So three months after my last post and I am still working on that same one Christmas song. It's been rough. Too much stuff going on. (Although I must admit I also did waste some time unnecessarily). Am I ready to throw in the towel on my plan to have a holiday album out this year? No, not quite yet. But it isn't looking good. I may have to settle on another EP. At worst, I may have to settle on this one song, but that seems far-fetched. The good news is I have to do just a little more recording on this song and then put it all together. The bad news is I'm not sure how I will handle the drum track. Will I play actual drums or will I go with my Yamaha synth drum sounds? I do want to actually play but we'll see.
Sometime in April I took a break from the Xmas song to record something using my Minimoog. This is a pretty amazing instrument in that it is a whole band in itself. Couple some of the melodic tones with a delay pedal and you get some very out-there electronic sounds.
I put together about a 5 or 6 track piece of different Moog sounds and made up a little electronic song. After doing this for a few days I felt the inspiration to do a whole album of songs made only (or almost entirely) on the Minomoog. I'm not saying I've done that already but it is another project that will be in the works.
What I came up with is a type of music that I have been searching for but could not find. I realize there are tons of music out there that I have not yet heard and never will. But based on my searches I have not found what I've been looking for. It all started with a Chernobyl disaster I saw online a few years ago. It had stock footage of Soviet nuclear power films and some very Moog-ish music playing along. The song was undoubtedly electronic and was most likely created on keyboards exclusively. What I don't know is whether the music was part of the film or if it was newly created for the documentary. The film's era is very hard to tell but I would guess it to be somewhere from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. The music fits in perfectly with that era and makes me skeptical that it was newly made for the program. But I cannot find any info about it and there is nothing in the credits.
How do I describe this music? It's outer spacey. It's futuristic in a retro sort of way. It's unsettling. It's early shoe-gazing music. It's sparse. It makes everything seem slow motion. It sounds like it was recorded in wide open spaces, like the glaciers of Iceland. It's atmospheric. It's ambient. It has that lo-fi feel. It gives warning. It can be ominous.
That's what I want to make. I don't have all the synth sounds I would like to have in order to do this. In particular there is a vintage sound which resembles voices singing "ohs" or "ahs" and it sounds really great.
I've listened to artists such as Suzanne Ciani and Klaus Schulze but their electronic art tends to not be very musical. I have no problem with long, drawn-out pieces even if they're not in a static rhythm. But it has to have a feel of musicality and a pulse to drive it. The "I Robot" album by The Alan Parsons Project has a lot of aspects of what I'm looking for, particularly the instrumental passages. I thought Kraftwerk may have been a source but their music sounds too gleeful.
I would like to find some of what I'm looking for from the period of 1969-1977. It has to be out there. But I haven't found it so I will try to make my own. I uploaded a super lo-fi version to my phone from my monitors of the song I made has unofficial working titles of "Moog Song" and "The Day Will Come." Here it is from soundcloud:
That's rather a short piece but I plan to make it a lot longer. I'm envisioning about 4-5 songs for a 40-minute album. And this is a project I believe I can get done before the year is up even if I start a few months from now.
But I really do want to work on the Christmas music. It has not been difficult as I thought it would be. The song I've been working on is rather funky and it keeps me in the spirit of working on it. I don't think it's strange to work on holiday music throughout the year, and it doesn't feel weird telling others that's what I'm doing. So onward I go!
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