Author Archives: TomSlatter

How I wrote ‘Mechanism’

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I thought it might be fun to do a blog post about each of the songs on Spinning the Compass

This song is a little naughty. It began life as a song about the antikythera mechanism but as so many things do, eventually ended up about sex.

This mechanism it’s driving us apart,
It shines a prism on the kind of love we share
This mechanism is making passion spoil
It tastes of something the cloying tang of wine and oil
Our love relies on clockwork
The careful use of gears and wheels

More specifically, it’s about a love affair that has been corrupted by toys, cogs and machinery, to the point where genuine human contact seems impossible.

Of course, such despairing and bleak lyrics have to be set to a jaunty tune.

You and me in the gaslight with our machinery
Our artificial steam powered hearts will never set us free
This mecanism isn’t you or me

The song was written for February Album Writing Month, and began as a couple of largely wordless improvisations (Warning, what follows are very rough demo recordings of a work in progress).

Improv 1

This is the first improvisation I recorded. At this point I had one line of lyrics, some chords, a vague idea of the groove/bass line and little else.

You can hear me trying out ideas, and playing little bits of melody on the guitar to make clear to myself what I was singing.

This is how I usually improvise – guitar and voice at the same time and little idea of what the eventual lyrics will be – though I usually do have at least one line to give me an idea of mood.

Improv 2

Here you can hear me improvising to try and figure out a chorus – some of the original chords from this survived, as did the ‘way you get to me’ arpeggio.

One difference you can hear is that I’ve a much clearer idea of how the verses will sound. In between these improvs I wrote a few lines down.

Both of these sound files, as rough and ready as they are, illustrate how the song began to develop. Here’s the demo I posted for FAWM09 – the finished song, albeit not recorded as well as the version on Spinning the Compass.

Mechanism (FAWM09 Demo)

The full lyrics are:

This mechanism it’s driving us apart,
It shines a prism on the kind of love we share
This mechanism is making passion spoil
It tastes of something the cloying tang of wine and oil
Our love relies on clockwork
The careful use of gears and wheel

This mechanism it isn’t how we feel

You and me in the gaslight with our machinery
Our artificial steam powered hearts will never set us free
This mecanism isn’t you or me

The games we’re playing type writers for our hearts
The rules and rhythms
The limits of a steam powered love
It started somewhere lighter
Somehow we got lost somewhre
This mechanism won’t get us anywhere

You and me in the gaslight with our machinery
Our artificial steam powered hearts will never set us free
This mechanism isn’t you or me

Oil is the wine
Roses in the chains
Burning a pilot light
Isn’t carrying a flame

You and me in the gaslight with our machinery
Our artificial steam powered hearts will never set us free
This mechanism isn’t you or me

My First Online Gig

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On Wednesday I played my first online gig, via Ustream:

The setlist was:

  • Mechanism
  • August and Whiteface
  • Moon behind the Sun
  • Something’s Bound to Happen
  • Self Made Man
  • Black Water
  • Spinning the Compass
  • Where Once They Had Hearts
  • Jetpack

Most of which can also be heard via my solo album or Comrade Robot’s bandcamp or youtube pages.

It was easily the most fun I’ve had at a gig for ages, especially because of all the silliness in the ustream chatroom.

The sound and vision were pretty good, though listening back I would have liked the guitar quieter. Rather than ripping the audio straight from here, I’m thinking of doing another seperate acoustic recording of some of these  songs today. Because I can.

Thanks to all those who listened, and if you didn’t the video above will show you what you missed.

Structures of Glass

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Structures of Glass

Structures of Glass is my contribution to The Big Calm (a collaborative piece written by members of Cafe Noodle).

It started life as a title borrowed from a post on BLDGBLOG that imagined:

vast turbulent structures of glass move through the global atmosphere, posing a dire threat to machinery and drifting across whole continents in a kind of low-intensity storm of aerosolized crystal… The speculative climatology of alien worlds.

I loved the notion, and tried to take inspiration by downloading a load of pretty glass pictures from flickr, renaming them WAV files, opening them up in an audio editor and seeing what weird noises I could get out of them.

Mostly I got static, but slowing it down enough and adding some effects produced some interesting sounds.

With that as a background I set to work with a few notes from D minor (Initially D E F A Bb). A brief sojourn into the relative major and the music was complete.

The lyrics of course are about something completely different. I’m not entirely sure what:

Had enough of floating crystals, want to smash them all to shards
Had enough of all your miracles, your shiny house cards
Couldn’t just for once a brighter light be shone into the sky
couldn’t just for once an ugly truth come along to wipe away your smile

Had enough of all this beauty, had enough of all this gold
had enough of all this freedom, the best parts already sold
Couldn’t just for once a brighter light be shone into the sky
couldn’t just for once an ugly truth come along to wipe away your smile

These structures of glass
Were dazzling me
A light from our past
A fixed geometry
But the slightest hammer blow
could take it all apart
The slightest hammer blow
Could take it all apart
These structures of glass

PS totally unrelated, by don’t forget to watch my Ustream gig Wednesday 2nd June 8pm BST (or later on the archive). Click Here!

More on the Fan Page

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The fan page isn’t much to look at yet, but it does contain a lot of music. Here’s the text from that page:

This page will contain all the content that only mailing list subscribers can get their hands on. At the moment, that means my album Spinning the Compass, the bonus track The Man Who Learnt To Fly and the singles Last Sunlight, DeadPuppyRecycling, Papercut, Ratcatcher, Lines in the Dirt, Seven Curses and Structures of Glass

To get the password, join the mailing list by putting your email in the box over to the right.

Seven Curses and Lines in the Dirt

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<a href="http://tomslatter.bandcamp.com/album/seven-curses-lines-in-the-dirt">Seven Curses by Tom Slatter</a>

Seven Curses and Lines in the Dirt are two new songs that share a steampunky/Victorian Explorer/ancient civilizations theme. They will be emailed free to members of my mailing list in the next week or so, but they’re are available now to listen to and download for any price you want (including free). Just click the buttons above.

Wednesday 2nd June – My First Online Gig

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On Wednesday 2nd June I will be performing some, all or none of the songs from my steampunk album (and others besides) live via the internet.

To be specific, it will be on Ustream.

More details to come, all you need to do is not make plans for that evening at about 8.pm.

In the meantime, here’s my first little experiment with Ustream:

Monsters, Whores and More

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Fledderjohn is the performing name of a gentleman named Michael Heath. A couple of years ago, back when my songwriting blog was trying to be a podcast, I made use of a wonderful song of his to illustrate some songwriting point or other. I lost the recording of that podcast when moving server a few months ago, so I can’t share that with you.

I can however, share his new album. Monsters, Whores and More is a wonderful set of songs. I don’t know if he had steampunk in mind when he created it, but with that airship on the cover, the gloriously fragile acoustic folk sound, lines like ‘Bumble bees and beagles, Mr Darwin help me please’ and songs about adventure on the high-seas, I’m going to declare it a steampunk(ish) masterpiece.

Particular favourites of mine are the opening track Tiny Boat, Fiddler’s Field and Evolution Song, but the whole album is a sublime slice of nautical songwriting that deserves to be on your music player of choice.

<a href="http://fledderjohn.bandcamp.com/album/monsters-whores-and-more">Tiny boat by Fledderjohn</a>