Sonic Youth Gossip - View Single Post - Nels Cline

themawt71 · 02.12.2009, 12:08 PM

oh yeah. tons of overdubs.

*NOTES ON COWARD from nelscline.com

I have been thinking about doing a string-heavy, overdubbed record for over twenty years. The original inspirations for this were records like John Abercrombie's "Characters", Ralph Towner's "Diary", Bill Connors' "Theme to the Guardian", Pat Metheny/Lyle Mays' "As Falls Wichita..", all 70s ECM recordings. Also the phenomenal double-tracked side of John McLaughlin's "My Goal's Beyond", Steve Tibbetts records, and certain things, mostly from this same time period, by Fred Frith, Hugh Hopper, and even Robert Wyatt. But there never seemed to be the right time... or something.

I recently decided that I had been thinking and talking about this for long enough. As far back as the mid-80s I wanted to call the project "Coward", but - not trying to be too coy here - the reasons are too many and too convoluted to explain. At any rate, I had a window of time last summer and I grabbed it, booked time in my friends Mark and Weba's home studio in the Echo Park area of my hometown, Los Angeles, and spent five days surrounded by my guitars, zithers, sruti boxes, and I went for it. The odd thing was that I had changed my ideas for this record constantly as I progressed through my life. My interest in microtonality, Asian music, Hindustani slide guitar, trash rock from around the world, as well as in soundtracks by the likes of Ennio Morricone, Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein, and even John Lurie, were reshaping my concepts for the record. When it came right down to it, I wanted to finally just go in armed with a few musical jottings and a laundry list of vague ideas, moods, and whatever else would serve to make up what was ultimately going to end up being a very personal-verging-on-obsessive, self-absorbed bunch of sounds; sounds that would endeavor to address musical as well as non-musical issues pertaining to my life, my psyche, and the spirits of some of the people who have meant the most to me as a person, not only as an artist.

After writing a lot in the studio, utilizing the power of the computer, Mark Wheaton and I had recorded a lot of stuff, and a few weeks later we set aside three days to mix and edit it into what you may now experience as the Cryptogramophone CD "Coward". The funny thing is that I actually hadn't thought about what genre of music I was recording, or even if anyone would like it at all. I confess that I make records for myself, even though the listener is always being taken into consideration. "Coward" is meant to be a journey, bookended by minimal drone pieces named after infrequently-blooming flowers, and, in between, taking you on a trip - sometimes a wry, whimsical, or solemn one - through this string of references, of inside jokes, and of tributes to friends, artists, and to pools of feeling that are at once personal and (with any luck) universal, pertaining to love, alienation, things sublime and perverse...

There were two tracks which dangle as outtakes from "Coward"; one a solo acoustic guitar version of "And Now, The Queen" by Carla Bley, in which I tried to muster a Paul Bley-esque approach, a tribute to both Bleys. But it was just OK, and my brother Alex, to whom I have regularly turned in times of doubt, for song sequencing suggestions, etc., said that it was maybe... extraneous. Very polite! Anyway, he was right. I think that Jeff Gauthier, one of my best pals for almost 30 years and the owner/visionary behind Cryptogramophone, may have said the same thing. Anyway, there was one other piece, written in the studio, as an attempt to pay homage to the endlessly inspiring actor Cate Blanchett, but it fell short. I can't even remember its provisional title, but maybe we'll put it up on the Crypto website for laughs. But it can't be dedicated to Ms. Blanchett. It's not fabulous enough!

Track one: EPIPHYLLUM -
This is a piece named after the plant that happens to grow outside Mark and Weba's studio, Catasonic, and the alien-looking red "paddles" were in full bloom. Musically, this is a simple drone involving layers of Indian sruti boxes to create a vague tension between minor and major modalities, and electric guitars, looped and feeding back. The howling sound is a hollow-body electric guitar a extreme volume with an low-octave harmonizer setting that I was swinging around and scraping the studio ceiling with. A piece like this could easily go on for 30 minutes, but there was no time for that. Aspects of Tony Conrad's music are purely intentional.

Track two: PRAYER WHEEL -
I remembered only one song from the time I was first thinking of recording overdubbed guitars, and this is it. It was always called "Prayer Wheel", and it is very directly inspired by the aforementioned ECM recordings, and also by Steve Reich. In retrospect, I dedicated it here to my friend and ex-wife D.D. Faye, a wonderful person and spiritual seeker. The title seems even more appropriate now. The instruments used are my old Martin guitar (playing doubled parts in pairs), and two electric guitar tracks of the usual looping, volume pedal swells, etc.

Track three: THURSTON COUNTY -
After listening to what Mark and I had recorded, I decided that the record needed some... spark. Something with momentum, not too silence-filled. The song was written, recorded, and mixed all the same evening. The main riff or "verse" section is very obviously Thurston Moore-ish, despite the fact that it's in 7/4. Someone listened to the "chorus" later and said it sounds like a Radiohead song. I will take their word for it, but I prefer to think of it as reminiscent of European folk music. The introductory section is an improvised duet between my open-tuned Hagstrom guitar (the same guitar/tuning used in older pieces of mine like "In Form" and "The Ballad of Devin Hoff") and lap steel, all looped on the fly in real time with my constant companion, the old (notice: OLD) Electro Harmonix 16 Second Digital Delay. As is the case on much of this record, I am striving for the illusion of an extemporaneous duet, so even though I did more than one pass to get events that I liked, there are no edits and very few attempts made, just to keep it sounding more real to me. Playing with myself!... This same strategy is used later in the CD on tracks 4, 5, 6, and 7. After this introduction a bit of a lap steel feature, the 7/4 groove seeps in. The rest is all electric and acoustic guitars, and the thumping is me pounding the Hagstrom behind the bridge with the compressor cranked so one can hear every little scraping. Even though this probably sounds like it could be done by a real rock band or something (and now my trio, The Singers, does do a version), I think it rocks pretty hard in a way. Love to you, Thurston Moore: I have gotten a lot from listening to you! And the rest of you of course know of Washington State's county of the same name, the seat of the capitol in Olympia, and so much more...

Track four: THE ANDROGYNE
This is an acoustic guitar duet between my old Martin and a Gitanes Maccaferri-style guitar. The written material is one piece from a suite I wrote a few years ago for a group I was leading sometimes in Los Angeles called The Blue Mitt Ensemble. The suite was written in a day and was sort of feverishly inspired by the story of Peter Pan, which I have always loved ever since watching it on TV as a boy - the Mary Martin one. The fact that Peter Pan is usually played by women and that Mary Martin looked kind of like me in my 20s has something to do with the title. The provisional title of the suite was "Kid Power", and this is movement 2. It strives for a sort of 1950s chamber music klangfarbenmelodie approach that one could hear infect the neo-jazz world of free improvisation, and the theme is kind of Annette Peacock-esque at points (60s Annette, not the 70s jazz-rock Annette).

02.12.2009, 12:08 PM	#11
themawt71 the destroyed room Join Date: Mar 2006 Location: chicago Posts: 570	oh yeah. tons of overdubs. *NOTES ON COWARD from nelscline.com I have been thinking about doing a string-heavy, overdubbed record for over twenty years. The original inspirations for this were records like John Abercrombie's "Characters", Ralph Towner's "Diary", Bill Connors' "Theme to the Guardian", Pat Metheny/Lyle Mays' "As Falls Wichita..", all 70s ECM recordings. Also the phenomenal double-tracked side of John McLaughlin's "My Goal's Beyond", Steve Tibbetts records, and certain things, mostly from this same time period, by Fred Frith, Hugh Hopper, and even Robert Wyatt. But there never seemed to be the right time... or something. I recently decided that I had been thinking and talking about this for long enough. As far back as the mid-80s I wanted to call the project "Coward", but - not trying to be too coy here - the reasons are too many and too convoluted to explain. At any rate, I had a window of time last summer and I grabbed it, booked time in my friends Mark and Weba's home studio in the Echo Park area of my hometown, Los Angeles, and spent five days surrounded by my guitars, zithers, sruti boxes, and I went for it. The odd thing was that I had changed my ideas for this record constantly as I progressed through my life. My interest in microtonality, Asian music, Hindustani slide guitar, trash rock from around the world, as well as in soundtracks by the likes of Ennio Morricone, Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein, and even John Lurie, were reshaping my concepts for the record. When it came right down to it, I wanted to finally just go in armed with a few musical jottings and a laundry list of vague ideas, moods, and whatever else would serve to make up what was ultimately going to end up being a very personal-verging-on-obsessive, self-absorbed bunch of sounds; sounds that would endeavor to address musical as well as non-musical issues pertaining to my life, my psyche, and the spirits of some of the people who have meant the most to me as a person, not only as an artist. After writing a lot in the studio, utilizing the power of the computer, Mark Wheaton and I had recorded a lot of stuff, and a few weeks later we set aside three days to mix and edit it into what you may now experience as the Cryptogramophone CD "Coward". The funny thing is that I actually hadn't thought about what genre of music I was recording, or even if anyone would like it at all. I confess that I make records for myself, even though the listener is always being taken into consideration. "Coward" is meant to be a journey, bookended by minimal drone pieces named after infrequently-blooming flowers, and, in between, taking you on a trip - sometimes a wry, whimsical, or solemn one - through this string of references, of inside jokes, and of tributes to friends, artists, and to pools of feeling that are at once personal and (with any luck) universal, pertaining to love, alienation, things sublime and perverse... There were two tracks which dangle as outtakes from "Coward"; one a solo acoustic guitar version of "And Now, The Queen" by Carla Bley, in which I tried to muster a Paul Bley-esque approach, a tribute to both Bleys. But it was just OK, and my brother Alex, to whom I have regularly turned in times of doubt, for song sequencing suggestions, etc., said that it was maybe... extraneous. Very polite! Anyway, he was right. I think that Jeff Gauthier, one of my best pals for almost 30 years and the owner/visionary behind Cryptogramophone, may have said the same thing. Anyway, there was one other piece, written in the studio, as an attempt to pay homage to the endlessly inspiring actor Cate Blanchett, but it fell short. I can't even remember its provisional title, but maybe we'll put it up on the Crypto website for laughs. But it can't be dedicated to Ms. Blanchett. It's not fabulous enough! Track one: EPIPHYLLUM - This is a piece named after the plant that happens to grow outside Mark and Weba's studio, Catasonic, and the alien-looking red "paddles" were in full bloom. Musically, this is a simple drone involving layers of Indian sruti boxes to create a vague tension between minor and major modalities, and electric guitars, looped and feeding back. The howling sound is a hollow-body electric guitar a extreme volume with an low-octave harmonizer setting that I was swinging around and scraping the studio ceiling with. A piece like this could easily go on for 30 minutes, but there was no time for that. Aspects of Tony Conrad's music are purely intentional. Track two: PRAYER WHEEL - I remembered only one song from the time I was first thinking of recording overdubbed guitars, and this is it. It was always called "Prayer Wheel", and it is very directly inspired by the aforementioned ECM recordings, and also by Steve Reich. In retrospect, I dedicated it here to my friend and ex-wife D.D. Faye, a wonderful person and spiritual seeker. The title seems even more appropriate now. The instruments used are my old Martin guitar (playing doubled parts in pairs), and two electric guitar tracks of the usual looping, volume pedal swells, etc. Track three: THURSTON COUNTY - After listening to what Mark and I had recorded, I decided that the record needed some... spark. Something with momentum, not too silence-filled. The song was written, recorded, and mixed all the same evening. The main riff or "verse" section is very obviously Thurston Moore-ish, despite the fact that it's in 7/4. Someone listened to the "chorus" later and said it sounds like a Radiohead song. I will take their word for it, but I prefer to think of it as reminiscent of European folk music. The introductory section is an improvised duet between my open-tuned Hagstrom guitar (the same guitar/tuning used in older pieces of mine like "In Form" and "The Ballad of Devin Hoff") and lap steel, all looped on the fly in real time with my constant companion, the old (notice: OLD) Electro Harmonix 16 Second Digital Delay. As is the case on much of this record, I am striving for the illusion of an extemporaneous duet, so even though I did more than one pass to get events that I liked, there are no edits and very few attempts made, just to keep it sounding more real to me. Playing with myself!... This same strategy is used later in the CD on tracks 4, 5, 6, and 7. After this introduction a bit of a lap steel feature, the 7/4 groove seeps in. The rest is all electric and acoustic guitars, and the thumping is me pounding the Hagstrom behind the bridge with the compressor cranked so one can hear every little scraping. Even though this probably sounds like it could be done by a real rock band or something (and now my trio, The Singers, does do a version), I think it rocks pretty hard in a way. Love to you, Thurston Moore: I have gotten a lot from listening to you! And the rest of you of course know of Washington State's county of the same name, the seat of the capitol in Olympia, and so much more... Track four: THE ANDROGYNE This is an acoustic guitar duet between my old Martin and a Gitanes Maccaferri-style guitar. The written material is one piece from a suite I wrote a few years ago for a group I was leading sometimes in Los Angeles called The Blue Mitt Ensemble. The suite was written in a day and was sort of feverishly inspired by the story of Peter Pan, which I have always loved ever since watching it on TV as a boy - the Mary Martin one. The fact that Peter Pan is usually played by women and that Mary Martin looked kind of like me in my 20s has something to do with the title. The provisional title of the suite was "Kid Power", and this is movement 2. It strives for a sort of 1950s chamber music klangfarbenmelodie approach that one could hear infect the neo-jazz world of free improvisation, and the theme is kind of Annette Peacock-esque at points (60s Annette, not the 70s jazz-rock Annette).
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