Sea of Sand: Download (3)

You may notice that the page lands on the blog page upon visiting now, rather than the Music Archive.

We noticed that there’s quite a large collection of songs available on the Music Archive page now and were thinking that it was probably overwhelming for any new listeners. It was impossible for new people to figure out what should be listened to first or what would best represent a sample of our newest material.

So now, we’re going to work on releasing one song per week (hopefully sticking to Mondays) of new material as we create it.

This week, we have Sea of Sand:

Sea of Sand can also now be found on the Music Archive page listed under Knick-knacks as it doesn’t quite fit with any of the other themes we’ve been working with recently.

 

 The Black Squall [3:24m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (9)

I was bored this evening and decided to take a break from my normal weekday escape into video games to play around with my acoustic some. It’s been awhile since I’ve played it.

Well, after I got started, I came up with a little guitar ditty that reminded me of a sea chanty. So I decided to stick with it and write a little pirate-y thing. Is it cheesy? Well, maybe. But it was fun and I thought it sounded decent enough to throw it on the site so here it is.

It’s listed under the Knick-Knacks section on the Music page as “The Black Squall”.

Here are the lyrics for anyone interested:

The wind takes me off
filling hemp voids
deep deep into the wide wild blue

Labor the sun
unto the sea
sweet sweet lull of the boards beneath

swiftly we ride
into unknown
fill the spots on the tattered map

heart beating thin
in cages open
glide glide into the squall ahead

nowhere bound
all around
black clouds
watching me wanting me

spinning me round
quickly unbound
crashing wave after wave attack

briefly a prayer
hope for a chance
if only i could see home again

splinter the ship
crack of the whip
down down into the deepest dark

swirling down
no direction
if only I could take a breath

This animation was inspired by one of Akira Kurosawa’s films called Dreams.  I rented this from netflix and thought I would’nt watch it, and actually put it back in the mail box to be sent back.  I assumed it was like every other foreign film with hard to follow subtitles.  I was wrong!

Luckily, Amber pulled it out the next morning and watched it.  She said that I would like it because of the photography work and that there were different short films that were all unique.   She was right, I loved it!  The style was amazing.  I liked the effects the scenes had, they were like animated pictures, but without digital graphics.  I had been looking for a flash project, and thought this film would be fun to edit and play around with. 

This particular scene is called “Blizzard”.  You’ll have to watch the film to get the meaning behind the scene, but I thought this particular part of the scene was fascinating.  The animation was taken from a camera video recording a small T.V. I was using.   After I recorded it, I imported the video into flash and edited different frames to add more color and animation.  

Akira Kurosawa has influenced many film directors in America.  Clint Eastwood’s “A Fistful of Dollars”, is a remake of Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo”.  The only real difference is that Eastwood carries pistols and Toshiro Mifune carries a sword.  “The Magnificent Seven” which was another Western, is a remake of “Seven Samurai”…which coincidentally The Clash wrote a song about on their album Sandinista.  Joe loves that song.  

Here’s a little more history behind Akira Kurosawa.

Kurosawa’s work changed significantly over time.  His earlier work, during the 1950s and early 60s, was focused on the samurai archetype as saviors for people in small villages.  At the time, Japan was still recovering from WWII and it was a way to give the war torn nation hope in rebuilding their country as well as some pride in their culture. These films went on to influence the American and Italian Westerns so when you watch them, you have to go in expecting a Western-type film.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted some of the old Haywire Transmission stuff I did prior to joining the project to the page.  Some posters on another message board mentioned that they enjoyed that stuff and it spurred me into looking into using it again.  So, on Saturday, after my wife and I got back from an appointment, I spent a couple of hours putting together some stuff for us to use in the project. 

Using FL Studio has some nice aspects but it can also be a huge pain.  One great aspect of using it is that it gives us the ability to employ a huge number of instruments and sounds in one package that pretty much plays itself when set up properly.  It’s great as it makes the 3 of us sound like we’re playing 20 or more instruments sometimes.  It can really fill in the sound, giving us some freedom to try other things than we normally would.

However, it’s not a very flexible program to use for live situations and can be difficult when employed with groups like The Chill because the basis of the music is improvised.  I’ve learned some methods of changing the sounds in a live manner but it can be frustrating and limited.

In any case, because we’ve been working on The Daily Routine theme lately, and I work primarily on computers all day, I thought it’d be interesting to throw in some midi bleep-bloop and glitch sounds in there so we tried it out yesterday and it went well. 

Unfortunately, it looks like the recording equipment may have had some difficulties however, so it looks like we may not have captured the session as we’d hoped.  Neil will listen to what was captured yesterday and hopefully, it’ll still be enough to post a couple of worthwhile songs to the website. 

There are a couple of new songs up from our session last Sunday on the Music page.

Lyrically, I concentrated on things I think about, see, or do during my daily commute and the grind throughout the work day. I have quite a commute each day starting with a drive to the train station, a long train ride from Baltimore to Washington D.C and then I take the Metro to the office. Along the way, there are various people or things I see or may feel that I thought would be interesting song material.

I’m sure some people probably experience some of the same thoughts on a day-to-day basis and I thought it’d be interesting to put those ideas into songs.

Also, there’s a new animated picture up on the Musicians page that Jeremy put together. It’s similar to the one that was presented there before but he sped up the timing on it so that we sort of mix together as you watch it. It’s pretty awesome, check it out.

Neil also got some great pictures at our practice session Sunday. I’ve got to probably compress them down a bit as they’re too big for web presentation so I’ll try to have those up in the next day or so.