Liner Notes: Sometimes I Draw Robots

It occurs to me that both with the advent of the oh so portable (but oh so tiny) Compact Disc, and with the current popularity of downloaded and streaming audio, the concept of liner notes--at least the way I remember them from the good old days of those big-ass record albums--has become something of a thing of the past.  And that's a shame, because I think it's nice to know what the artist had in mind when he/she/they created the music, how they were influenced and, in some cases, even what gear they used to make the recording (yes--I'm a guitarist, so naturally I'm hung up on gear).  With that in mind, I've decided to use my ever so popular blog to write "liner notes" for some of my CD's, all for the benefit of them what aren't afraid to venture inside the musty cobwebbery that makes up the creative portions of my mind.  I'm starting with my latest release, Sometimes I Draw Robots because it's all fresh in my mind and whatnot--so here goes:

Sometimes I Draw Robots is my second recording of entirely electronic music (the first, The Disorienting Appeal of Shiny New Things was released under the artist name "The Subterranean Philharmonic Orchestra".  Check out previous posts for why I have abandoned that artist name).  The aesthetic I'm pursuing with these compositions is informed and influenced a great deal by the creations of electronic music pioneers like Vladimir Ussachevsky, Milton Babbitt, Morton Subotnick, and Louis and Bebe Barron, to name a few.  More than anything else, I was driven to create music that explored some of the infinite variety of timbres, textures, and rhythms of which electronic instruments are capable and eschew a great deal of the "bass, beats, and glitches" ethos that drives so much of current electronic music.  Not that there's anything wrong with dance music or pop music--there's just so bloody much of it and I felt driven to explore somewhat more sophisticated harmonic and rhythmic textures with this recording.

I love the kind of music made by sonic explorers of the 50's, 60's and 70's and I'm especially drawn to compositions by the members of the Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center.  I was absolutely knocked out the first time I watched the movie "Forbidden Planet" (incidentally, my favorite science fiction film of all time) and discovered that the music score was realized entirely on electronic instruments from the pre-Moog era--primitive stuff by today's standards, but capable of incredibly rich sonic expressiveness, and the Barrons were able to compose music that was not just atonal and alien, but also emotionally complex and genuinely beautiful.  The pieces on Sometimes I Draw Robots are strongly influenced by my feelings at listening to such amazing music. 

For tech heads, pretty much every sound on this recording was created using a variety of Virtual Studio Technology (VST) plugin instruments driven by MIDI sequences programmed into Mackie's Traction II DAW program.  If you're interested in the specific VST's used, shoot me an email and I'll be happy to give you a rundown.

As for the title and the cover artwork, both come from my late night sketchbook, which I often employ to help me wind down before bed.  I find that visual and audio abstractions are very helpful in diffusing the little mental loops that can often make sleep difficult; as a result of which, most of my sketches are of  a considerably more abstract nature than the robot that appears on the cover of the new album.  But "sometimes I draw robots"...which bagged me both cover art and a title for the new album. 

Comments on individual tracks:
1.  The Girl with the Pinkish Hue
The title is sort of a parody of Debussy's "The Girl with the Flaxen Hair", though the piece itself has no sonic or harmonic relation to Debussy's piece.  My intention was to capture a bit of the aesthetic of early works by Ussachevsky by improvising a synthesized flute part over a wash of colored sound. 

2.  Sometimes I Draw Robots: Futura
I'm fascinated with the idea of the repeating sequence, especially with the little accidental polyrhythms that occur when multiple sequences of different length are layered one on top of another.  This piece uses a 16 step and a 32 step sequence, each panned at a slightly different rate from across the stereo field--left to right and back again.  Futura is, of course, the mechanical woman created by Dr. Rotwang in Fritz Lang's silent film masterpiece, "Metropolis."

3 & 7.  Microsuites for Klavier Robotika
I'm not a particularly great keyboard player, but I've been a huge fan of solo piano works since the first time I heard Glenn Gould's recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations.  With a fairly decent grand piano emulator and a MIDI encoder, I'm now able to come reasonably close to the sound I hear in my head when I think of my own piano compositions, and the two "microsuites" on this album are a first step toward larger, more serious works I hope to accomplish in the future.  I like these a lot.

4.  Oort Cloud Sonata
This piece is all about Moog, using the amazing Arturia Moog Modular VST to produce spacey, harmonically rich timbres that evoke the bleak sonic landscapes of 1950's science fiction movies.  I love this piece!

5.  Morning Dew Makes Orb Weaver (Spider) Webs Conspicuous
Another repeating sequence piece, this one using four layered sequences of 7 and 11 steps progressing backward and forward.  As with #2, the combination of the individual sequences becomes more than the sum of the parts as polyrhthms and block chords appear and disappear at random.

6.  Phantasy 1 for Oscillatora Primitiva
This piece was an experiment in which I attempted to emulate the process (if not the sound) of early tape splice music.  A very simple home made oscillator was used to produce 12 distinct tones which I recorded into Traction and then segmented into pieces which were cut and pasted into the patterns of the composition.  Sonically, it's fairly simple and just under two minutes in length--but it took close to 12 hours to compose it.  I now have a new appreciation for the pioneers of this art!

8.  The Inscrutable Attractions of Antiparticles
For this piece, I used a simple 8-step repeating sequence and improvised a sound wash on top.  It's interesting to me how quickly the sequence becomes the rhythmic base for the piece and serves as a propulsive force to provide texture for the synth swells.

9.  Sometimes I Draw Robots: Brainiac
Brainiac was inspired by the sine wave compositions of Milton Babbitt and demonstrates the tremendous power of programmable, computer-driven synthesizers in creating non-traditional intervals and rhythms.

10.  I Want to Show You Something Amazing
This was meant to be part of the microsuites but didn't fit in well with the texture of those pieces, so I decided to make it a stand-alone composition instead.  I very much like the cautiously optimistic vibe of this piece mitigated by the tension produced by the 5/4 time signature.  This is another favorite of mine.

11. Sometimes I Draw Robots: Tik Tok
Another experiment using sine waves, this time passed through a ring modulator to give them a percussive sound.  It's probably the most "mechanical" sounding piece on the album, so I thought would be appropriate to give it the name of L. Frank Baum's mechanical man from the OZ books.

12.  Canals of Mars
My one concession to pop music on this album, Canals is also the first electronic piece on which I've used electric guitar (my lovely "birthday guitar" Fender Jazzmaster).  This is something of a teaser for things yet to come, so I hope you like this as much as I do...

Sometimes I Draw Robots will be available shortly in MP3 format from CD Baby, iTunes, Amazon.com and so on and in hard copy CD-R format directly from me.  I'll post a link to my CD Baby page as soon as it's available there.  If you're interested in a disc, send me an email and we'll work something out.  

As always, if you like what I'm doing, I would really appreciate it if you would spread the word and let others know--and tell me too.  I'm always happy to hear from folks who have discovered my music.  I'm tremendously proud of Sometimes I Draw Robots and I hope you'll like it too!

Until next time, eat your veggies, don't turn up the volume too loud and be sure to stop for pedestrians in the cross walk.

Be excellent to yourselves!

Rick

 

Items and Whatnottery

Item the First
OK, this was weird:   Mrs. Griffmakesmusic and I visited the Minnesota Renaissance Festival yesterday (Friday, October 1), and it was the first time we've attended on the now semi-traditional last weekend Friday, not knowing that the musical acts wouldn't be there (go figure that in oh-so-arts-friendly America musicians would have to have day jobs, huh?), and were freaked out by the stark oddness engendered by the lack of music on site.  Now, I'm one of the first folks to get in line with people who would like to see a whole lot more actual Renaissance music at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival and a fair amount less Potato Famine-era Irish music, and I have to admit that I was positively gobsmacked the day I witnessed one of the groups there performing Richard Thompson's "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" to a large crowd while I struggled to gather an audience of even two or three people to listen to me play the lute--but no music at all was just...disturbing.  I fully expected to see tumbleweeds rolling across the street to the accompaniment of a lone, spectral harmonica.  Weird.

Item the Second
Yep, the Twin Cities Lute Cooperative is coming back.  Don't know what shape or form it's gonna take, but we're going to make an effort to get some regular lute activity going--and promoted--in the Twin Cities again.  For what it's worth, we now have a Facebook presence (and who doesn't, right?), which you can access at: Twin Cities Lute Cooperative on Facebook.  Expect some news about concerts and other whatnottery (including a reprise of the Lute Summit show!) as soon as we get those duckies in a row. 

Item the Third
With the return of the TCLC will come the return of The Lute Cafe, which I plan to commence as part of the "First Fridays at the Madhatter" series starting in January.  Again, stay tuned and I'll drop the dime on the details as soon as they're available.   

Item the Fourth
The new electronic music CD, more than tentatively titled Sometimes I Draw Robots is almost done.  Just need to "put the eyebrows on" (as Frank Zappa would say), devise some case art and get it duplicated and I'll once again do my part to contribute to the sonic weirdness of the world.  Expect a release soon...

Item the Fifth
Robot Gas.  Say it with me now: Robot Gas!!!  Trust me, this will mean something to you soon...

And that's plenty for now.  Next time: more stuff.

Be excellent to yourselves!

Rick