A couple of weeks ago I played my wife the sketches and material I've generated for the album so far.  She was really happy with it because she said I'd "gone back to that lush, sexy, electronic sound" that I'd started with.  Seeing as she seems to like it so much, I thought I'd post some of the stuff she's talking about.

When I first sat down and started recording songs back in Switzerland in 2003, these are the kinds of songs I was producing.  When I released my first album in 2004, I'd reworked some of them into a more commercial-sounding form, which, in hindsight, wasn't a particularly good idea.  I also excluded the darker stuff as it didn't fit with the album.  Again, not a great idea.  As such, none of these tracks have seen the light of day. 

Coming back to this style now, which is the direction that Melbourne Beauty is heading in, I feel like myself again.  Sworn In On A Stack Of Dictionaries was written for a group of people that I hadn't met.  This electronic stuff is written for me.

Wanted_Ad.mp3 (6.9 MB)

Bad_Memories_(Orginal_Mellotronic_Mix).mp3 (5.5 MB)

Smoke_&_Mirrors_(Scary_Monsters_Mix).mp3 (6.9 MB)

Crawling_Backward.mp3 (5.5 MB)

Standing in front of a keyboard for an hour a day and wailing like a loon over stuff I'm making up on the spot is exactly as hard as it sounds.  The hard bit comes now.  I've now got about 80 bits of random riffage and singing recorded, ranging in duration from about 30 seconds to two minutes each.  And these were the doodlings I kept.  The hard bit is wading through them all and beginning to turn them into songs.  Frankly, I've been procrastinating.

So I call this second stage of my process the "sketch" stage.  A sketch to me is when I take one or more of the bits of material I've made and start stretching them out, sticking them together, adding extra bits and pummeling them into the shape of a song.  This is when most of the actual writing happens.  It is during this process, when I'm working with some riff I knocked out in the "material" stage, that it will suggest more riffs, chord progressions, moods, lyrics and all the other stuff that ends up making the song.  It's during this part of the process when you'll see the biggest changes from what I started with to what comes out the other end.

So here's the first example of what happens when I take a bit of material and start working on it.  Here's the material:

another_(material).mp3 (1.1 MB) 

And here's the first draft of a sketch.   The bit in the middle that vamps on one note is my improvised shorthand for "I'm going to write something to put here".

another_(sketch).mp3 (4.3 MB)

As I said, this is just the first draft.  It's my first improvised run through mapping out a structural idea for the song.  The riffs will probably stay, but many things will be added and some taken away.  Or the whole thing could end up sounding like UB40 for all I know at this stage.

So that's how things usually go, but not always.  Here's an example of some improvised material that came out pretty well.  So well that I added an extremely primitive drum machine part to it, which is something I'd usually only be doing after I set the whole structure of the song.  This sort of jumped from being material to sketch in one fell swoop, but it's still only one minute long and obviously needs a lot more work.  But it very, very strongly points at where it's going.

learnt_from_magazines.mp3 (1.1 MB)

I started playing around with arpeggiators while I was generating material for this album.  An arpeggiator is a handy function on a synthesizer, or in my case, a plug-in on a MIDI track in my computer software, that takes the output from the key or keys you're holding down on the keyboard and either generates extra notes from them or plays the notes form the chord you're holding in sequence.  The latter function was what the arpeggiators was designed to do.  I generally use them to create riffs from sequences of notes that I'm playing.

I started mucking about with these because of The Knife's album Silent Shout and some of the solo work of Spencer Krug.  Both utilize the arpeggiators heavily.  Most synth-based music does. 

I'm finding them really exciting because I'm creating sounds and textures that I'd have to be a virtuoso octopus to actually play.  Plus they free up my other hand to do something else at the other end of the keyboard.

So here's 4 examples of me in "generating material" mode, i.e. yelping incoherently out-of-tune over out-of-time keyboard playing.  I solemnly promise this all gets turned into something resembling music in the end.

another_place_for_your_eyes.mp3 (653 KB)

blackfish.mp3 (933 KB)

i_smell_cordite.mp3 (606 KB)

its_an_illusion.mp3 (943 KB)

OK, so it's been three months since my last post.  But I have a very good excuse.  Just 6 days after that post, my wife and I bought our first home, an apartment, at an auction.  We then had a 30 day settlement, and then moved.  Then it was Christmas.  Now it's New Year.  Throughout all of it, I kept writing, but I couldn't find time to update this blog.

But the important thing was I kept working.  I've still been using most of my lunch hours at work to generate material and work out sketches for songs.

John Cage once said that life was a series of interruptions that are meant to be enjoyed.  But he also thought it was unethical not to answer the phone when you're busy.  If he'd lived to the present day I'd be interested to see how he would have dealt with mobiles and 300 unread emails in his inbox, the smug, serene bastard.

Vocoders, for those of you not familiar, were first invented as an encryption device.  Basically, they take two audio sources and use the amplitude of one to control signal to control the amplitude of the other.  What that means in practical terms is the robot vocal sound you hear on Daft Punk's Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger and most of their other songs.  Yes, it's the singing synthesizer thing.

In this WTF stage of creating material, I will give anything a go.  I decided to muck around with vocoders one afternoon as I had been compulsively listening to Black Moth Super Rainbow's lovely album Dandelion Gum.  It's a wonderful psychedelic affair.  Every song on the album has the word "sun" or "sunshine" in it.  And every vocal part is pure vocoder, Daft Punk-stylee.

I'm not using the vocoder like that.  One thing you can do with them is mix them in with the dry vocal, so the "singing synth" effect is an addition to the vocal, not the whole vocal sound.  This has provided me with a great tool for adding harmonies to my vocals live, and giving my other hand something to do on the keyboard (see previous post).

These examples have got me playing a synth sound using an arpeggiator in my left hand, controlling the synth that feeds the vocoder with the right, all the while wailing nonsense like a drunken sailor that will one day be replaced by actual singing with lyrics.

feel_like_a_renegade.mp3 (1.6 MB)

i_am_not_a_ragdoll.mp3 (1.4 MB)

peace_in_our_time.mp3 (1.3 MB)

take_me_as_you_are.mp3 (1.2 MB)

I learnt a lot about streamlining the creative process between creating my first album, which took 18 months, and making the first Vorstand Circus album, which took 6 months.  For "Sworn In…..", I decided what the album was about thematically, decided on the instrumentation, decided roughly how long it would be and how many tracks it would have.  I then sat down and wrote the whole thing before I went anywhere near a computer to record, arrange and produce it.  I had learnt that getting absorbed in the endless possibilities presented to me by creating on a computer was what wasted most of my time on the first album.

I honed the writing process that works for me while creating "Sworn In…..".  It has three parts.  The first part is generating material.  I do this in three different ways:

·         Writing words on paper with pen which I then sit down and improvise music to.  These words are usually pretty stream-of-conscious.  I've started doing this on the train on the way to work to wring every available minute of creative time out of the day.

·         Singing random words and melodies into my mp3 player's voice recorder which I then transfer in to the computer and add music to.  I often do this while I'm on a long walk, reacting to the environment around me.   I used to do this with a micro cassette recorder.  The mp3 player is much faster.

·          Sitting down with keys or guitar, a microphone and my laptop and improvising.  This is how I've been generating most of the material for Melbourne Beauty so far.  Most of the time, I'm singing complete gibberish out of tune over a chord progression or riff I've just made up.

These become individual tracks with their own shorthand names in their own folders.  I've got 80 or so little folders of this stuff sitting on my hard drive as of now.  I'll keep going until I feel like I've got enough, and then I'll move onto part two of the writing process, which I refer to as the "sketch" phase.  There'll be a post devoted to that when I get there.

 So here's what these bits of material sound like.  I feel pretty naked and embarrassed letting these out into the public domain, but I said I was going to share everything.  Some of these snatches of improvised material will be worked on further and may eventually end up in a song; maybe the melody, maybe a lyric, maybe a chord progression, maybe a sound.  Maybe.

a_delicate_place.mp3  (808 KB)

i_can_be_your_razor.mp3 (698 KB)

laughing_in_matchbox.mp3 (1.01 MB)

six_eight.mp3 (819 KB)

I've got a 9-to-5 job in a large company, which I got 6 months after returning from three years in Switzerland.  I had the privilege of working full-time on my music in Switzerland.  I released two albums, one under my own name and one as The Vorstand Circus. I'm now writing the second Vorstand Circus album, which I will write, perform, record, mix, master, release, promote and perform live entirely by myself while working my day job.  This blog will chronicle how I do it, why I do it and the reason behind every creative decision I make along the way.

So let's begin at the beginning and then go on until we reach the end.  Let's start with the first decision I made; the decision to make an album and what to call it.

I catch the train to work.  I can't begin to tell you how important this is.  I listen to music on the train; this is how I keep up with all the great music out there and keep myself sane.  I also use the train to work, but more on this in later posts.  For now, let me just say – take public transport to work; it makes your life better.

I also walk past Melbourne's Sandridge Bridge every weekday on the way to and from work.  The bridge is dominated by a large-scale installation by artist Nadim Karam called "The Travellers".  That's a photo of part of it on the header of this blog.  Ten huge figures made of stainless steel make up the work.  They symbolise the different periods of settlement and immigration in Melbourne. 

 One day, while traveling to work, I was listening to Neutral Milk Hotel's "In the Aeroplane Over The Sea", which, on most days, is my favourite album.   As I walked down Southbank Boulevard, the track "Oh Comely", the emotional melting point of the album, was playing.  This track never fails to either send a cold chill up my spine or bring tears to my eyes when the twin narratives of Anne Frank and Goldaline collide in Jeff Mangum's incredibly fertile imagination.  As the line "Goldaline my dear, we will fall and freeze together" played, I was looking at "Melbourne Beauty", the female figure in "The Travellers" that represents the gold rushes of the 1850s to 1890s (see image at the top of this post).  Something happened.

I'd been through a lot of change; moving countries, finding a new job, finding a new place to live.  I'd also tried to put the "Sworn In On A Stack Of Dictionaries" line-up of The Vorstand Circus together; keys, drums, bass, accordion and me on guitar and vocal.  I couldn't make it happen.  I hadn't written anything since almost a year previously, since "Sworn In….." went into the production stage.  In my defence, I had been busy.  But I had to figure out how to write, record, release and perform again.  This is what I want to do full-time.

It hit me all at once around that moment; write the album to be performed solo; use your lunch hours, your laptop, your time on the train, your mp3 player's voice recorder, a notebook, a pen. Change the music you write, how you write it and how you play it.  And write about it while you do it; not one of those arch, abstract, flippant musicians' diaries of their album recording sessions, but explain how and why you make every creative decision. 

So that's why it's called Melbourne Beauty, though it won't necessarily be about Melbourne.  But it will be written in, infused with, nurtured by and performed in Melbourne, so maybe it will.