Matt Stevens instigated a twitter-made chord progression.
Here’s a sketch for the opening of a song I might write based on it:
Maybe we’ll surface soon,
Under a winter moon,
Thaw must have left weakness.
Maybe we’ll freeze again
Awaiting the summer rain,
Ice in our veins.
A ship sails on a solid sea
A perfect place for you and me
A moondial turns until we move again
Last sunlight for six months
Last movement this year.
Via the Brass Goggles forum, I stumbled across Been Steed’s ‘Distorted Skies’.
I’m listening to it for the first time as I type, and I really like it. It’s very much a ‘mood’ album, all ominous drones, muffled piano and twisting layers. There are some genuinely interesting note choices, for instance at the end of the opening track Time Will Erode Use (I’ll Be Waiting).
Steampunk? In parts. The Conspirator opens with a lovely broken-music hall groove that stays on the same chord for too long (in a very good way), and there’s a sitar intro later on that’s very steampunk in a British Empire, last days of the Raj fashion.
The mix of electronica, piano and distorted vocals on Distorted Skies evokes a wonderfully dark mood and I would heartily recommend it as the perfect accompaniment to the few winter nights we’ve (hopefully) got left this year.
One of the books that has inspired me in my composition is Reginald Smith Brindle’s stuffy, old fashioned, pompous tome ‘Musical Composition’.
I don’t mean that description as a criticism, merely a statement of fact – his written style is old fashioned, and his attitude to popular music, in the few brief passages where it is mentioned, is silly. But as a guide and inspiration to composition, it’s great. The opening chapters on melody in particular are really good, and I love his attitude to harmony.
He’s also a pretty mean classical guitar composer. Here’s a great rendition of his piece inspired by Lorca’s descriptions of the guitar: El Polifemo De Ora
Little Acorns is a piece I’ve been meaning to write for a very long time. The original melody I came up with at college – that’s about 8 years ago – but apart from a solo violin piece I started and never finished, I’ve never really come back to it.
In the last few days it’s been niggling at the back of my mind, even extending itself a little. So this morning I recorded this little semi-improvised sketch to see if I could get some ideas moving.
‘A Tale from the Endless Stair’, is a bizarre and incredibly violent animation that my brother, Joe filmed last summer.
I composed and recorded the music in one day with Joe sitting beside me, directing things.
The composition process was very quick and very natural. Joe had clear ideas for the music already – a little bit of the theme music for Battlestar Galactica, a dash of the soundtrack for 28 days later – which made things very easy.
Here’s the first part of the film:
The opening theme was built on a simple 7/8 ostinato and some discordant string chords, all played (not very well) on my trusty yamaha keyboard.
The main theme is also based on repeating ostinatos, a doom metal inspired repeating acoustic guitar line that slowly builds in intensity before collapsing into white noise.
The second half of the film sees the Demon finally appear:
The sharp eared amongst you might spot elements of the Comrade Robot song ‘Demon‘ in some of this. Joe has also used Demon over the end credits of the film, the finished version of which should surface soon.
These are both guitar based background loops, the first a moody loop in A minor, the second a more discordant multi-layered affair for the Demon fight.
Composing this music was great fun, and one of my first forays into music for film. I’m particularly proud of the ‘main’ theme which was a real collaborative piece. Most of the musical ideas came from Joe, which I then crafted and shaped into the sounds he was looking for.
The experience has left me wanting to score music for some more films. Quite how I get to do that I’m not too sure yet, but I’ll be working on it over the coming months.
Spinning the Compass technically isn’t finished. I still have to sort out a final cover and redo a few little details in the recordings. Neverthless, it’s getting the occasional mention online. Here are two of ’em:
Andrew Liptak from Carry You Away:
…Another artist, one of our favorites from a couple years ago, Tom Slatter, of the since metamorphosed We’ll Write (now called Comrad Robot), has released a solo album with a steampunk theme called Spinning the Compass. If you liked We’ll Write, Slatter has kept a lot of the same feel from that group with the same nerdish themes of machines and humanity…
Tom Slatter’s Spinning the Compass is best described, I think, as acoustic prog-rock. From alternating measures of 5/4 to wildly chromatic key changes to rowdy (acoustic) guitar solos, all of the prog-rock elements are there. As a fan of Yes and ELP, these elements drew me in immediately.
O.L.Droid by my brother, Joe makes copious use of my music, and features Joe’s usual mix of weirdness, weirdness and more weirdness.
SkinzNHydez is an artistic type I stumbled across via twitter. He lives in Canada and makes all sort of snazzy masks and wrist cuffs and similar, many of them in a Steampunk style.
The mask above is currently on sale on Ebay, and I happen to think it’s pretty cool.
There’s a bonus song on Spinning the Compass. Did you know that?
It’s called ‘The Man Who Learned to Fly’ and it’s downloadable for free for anyone who’s joined the mailing list.
It might have been written by a very good friend of mine, but I didn’t know he was going to write it, or even that he’d started his (rather good) blog.
Spinning the Compass has been reviewed!
(Interestingly Pete singles out Lines Overheard At A Séance for special mention, a song that I included as an after-thought to get the numbers up. I mean, I’m very proud of the song, it’s one of my favourites, but it almost wasn’t on there…)
Spinning The Compass is almost a metal album. All Tom would need to do is swap acoustic for electric guitar and the keyboard parts for more electric guitars and he’d be there. The fact that it’s not a metal album does allow the songcraft to shine, though, and it’s a treat to hear such deft fretwork without layers of distortion.
Tom’s dedication to theory means these songs are often almost too clever for their own good; he likes time signatures, and don’t get him started on the lydian mode. However, the unexpected quirks and lunges in strange directions never get in the way of a melody or a strong chorus, particularly on the excellent title song and the opener, Mechanism. Buzzing at the centre of this album is Lines Overheard At A Séance, all fuzzy keys and crackling drums. It’s a dark and hypnotic piece,easily one of the best things I think Tom has recorded.
