weight of its
melodic cousins.
The
track I’m linking to below (Relentless) is fairly typical of the Analogue Hashtag oeuvre. As usual, it started with
me playing around at home, doodling on the keyboard. Something about the
simplicity of the riff and the insistent rhythm set me off and, thereafter, the
piece pretty much wrote itself; all I had to do was keep driving it in the same
direction. I know that repetitive pieces aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but
nothing is everyone’s cup of tea.
The point
of this kind of music is to create a mood and to sit in that mood for a longer
period than one might expect from a normal pop song. Working on these tracks
has given me license to mess around a lot more with effects and treatments and
to indulge a love for warm analogue synth sounds and atmospheric textures. Listen
out for the ‘cut-up’ vocals layered across the landscape of this piece, sitting
somewhere in the background like a not-so-distant memory. Later in
the track, a lead vocal kicks in. The
observant listener will notice that I’m not singing any particular words, but
rather making sounds that -to me- felt like they would sit comfortably with the
mood of the piece.
A bit,
in fact, like Bowie, on side two of ‘Low’.
Well … I
can dream, can’t I?
