NOTE: It seems that iOS dislikes most audio files. I have replaced the audio file with one coded in .MP3, so let me know if there are still issues on your platform of choice.
Happy Sunday evening (or Monday morning) to you all.
Quite possibly against my best interests considering that I am coming out a bit with a truly frightening prospect for anyone who knows: a full song recording that I’ve been working on with some bloke I know named Michael singing. He’s not the best singer out there, but hopefully his contribution to this composition was at least serviceable.
As you know, when time permits, I’ve been working on trying to work on getting a few music snippets out that play with a modified 80s-era post-punk sound influenced primarily by early Cure and Joy Division, with hints of all of the other bands from that era to more modern bands like The Eden House and Kælan Mikla. More than just playing around with sound, I felt I should finally commit to making a full song.
The song was developed over the past two weeks, beginning with a similar-sounding “songlet” (but is an entirely different composition from that from beginning to end) that I posted at the time. I took some lessons learned from that effort to create the current song, “again”.
As always, it might play better in a browser than in the WordPress Reader. If you are having problems with hearing this audio file, copy this post’s address and open a new browser window, paste and play outside of the Reader environment.
The lyrics are from a post written for the previous site on February 10, 2025, with some minor modifications:
again
shapes like splinters
her teeth like wood
pictured dark gardens
dance her shadowed room
she wytched, she crashed
towards many years ago
trying to find her way home
trying to find a home
again
again
home again
again
home...
For those interested in the composition, I wrote it using primarily “real” instruments, with an exception made for the obvious use of a saw-voiced synth and some electronic drums. I sequenced or played all instruments included.
The other instruments include:
- an electric bass with an applied chorus effect and some EQ
- an electric guitar for the rhythm portions, with an applied chorus effect, digital delay, front-end gain and a hint of phaser.
- an electric guitar for the solos, with similar effects as the rhythm guitar and a slight distortion added, no phaser — different tonal settings on the guitar and on the applied effects
- my voice, with chorus (to smooth out my lack of practice) and a limiter to balance out my volumes
All of the instruments, real or otherwise also had added reverb, EQ, echo and compression in post-processing. I also did some cleanup of the pitch on all instruments post-recording to eliminate some artifacts that appeared while recording (slight bending of the strings giving a fraction of a semitone out of key notes), with the largest use being on a few notes I didn’t hit spot-on with my vocals on takes that were otherwise acceptable takes. In the old days, we would have to record it over and over until you got a clean recording, but I think the cats might have started yowling if I tried that as my solution.
I’m not real good at music theory but if you can believe the AI when I asked it about such things, it told me that it was in F# minor Dorian. While I didn’t have that particular thing in mind when I started, I purposefully chose to start the chord progression on a black key (F#) to force myself to think outside of standard key signatures when writing this piece.
In ways, things turned out better than I expected, almost as much as I hoped, and without being as bad as I feared.
Now that this project is out of the way, I plan to focus on continuing to work with a few folks who have reached out to collaborate, but I needed to get this one “in the can” before I could readjust my focus. As I told Chris Nelson, I’d been farting around with this piece so much that I was hearing it when it wasn’t playing, which meant it wasn’t going to leave until I finished it.
Thanks for giving a listen (if you do). I hope you enjoy it. Constructive comments are always welcome below.
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