Our muse was sick. There was no denying that.
The first two CDs, "Noises From the Kitchen" and "Cover Your Ears" were labors of love, not skill. Thats what we told ourselves, and we had the evidence to back it up. But by the time we were arranging the tracks on "Good Enough for Government Work", we had to acknowledge that we'd rather be drinking beer and watching old Columbo episodes than trying to figure out how many beats needed to separate "Kissinger Hip-Hop & Rag" from "Battle for Tiny Town".
So, while continuing to produce more traditionally constructed songs, we also began the quest for a more spontaneous process to commit our form of sonic abuse.
What we sought was a process that embraced elements of chance, allowed for free chromatic improvisation and yet produced artifacts that held together well enough to allow a mu(sic)al aesthetic to emerge naturally, both within the piece and from the larger process over time. An application of Aesthetic Automatism to mu(sic).
Most of the early efforts lacked one or more of the necessary elements. For instance, the surprises might not be surprising enough to overcome the sense that they were just mistakes, or maybe they were too surprising to fit naturally with other elements. Because there are only two of us now, it's difficult to achieve any real-time improvisational interaction between all the parts in a piece. It was also difficult to come up with a viable "musical corpse" process which would allow for the desired isolation from parts we'd previously added.
But we have made some progress (sic), so we thought we'd share -- whether you're interested or not. This wouldn't impress real musicians, of course, but we're not, so we were.
Since we have no sense of rhythm and know no one who does, one break-thru came when we discovered "Jamstix", a virtual instrument -- an AI drummer -- that actually seems to improvise full drum parts based on algorithmic parameters (fully customizable) meant to mimic the characteristics of specific drummers (dozens of different drummers). Because this virtual drummer improvises the part in real time, with some awareness of what it's playing along with, it can bring vital dimension to a piece whether it's the formative context for subsequent tracks, added somewhere in the middle of the process, or even as the last element added.
"Jamstix" has also let us approach a viable musical corpse procedure, which we've just begun to explore, where the drum part and one or two other elements are added blindly, perhaps anchored by one element that we are aware of at the time of tracking.
We don't have a musical corpse available yet, but the following examples can be seen as transitional pieces leading toward that goal.
We hadn't been able to give Dale's lyric "The Doll" a voice until one afternoon when we were rummaging thru some unfinished improvisational pieces, found a lone bass track and decided to see if it fit. The drums were added somewhere in the middle of the process, after the vocal, then the guitars, then the keys.
We thought that worked out OK, so "Ice-T Loves Coco" also began with a (Dale) lyric added over a pre-existing free-form bass improv. Keys, then guitar were added, then the drum part was the last element.
"This Ignorant Life". Again a pre-existing bass track. Vocal and guitar tracked together. Added this one just so you don't think everything we'll have to offer here is going to be a slow droning drag.
Current Experiments in Mu(sic)
"Bonus" Extra:
Has nothing to do with the above, but we've never found a home for this (very) early piece that we considered kind of a breakthrough for a number of reasons (yeah, we know that's sad). So we figured we'd put it here. A cover of "Poison Ivy":