meters are miles

the battle to finish writing the turned series rages on. we spent sunday concentrating on force field again, the keychanges need some hard work on them and coming up with a second theme seems to be quite troublesome. jere played us an extremely beautiful piece he wrote for guitar, and we will most likely use it as it's own seperate song. so basically this is all multiplying, and four parts won't be enough.. i had a dream during saturday night in which i heard most of these parts played in a row. some bits were missing, some i just didn't remember and the rest are fading fast. i managed to write down most of what there was soon after i woke up, and the followng is from the notebook i used (slightly revised in light of the rehearsal that followed, and including ideas i've worked on with tuukka and by myself afterwards):

1/4 - force field, beginning to take shape slowly, will probably involve words with a sort of agricultural feel to them, a slowly building piece with a loud noise burst after the intro, then gradually turning more and more atonal. the parts for this in their correct order (at the moment) is:
intro: about two minutes of seemingly unplanned accents on floor tom, accordion and line 6 looper, using snippets of violin and metallophone all slowed down, with violins playing short bits of the first theme
loud part: comes in suddenly and subsides just as fast, guitars and drums (possibly two sets) have the lead here.
cymbal swell: a one-bar expanse on the first note of the first theme's bass (e)
theme 1/1: bass and a repetetive 5/4 metallophone, violins and drums slowly enter, imitating the 5/4 rhythm
theme 2/1: bass and metallophone continue, strings and trumpet veer off into the main theme, very quietly
middle eight: where trumpet and second metallophone/guitar take the lead for 8 bars. a sort of solo if you like.
theme 2: a lengthy chorus-ish part where the violins start on a hypnotic four note loop.
theme 3/1: bass, metallophone, strings and trumpet return, this time with added guitars and piano.
modulation: slowly pulling everything from an Am-key to Bb.
end: partly borrowing the end of the world or theme 2/4 from death suit.

2/4 - crocodile teeth:
verse: violins play the original keyboard line pizzicato, emily sings.
chorus: drums and accordion enter, and everything gets scrambled by a delay-pedal.

3/4 - death suit, starting to look very big, loud, epic and looming:
theme 1/1: one bar in 4/4 time followed by 8 bars in 3/4.
theme 1/2: or tangerine dream. violins play a two-part theme over and over, modulating between f and g# throughout. quietly.
theme 2/2: the same as above, only twice slower this time.
theme 1/3: also called donnie darko, the lead instruments are two metallophones.
theme 2/3: again, the same repeated, but with the higher-pitched vibes playing twice the normal speed.
theme 1/4: aka best of bach, strings and trumpet lead and the bass changes key over and over, always returning where it started from by the end of the cycle.
theme 2/4: end of the world, same as 1/4 but with the bass veering off into another direction and one of the violins playing a repetetive short arpeggio.
theme 1/2: back again, this time much louder.
theme 2/2: again, the slowed down version.
theme 3/2: still slowed down, but with a much simpler bass.
theme 2/1: and we're back at the beginning, this time with strings playing the first four beats of the rubato from left your marks in the sand over the 4/4 part.

4/4 - left your marks in the sand
intro: 4/4 rhythm, with double-bass and drums.
rubato 1: emily and iina sing and play a short vocal/trumpet bit here, regardless of rhythm.
verse: everything from here on is piano-led, apart from the very end.
chorus 1: understated and quiet, hinting at the second chorus.
verse 2: second verse differs only in having more trumpet, sax and clarinet.
chorus 2: strings enter here.
middle eight
vocal bridge
instrumental bridge
ending: return of the drums (and vocals).
rubato 2

5/4 - mox kow / end fights will probably be jere playing a compostion he wrote for classical guitar with added strings, trumpet and metallophone.

6/4 - meters are miles will be the ballad. and the only one we haven't really started proper work on. the ending will have the adjacent 1/4 notes though, i promise.

prince sings on, like some mollusc in your head

yesterday's rehearsal was spent working on force field, a seemingly futile attempt to merge several unfinished parts for the song together - i'm having some second thoughts about the addition of the main piano line from moscow being used in the beginning of this first part. the notes don't seem to correspond in any sensible way and the metallophone just doesn't have the range that it requires to sound good. tuukka spent a good long time introducing a new fourth part for the song, a nice bridge that he managed to work out for violins and trumpet with essi, saara and iina. the rest of the day seemed to be a bit of a waste, everybody sitting with their instruments, not entirely sure what they should be doing.

it did occur to me that a piano part that tuukka jammed on for some time during the time we were recording the grand piano parts for left your marks in the sand last winter could be used as the first part of death suit somehow. the part sounds quite powerful as it is (but only if you use a grand or upright piano to play it), starting with one bar in 4/4 rhythm followed by eight bars in 3/4, after which it starts again from the beginning. this may sound interesting if it gradually blended in with the second part, tangerine dream.

i'm listening to three records on heavy rotation at the moment: september 000 by secret machines, 7 from the village by fields and trans canada highway by boards of canada. i'm reading kafka on the shore by haruki murakami and have recently seen my neighbor totoro by hayao miyazaki at the 19th annual helsinki international film festival. i have tickets to colour me kubrick by brian w. cook, art school confidential by terry zwigoff and tideland by terry gilliam. should be good.

p.s.
going through the four minidiscs i had with me today i discovered an extremely old version of aircrash - before we thought of using faster drums.. anyway, the link is below. emily and i sing, jere plays guitar and otto plays drums. recorded way back in 2001.

aircrash at folkpensionsanstalten

i found: recordings of sinking steamboats, hush and haunted planes/moss-school

i've been going through some old md-cassettes, discovering alternate versions of many older songs played at rehearsal rooms in laajasalo and kerava - a new way to play the second half of sinking steamboats (an addition rather than a completely new take on the song), an extremely old version of hush that seems to have a certain something that the recent version lacks - work on this song seems to be constant, as we decided to replace most of my guitar-parts with violins, and the lyrics have been changing forever.. and finally, a recorded version of the fourth part in the turned series, tentatively moscow. by no means what the song will sound like finished, it gives a fair idea of what the piano and guitar might sound like together some day. these recordings of hush and moscow seem to be from late 2001, the first committed to minidisc in the front room of a house in laajasalo and the second at our first rehearsal room in laajasalo. hush has jere on guitar, otto on bass, ville on drums and myself on guitar and doing the vocal parts, moscow is otto on piano, jere on guitar and me on my usual vocal and acoustic guitar duties.

sinking steamboats a and b.
early version of mox kow.

crocodile teeth is one of the shortest songs in our roster, but i feel the lyrics are our most accomplished. the picture above is a recent drawing of our bass-player kelanen by our drummer & resident art-school student tuukka. due to continuous arguments and stupid fights while in studio around last christmas, kelanen left the band, and emily and i wrote the crocodile teeth lyric based around him and his penchant for arnold schwarzenegger impressions:

"lines are strewn across
marshes eye and pot-holes
like across your crooked stance
like across candid demands
you were our mountain of man
caricatures built in sand
a bad actor with a speech-impediment
poorly mouthed and forced in sentiment

i can't remember, much else of you"

force field, death suit, marks in the sand, moss-school

as a first entry, coming up with anything sensible to say seems beyond me. i will try to keep this all updated as best i can during the time that this group is on a break from playing live-shows; this is here for anyone to find. to recap, we don't have a real name, we have played twenty shows. there are ten of us, we play all our own songs - some of which have been the same since the day we wrote them, some of them still changing.

our most recent project has been to start work on a four-part piece called turned. the third part has been ready for a long time and we must have played it to an audience nearly a dozen times by now. the whole idea is to use classical-music influences to an extreme where they become the main point of focus, leaving the rock elements in the background. the following is a sort of open plan for the four turned pieces - and a catalogue of the parts we have composed by name. don't expect any of it to make sense please..

turned 1/4 - force field. the three parts we have ready for this piece are quite similar to one another. the beginning will be very minimalistic and seemingly arryhthmical, violin notes on floor-tom accents, slowly bringing out melody from within the interleaved hum. part two of this will make it's entrance forcefully, a storm of squalling feedback and both violins playing the full leading melody - backed up by trumpet and a possible accordion. as quickly as this part appears, it quickly subsides, giving way to the leading melody played with guitars, metallophones, piano and strings. all of it ending in a lush minor 7 chord.

turned 2/4 - death suit. this is slowly beginning to take shape; we've managed to complete four parts for the piece (and more are on the way) - the first is called 'donnie darko' as it reminded someone of the score for that film, second comes 'tangerine dream' - off-kilter arpeggios on violins, modulating every two bars; 'tangerine dream' and 'donnie darko' may both end up using the same guitar riff in the background, one that makes me think of godspeed you! black emperor everytime i hear it. third comes 'best of bach', another strings & trumpet arrangement, the most honest pop melody in all the four parts and is naturally followed by the fourth section called 'end of the world'. there will be more to say about this one once we get it near finished. a fifth part has been kicking around that sounds like dub. but we might just end up leaving that out - however much fun it is to play.

turned 3/4 - left your marks in the sand. the long-finished third part starts with a jazzy 4/4 rhythm with trumpet and saxophone playing over a simple four-note bassline. this gives way to a short vocal and trumpet centered rubato, and continues in 3/4 rhythm for the rest of the song. violins and 'cello make an appearance during the second chorus and round the whole song off in a slow-building but powerful final crescendo.

turned 4/4 - moss-school. the closing fourth chapter will be a very simple ballad using an acoustic guitar and a piano as the leading instruments. the piano melody will be revisited here in full for the first time, after appearing in tiny fragments played on the violin during the first third of force field and as the backbone to the final bridge in left your marks in the sand. here it comes through in the chorus in all it's glory, backed up by violins, 'cello, trumpet and orchestral percussion. the very end of the song will involve all instruments dropping down into parallel 1/4 notes, creating a very unsettling dischord.