 |
||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||
Zephyr Device
"Departure"
Listen to the album 
Order the CD $5
Buy the Album as MP3s $3
Download a song! $0
- Target Market
- White Collar Nomads
- Fugitive Plastic
- Call
- Response
Authors' Commentary
Response
Author's Commentary
Andrew:
When I wrote this piece (largely influenced by Adam's freewrite) I had no idea what sort of music would fit it. It was difficult trying to read and record the piece cold to a programmed drum track with no extra instrumentation. If you look at the line breaks, the lines are short and strictly cut to match the rhyme. I originally thought this would be a second part of one longer song that included both Call and Response.
I like the line about giving belts new uses. I wanted to focus on flipping roles, flipping uses for things and people. The woman recalls patriarchal societies in which women were born into the wrong gender by male standards and times during which "pussy currency" was acceptable payment for debts, land, livestock, etc. I think this last track is pretty straightforward. Bill and Adam did a great job with the final crescendo and I like the way that last line of lyrics sounds on the track.
Adam:
We had this other half of lyrics that Andrew had compiled from the "Call" sessions and we're all sitting around trying to determine what to do with it and we come to a consensus somehow that it would be a good idea to work on something (almost) entirely electronic.
We're all sitting there looking at each other and just up and decide to just pick something and work it out. This beat appears in my head as if put there by divine intervention! I work it out in Reason and that's it right there, the main loop to the song. I think that's where my involvement in the writing of the tune actually ends. I made up that small beat and exclaimed something like "That's it! I'm genius for all of 4 bars, and after that I'm stumped!" After much debate we decide to let Andrew spit his lines over the sparse loop, and he makes great use of the space. Bill then took it home with him and did wonderful things to it.
Mixing this tune was a lot of fun! It was challenging to try to remain as close as possible to what Bill had in mind with the stuff he added, but to harness it all in, and make sure all the different sounds could be heard distinctly. This mix actually inspired me to go back and fix the mixes on some of the older songs.
Billy:
In direct contrast to the live and improvised nature of "Call", "Response" was originally slated to be an entirely electronic tune. That was the start of the idea for the music, anyway. Adam sat down and cranked out the craziest nasty Kanye meets Missy Elliot meets Bitshifter nintendo beat he could muster. Something hot with disturbing rests that invoked the S&M nature in the beginning of the lyrics, which we could then layer other beats on top of.
I then programmed a whole pile of beats to go on top of the main beat (using Reason), thinking that while we were recording Andrew's vocals to the main beat, I could drop in and mix other beats as needed, DJ style, using Reason in a live manner. Line signal noise foiled us, however. I'm not going to get into the sticky details, but it was not going to happen that way.
Since we were down to the final hour (this was the last session we had with Andrew before he left for Japan), we just had Andrew record his vocals to the main beat as it was. After a few takes he came up with a really stunning performance that we liked, and that made it clear that the additional beats I had programmed were definitely not what the song needed.
So after Andrew left I had some time to figure out what to do with the tune. I ended up programming another set of beats in Reason that were targeted to specific passages in Andrew's performance. Still, the piece felt really sparse compared to the rest of the record - it sounded like we just hadn't given the song as much love and thought, like we were phoning in a performance. I kept looking for weirder and weirder percussion loops and bleeps and noises to add in and for mixing effects (bringing some beats forward and dropping some things out of the mix), but no matter what I did, I felt I couldn't really take the song any farther if I stuck with the all-electronic agenda. So I plugged my bass into a distortion pedal and directly into the board and got serious.
The Distorto-Bass-O-Doom is my Ibanez Musician plugged into a Proco Rat pedal. I had some basic gists of decent basslines and a key, but the performance is improvised. Took me a few takes, but I really love the crazy sound of it, mostly a result of just barely hanging on to the beat while trying to make up cool things on the fly.
Once you start making with the bizarre guitar noises, it's hard to know when to stop. Most of the truly strange ones involve ebow, delay pedal, or me screwing with the delay pedal's controls while notes are still ringing out. I found that while you've picked a short note, if you drop the repeat rate while the note is still ringing out (and thus being recorded by the delay pedal) you get a reverse of the doppler slowed wave form, resulting in a pitch bend that sproings up like a catapult in quite an unexpected manner. Getting the timing just right for that noise was a matter of feeling it out over and over again.