...woke up to Ricky Nelson's "Lonesome Town" running not so much through my head, as through my chest and stomach - not looping soundtrack but prognostication, a temporary organ, astrological forecast for the day...makes sense perhaps, as I'm back in the city by the sea I grew up in, not the same house, so none of those ghosts show up, but still, fall coming, hurricane coming, poisonous Indian Summer, and (as always, maybe) feeling far far away from the thing I should be doing, while knowing being far far away is the only way to get the thing done. (That's the Orphic moment, the Orphic jukebox playing- "I heard her call my name" thru "I hear you knockin' but you can't come in" - Eurydice was just a song he couldn't write.)
Nearby is this pizza place, it's regular greasy Friday night hang-out spot ambience eliminated cause people in this particular city don't congregate publically so much anymore. They had Battlezone when no one else did. Battlezone was better to me than Donkey Kong or Pac Man because a) you looked through a one person viewfinder so the whole thing felt intimate, special and private; and b) cause Battlezone had mountains ahead and a moon above. There was a legend, or else I made it up, that if you drove your tank out far enough, into the right part of the screen, into those mountains, that there were whole other places inside the game. A city maybe, or a different kind of landscape, but that the world inside the game extended, perhaps of its own accord, ad infinitum.
Early video games were the closest a young person could get to going west or going to sea. There was the hope there would be adventure at the border. You could later join a band and maybe that would scratch the itch. As with all colonial endeavors, the unknown fell quickly, the adventure got used up (the internet being the strip-mined remains of that place-beyond-the-mountains in Battlezone). Takes 200 hundred years to devour the unknown. Takes 50 years to re-create it again in sculpted plastic. Frontier to Frontierland.
Also there's supposed to be a hurricane coming ashore today.
A wrong number turned out to be an extremely lucky break for an elderly woman suffering a stroke in her home in Richmond, CA. A college student on the receiving end of the misdialed call acted quickly to save her life.
Camillea: our love story END. 6months, 3week and 4days to be exact... Things really CHANGE... It gets more and more COMPLICATED... I personally hurting because i love him but in reality there's no magic.
Irvine, CA: A golfer at the Shady Canyon Golf Course landed a shot in the rough Saturday. On his next swing, his club snagged a rock, causing a spark that lit the rough ablaze and eventually attracted 150 firefighters to the scene.
Below is a chart of the progression in 4 weeks of the entertainment at a bar about 2 blocks from me. I could hear the band from my porch. Here's what happened:
For the music during the period of working with a band I got external in segments; it's really something-- that working with those people consequently coupled the music even better than I made it originally to the text. They give attention to it but not whole. They came in late and it was already built up a lot. We played with some previously recorded parts so in almost all the cases the music coupled in a way that held only a passing sense of the 80s or what I thought they were. Unbeknownst to them, the band were mixing sound, their presence made it like a sports process.
Some parts' figures were only infused by thinking about the text, others were locked to it down to every period. This was crucial during some difficult parts of the music, like the step in that "Toto" process; that is: trying to get an icier (snowy) sound. As much as I wanted each part to be like a picture of the process during each point, what started with the word stayed with the word. This makes describing the process a little bit banal just because I was making functional decisions not creative ones.
Not that I consequently worried about the reaction that would come out of Chicago, but that is a venue that wouldn't respond well in certain cases to changes or remixes I'd make during the week, changing pieces they might have already approved. But as a test venue it is always my first and always better than any other critic I have.
The melancholy of looking back at something like this wasn't something that controlled the process as a whole but it did alleviate my certainty-- which I think is just fine. You can hear the echo of fragments just starting, when a paragraph is just getting started you can hear it very clearly, like having every radio in the house on at the same time while walking room-to-room. I am in there, unfortunately, and nausea is what I get. I'd hoped that would end the overlooking of details but sometimes I looked away from things.
At one point the sound resembled a period VHS cassette version of The Obliteraters but I was glad if it was because then it had some solid reference point and it wasn't just that the person gets to control each episode of the process, but episodes get to be like a guess. That's how it is done, this music. Ambition drives quality but ambition will always expand into the technical realm during a period of what were only really weeks of work just stretched out over months. The impression I had was that I was lucky not to be just sitting there brooding, to analyze and think during each step a lot about all of my memories all of those weeks. Handling the technical aspects kept me detached during much of the time. And a lot of good came from it, there was an underlying orderliness when I was also busy assigning multidirectional mics or trying to mix a memory in with a voice. This "Victory" into music thing shows one way to slow down negative progress, having to think about what I could say made any progress bitter. I guess I get uneasy when I have to examine certain habits.
In my earliest version it always really had a dark Dark Shadows feel to many of the pieces. I can still hear it in there but I'm not sure if others could.
During all of it I was uncertain almost always at every new step in music for some different reasons. It was very useful in various ways that it was anchored from the beginning to the text for both presentation purposes and the way it pushes the thing from serious to ridiculous (where it was always meant to be)-- and that was there from the earliest music.
full-tilt-audio-version I started using this "technical term" over audiobook to describe this piece.
approach the monolith of the text...
Yes, my rock.
the thing is in parts on the assembly line Even though I wasn't just one step from finishing as I seem to think here, I did have every word set down as audio in one form or another. I had all the straight reading, all the musical themes. I also had a host of fragments from throughout the book that Mike Signs had recorded by himself up in Chicago, both music and words. I used most of these whole but in a couple cases I so radically altered the approach to this or that segment that I had to abandon his contribution for that part.
Another week or so, I will lay it all out in a rough cut. Very, very rough...as I would discover.
Then overdubs and redos and eventually go to mix down for the master. Yeah, that REDO part will figure heavily-- I should have known better. And as the mixing began the rewriting also began.
Two months ago I had a complete A-Z rough mix of VC, every word. During the passing of that 2 months was when the thing really took shape. I had the text out of the rock and into sound-- so I really only began to think about it at that point, think about sound, just sound. I also introduced a lot of new hardware/software to my gear and they became a hugely influential part of the mixing process and consequently part of the writing process.
Very influenced by sports radio...
The style is definitely infused with this, especially the little replay bumpers they make. They take a short controversial statement made by one of their hosts that day and remix it over some beats.
Conceptually, I somehow have moved from Dark Shadows & Toto to Simon and Simon & Miami Sound Machine. Musically i was starting to really delve into the sounds of the 80s (a period that the book addresses.) I was starting to get melancholy and depressed, I think those moods began to infuse the work at this point. Going from cynicism to just plain sadness.
My soft deadline is late March. Uh, no, forget it. In fact, I was just about to go into some external studios and rerecord some of the pieces, work with a group of people. That would open up a new wing on the mansion. It was very important to do, to put the work in a semi-public venue rather than just be working in my head all the time.
I was thinking of THE best live shows I ever saw and I made this list. As I started working in studios with other people I started thinking back on the concerts I had seen in (mostly) the 80s-- for one thing, I wanted to look back and see how far my tastes deviated from standard pop charts, it wasn't that far-off really, i always paid attention to what was on the charts. For example, I did see RUSH on the Moving Pictures tour.
If I were to judge by much of what I've been hearing as I wrap up the mixes for the VC project it turns out that Cabaret Voltaire. Yeah, that was a band that I rediscovered during this process. I snuck up on myself, but it was ok since CabVol I think are very 80s-- so i kind of thought I was on the right path.
Sorry, sorry, this is an inarticulate by-product... I was really overwhelmed by sentiment by this point, morose etc. Side-effect of doing something like this. I don't really like to revisit stuff too much but in this case it was very beneficial. It's a one-shot deal.
First it was text, then it was a plan, then it was music, now it's a "record." Ok.
not filled in with some bullshit... There are a lot of gaps in my description of the process, I'm not comfortable lying about it.
Well, I guess I can conclude that I won't be trying something like this again. Should just post photographs next time.
Well, well,,,GOOGLE tells me it is Wizard of Oz Anniversary Day. That film includes possibly the greatest American song of the 20th C: "Over the Rainbow." (i use the first recorded Judy Garland version, YMMV...)
THis song, along with what is possibly the 2nd greatest American song of the 20th C: "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" are both very amazing, reliable and a part of the American essence-- and, of course, they were written by chilkdren of recent immigrants: Chaim Arluck (Harold Arlen) & Edgar Yipsel Harburg in the first case, Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham (Bob DYlan) in the second.
Coincidentally, this day is also "Kick a rACIST Anti-Immigrant Teabagger in the Teeth Day" aas well as the Catholic Saint Jane Frances's feast day. She is the Patron Saint of forgotten people and parents separated from children.
going thru the book assigning passages to various voices.
I think this was the right place to start; rather than by re-imagining the whole for a new kind of presentation it was better to chain myself to the text from the beginning. It was always meant to be an "Audiobook" not a new entity. By ultimately focussing on the text I never got away from the correct approach, it became a kind of 1 Commandment. And so throughout the finished piece, no matter how distorted or multidirectional it wanted to be, the text always pushes forward as the pulse which drives the pace and the form.
first voice I'm looking for is described as an older women-- now I have 20 audition tracks to examine. I got really lucky with the person I found to do this voice, Lisa Peakes is her name. To the bitter end her parts anchored the progress of the book by bringing it back to the plane of professional voice-overs whenever she reappeared.
How long will this take? Well, it's been over 1 year and we're at the mastering stage now.
the music from the time that is the context for Victory Chimp. It covers the years 1980-1988 The music from this period was the second anchor for the thing, at certain crossroad points I always resolved the situation based on what resembled or evoked this period in music, or at least my memory of it.
to what degree the audio version might be theatrical or dramatic, audio-bookish, operatic Here I was still uncertain about tethering everything to the text, obviously-- there were so many ways to go with this. What if everything had been set to music and then sung? Or everything done as a radio show? There had to be a primary componant, and the text was it even if I was toying with other ideas. In the end, the other approaches intrude into but don't obliterate the text, no matter how much I wanted them to. In fact, as things went along, the process became largely about looking back at my own life during the 80s-- so during the nausea of that I was glad to have "The Book" to hold to.
I'm looking at a lot of Dark Shadows episodes because it was the earliest impression I have of what putting on a show looks and sounds like.
This turned out to be prescient, just in terms of production values. This experience was a tailspin of memory and since Dark Shadows is one of my earliest memories I thought of it as absolute and when in doubt would ask myself if something I was working on was worthy of the original Dark Shadows.
The artwork is in progress, too
It's almost done, and I still need to get some high quality slides made of the original pieces.
I think it will come in handy when I'm brought up on charges of fraud and crimes against art. Yep, I expect an indictment to be handed down once this comes out.
Getting that first voice set, even if I don't ultimately use every word recorded, begets the breaking down of all the episodes into their proper forms This was a correct guess.
a song, a radio movie, sometimes like an oratorio or a Zane Grey audiobook on cassette Well, these "styles" weave in and out of the whole thing but they've blurred and merged beneath the text.
I have been going into the studio for the past few weeks. Just rehearsing one simple thing for a week and then recording it, puzzle parts. This was a good way to start, to break down different parts and analyze what kind of approach musically worked here or there. But they weren't puzzle parts in the end, maybe an underlying grid, but their presence is not detectable in the finished piece. I really thought I'd finish by the new year but once I assembled everything I had up to that point I realized I was going to have start all over again.
So, overall, I was being optimistic but you have to be in this kind of process, I think, or you'll never get anything done.
