Electronic

Field Report

Cover1Longtime readers of my blog may recall that I started recording electronic music with Android Invasion back in 2012. Recently, several events transpired that led me to return to that on-again-off-again project.

For one thing, I read a lot of books about filmmakers over the summer, and I started thinking about how I wanted to record music that had a cinematic feeling to it. In particular, reading about Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey led me to watch the film again, and some of the music on the soundtrack had a haunting feel that I liked. I also wanted to something esoteric in the vein of one of my longtime favorite directors, David Lynch.

Coincidentally, about midway through summer, I saw that a friend of mine from high school named Kevin Quinn was on Facebook, so I friended him and found out that he’s an amazing visual artist  now. His works focus largely on architecture, playing with color, light, and repetition in a style that’s reminiscent of Andy Warhol.  I thought his work was really cool and original, and it made me think about how much I like doing cool and original stuff with music.

I love writing and recording more traditional three-minute rock and pop songs, but I also want to do something that pushes boundaries a bit and is a little more “far out.” That’s why I decided to revive Android Invasion.

The music on the album is ambient — definitely in line with the kind of music Brian Eno pioneered on his Music for Airports album and others like it. It’s also fairly minimalist and hypnotic. You can certainly listen to it closely and pay attention to subtle shifts in tone and timbre, but it’s also extremely repetitive, so you can put it on in the background and not think about it at all. It’s great for meditation, for relaxing, and for lulling yourself to sleep. In fact, for some of the songs, my goal was to make it sound like you’re listening to a dream.

I also recommend Field Report to all of my friends who are teachers. You can listen to the tracks while you’re grading. They won’t distract you, and they might help to keep your blood pressure down!

In any case, I hope you enjoy it!

 

Soft Light: A Disco Riff on TS Eliot

Back in high school, I had a teacher named Joe Griffin who turned me on to TS Eliot. I think we spent the first semester of my senior year reading Murder in the Cathedral. It’s a play in which a bishop knows he’s going to get murdered by a king but does nothing to save himself because he has principles (or something along those lines). And though the temptation to write a song based on that one was exceedingly difficult to resist, I decided to go with another classic, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

Of course, I’m not the first person to write a song that riffs on “Prufrock.” Crash Test Dummies had a hit in the nineties with “Afternoons & Coffeespoons.” It’s from the part of the poem where the narrator, J. Alfred Prufrock, muses, “For I have known them all already, known them all:/Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,/I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

Prufrock, as you may recall, is a bit of a sad sack. He stands in a corner like a wallflower through the entire poem, trying and failing to muster the courage to ask a woman to meet him for a cup of tea sometime. My version of the story has the woman noticing him and taking charge of the situation despite his thinning hair. If you want to know why, you’ll have to listen to the song, but here’s a hint: it’s all about lighting.

A Longish Preamble to My New Song

Between the ages of ten and thirteen, I went to a Catholic school just beyond the city limits of Philadelphia. You knew you were leaving Philadelphia because you had to cross a bridge that spanned a set of railroad tracks and ended at the top of a steep hill that descended into the wilds of suburbia. The school sat at the top of the hill, right next to the railroad tracks.

The school didn’t have a schoolyard per se. But it did have a church, and the church had a parking lot, and that’s where we were sent to play at lunchtime regardless of weather or time of year.

Worth noting is the fact that the church was a long block away from the school, and that the long block ran parallel to the train tracks. What this means in practical terms is that the church parking lot where we played every day at lunchtime was right next to a set of train tracks. Other than a low dirt hill and some shrubbery, nothing stood between us and the tracks — not to mention the trains that roared by every twenty minutes or so.

Also worth noting is that the church parking lot was built on the same hill that the school and the church were built on. Again, if we’re thinking about this in practical terms — or at least geographical terms — it means that if the parking lot was level (which it was), then there would be a steep drop at one end.

So at one end of the parking lot there was a set of heavily trafficked railroad tracks, and at the other end was a twenty-foot drop. Between these boundaries ran a horde of ten-to-thirteen-year-olds who liked to set things on fire and believed that everything they saw on pro-wrestling was not only real but should be emulated. Amidst all of this, there was one person (me) who just wanted to be left alone to read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the latest issue of Doctor Who Monthly.

There was also a lamp.

SchoolyardDiagram-01

It turns out that I didn’t get much reading done, largely because I was trying to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of the church parking lot while also trying to avoid the hordes of preteen boys who wanted to use me as a prop in their efforts at staging the latest wrestling moves they’d seen on television. Also, my interest in reading and a tendency to make references to things like “Scylla and Charybdis” did not endear me to anyone in my age bracket. Or anyone outside of my age bracket, come to think of it.

The upshot of all of this is that I ended up getting pounded quite a bit, and once went home with a concussion when my skull slammed against the blacktop. At the time, I thought everyone hated me. I felt like an outsider, and that made me miserable. The books I read and the TV shows I liked to watch gave me a bit of an escape, but what I really needed was someone to tell me to forget about all of the kids who made me feel like I didn’t belong — to tell me they could all go to hell. To tell me, in essence, to fuck ’em.

And that’s where this song comes in…