Myrtle Lane

It's nice to have a quiet weekend to relax and make some music. This piece is pretty simple and might have been inspired by the low register twang of Tom Verlaine's Warm and Cool, which I was listening to this morning. I love my baritone Danelectro guitar, and I reach for it when I'm looking to create a certain down-by-the-foggy-dockside mood.

Change Comes Knocking Soundtrack, Revisited

Change Comes Knocking, a documentary released in Spring 2008, is the story of the North Carolina Fund.

From the promotional literature:

Change Comes Knocking is a fascinating and tumultuous story of a bi-racial anti poverty organization called the North Carolina Fund (NCF) that boldly confronted the explosive issues of race, class and politics during the turbulent 1960's in an attempt to stop the "Cycle of Poverty."

I collaborated with my friend and musical director Daryl White for the film's music, contributing a few of my own compositions as well as working on several pieces together. I wrote this particular piece, and it was used as the background for footage of civil rights-era protests in Durham. It was meant to be a mixture of roots (lap slide guitar) and modern (CR78 drum machine). When remixing it, I added a clanging, generative Moog loop as well as some treated mellotron strings to give it an epic and off-kilter Kung Fu soundtrack flavor and to keep the piece evolving.

Check out the documentary--it's a fascinating story.

Giving Music a Sense of Place

Lately, I've been fascinated by music creating a "sense of place"--a concept Brian Eno brings up in the liner notes to his ambient work, On Land. Ambient or small group instrumental music seems to do this more readily than vocal music, but I think that the concept can and should be applied to all sorts of music to gain the benefit of a consistency of vision. For example, the best Brian Wilson music always seems firmly rooted in a more innocent and idealized Southern California, a unique and special place you can visit every time you listen to Pet Sounds.

I've always appreciated the ways in which the best film music assists the filmmaker in creating a unique space for the film to exist. This last week in North Carolina has been a cold one (despite my best musical efforts to encourage an early onset of Spring weather), and I've been watching some good films. One of the films I've seen is Transsiberian, a moody thriller set primarily on a train trekking across the the Siberian plains. The claustrophobic warmth of the cramped train car is the sole respite from the foreign and bitter cold just outside the windows, the bleak setting contributing to the tension between the characters.

I composed the following ambient piece with this forbidding situation in mind, attempting to capture the quiet desolation of a foreign train car skittering across an expansive, unfriendly terrain.

Creator's Hands (a Collaboration with Able Parris)

My last post was about collaboration among musicians. For this post, I wanted to feature a mini-series of collages on the theme of Creation from my friend Able Parris for a cross-medium collaboration. Able posted these two collages (along with links to several of his thematically related poems) on his excellent blog the other day, and suggested off-hand that I drum up a little ditty in response. This sounded like a lot of fun to me, as I'm always looking for a unique inspirational focus. I attempted to answer his visual collage with an "audio collage" of 3 basic elements, and I tried to avoid a straight rhythmic structure and chord form. After 2 late-night gigs and a rehearsal yesterday, this approach was a good fit for my morning mind-fog.

Thanks Able--I hope you dig it!

Communal Musical Collaboration

As a guitarist, I have participated in a number of musical situations over the years. The dynamic of musicians is always different, and this relationship among players is one of the most defining characteristics of the music created. Whether there is backing band behind a principal writer/singer, a Mick/Keith style partnership, a singing duo or a completely open and communal group, the interaction always feels different and begs a unique approach. There is no mold.

The following video is of me playing with the Tiny Pyramids, a loose collaborative of Chapel Hill, NC based musicians from The Old Ceremony, Max Indian, and other groups (I've been playing with Tift Merritt in 2008). This is my outlet for nearly unfettered communal collaboration in an intimate setting--a welcome respite from and fuel provider for the "big show." I can't have one without the other.

The video was taken by my friend Dave Mello, who takes really cool pictures in addition to his guerrilla video work.


Untitled from dave mello on Vimeo.

Gonzalez is Dead

I love Mexican food--especially the more authentic fare I get at taco stands and tiendas. I was eating over the holiday break at La Casa de Las Enchiladas on South Blvd in Charlotte and enjoying some background Telemundo. I've always been fascinated by the way the drama seems to be pushed to the max in these programs, especially following a shoot-em-up gun fight/revenge plotting, or in the immediate wake of the realization of infidelity. These pensive moments are golden nuggets of sap that allow the characters to really show their emotions and acting chops via pained facial expressions, spurred along by occasional flashbacks of "the good times."

This short piece is for one of those moments of weakness and contemplation. I've stepped away from synthetic means--this one's all natural, recording-wise. Props to Ennio Morricone's classic score for The Good, The Bad the Ugly, and the opening sequence that I enjoyed early New Year's Day just prior to turning in for the night.

Grak Just Got Paid

I admit, I'm having a lot of fun lately playing around with software models of analog synthesizers on my computer. There are oodles of inspiring and useful presets available, but I get the most satisfaction from creating patches from scratch, or at least using a preset as a starting point (or example in the learning process) and doing some radical tweaking and shaping of the sound to get something new and, hopefully, original.

My goal with my electronic music experiments, at least this month, is to try to make something that keeps developing throughout the piece via texture or melody while avoiding the stock, genre-defining danceable beat patterns that serve as the foundation for so much synth-based music. I'm not knocking it at all--I'm just trying for a different sound.

That being said, this ditty might accompany a top-down, Saturday night interstellar cruise.