inspiration

Tranzor Z

Tranzor Z was a cartoon I used to watch after school when I was in grade school. The premise was that a teenage pilot would land a hovercraft inside the head of a giant robot and then control the robot from inside the hovercraft. The robot’s name was Tranzor Z, and he defended the world from invading monsters.

I originally started writing this song when I was working on a project with my friend Brandon Heffley. The original lyrics were a bout a pizza deliveryman who likens his job to fighting off monsters from the outer reaches of the galaxy. It was kind of funny, but I thought something was missing.

So I started thinking about the kind of kid who might like a show like Tranzor Z, and I figured it would be someone who, like me, got picked on a bit in school. For a while, I only had the first and last verses and the “I want to be Tranzor Z” chorus. So there was a kid getting picked on in a schoolyard, then he got tired of it and turned on his tormenters. But, again, something was missing.

I knew I wanted a song with three verses and guitar solo in the middle, so I recorded all of the music and then set it aside. (The backing track for “Tranzor Z” was actually the first piece of music I recorded for the EP.) It was only after recording pretty much the whole rest of the EP that I realized what was missing: a moment of transformation. So I wrote a verse about the kid and his friend watching TV and getting inspired by the show.

One of my favorite lines in the song is the one where “Television bathes us in a cathode ray of hope.” In my mind, I picture a kid sitting in front of the TV, getting bathed in cathode rays (kind of like the Hulk and his gamma rays), and transforming into the hero he wants to be before returning to the playground to vanquish his enemies.

Since this was the first track I recorded, it was also the first one where I started experimenting with horn sounds. In part, it was because the original series had a synthetic horn sound in the theme song, though I was also inspired by the sound of Belle and Sebastian. Once I found a sound that I liked, I wanted to use it on everything, which is how three of the four tracks on the EP ended up with so much brass.

The song is also loosely connected to “Yuck My Yum” on a few levels. For one thing, it’s the kind of show I would have been watching while the kids in my neighborhood played roller hockey. For another, it was one of Damian Smith’s favorite shows for a short while. He used to walk around his driveway and backyard with his legs sticking out from the bottom of a large box, pretending it was his hovercraft.

That is, of course, when he wasn’t busy breaking all of my toys.

Field Report

Longtime 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!