Tripecac - What Roses

Meaning 1: This song represents the start of a journey. We're ready to go, and just need to fill the tank with gas.

Meaning 2: I wanted to start this album with some instrumental "filler" in order to take pressure off the songwriting. At the same time, I wanted to "up" the level of detail (and perhaps energy) relative to the last few albums.

Meaning 3: This song is very up-tempo, with lots of fast percussion. I was also experimenting with different types of drum fills.

Meaning 4: I need to fill this album with songs quickly if I'm going to finish it by the end of the year. For that, I think I'm needing some really long songs. Too bad this isn't one.

Sorry about the bass; it's incredibly boomy! Wayyyyy too overpowering.

Yep, I'm playing organ again. Ha ha ha. Actually, this song does have lots of organ parts.

I'm also trying to make the music more "organic". For example, this time I wanted the arrangement to meander, to explore different ideas without necessarily returning to previous themes. I also wanted to try fiddling with some of the Triton's expressive controls, which is something I don't do very often.

The mood is kinda quiet. However, G wanted something dancy so I added a solid beat. It ended up sounding like a weird (and mostly boring) mix of new age and trance.

Wow, that bass is loud! Where's the treble???

When I first picked the title, I had recently re-watched The Shining; hence the "redrum" reference. Meanwhile, in the news, the "Foxy Knoxy" drama was developing. For the first time in years, I started reading the news every day to see the latest developments. "Red rumor" refers to people being drawn to macabre news stories.

G didn't think the last song was dancy enough, so I made this one really dancy! Or at least I tried. It's really repetitive, though. Oh well. Oh well. Oh well.

This time, for a "new" element, I added samples from a 1983 recording ("Live Wire") in which I made up silly news stories. All people and places are complete gibberish, so don't take any of it seriously.

Now it's time for a drastic change of pace. I wanted to make a song that's really long and rhythmic. The title is also a pun on "logarithm".

The challenge was coming up with a groove that made you want to hear more, despite the song's length. It needed to be non-fatiguing, the opposite of "busy", so I made it very slow, sparse, and melodic.

The theme of sparseness was reinforced by a documentary about Stanley Kubrick. I also added faint martial drumming and humming, which kinda references a Ken Burns documentary about World War 2. The hints of Asian "spices" were inspired by some recent cooking experiments.

For something new, I recorded some acoustic percussion at the end. It's a little shaker that someone gave me up in the Canadian Rockies back in 2001. I think this is the first time I've used live percussion since South or Southeast (1999).

Now that it's [almost] winter, the mornings have been dark when G goes to work. On top of that, her car is usually coated infrost. Her quick fix is to pour hot water on the windows and mirrors. This is a lot faster and easier than scraping, and so far has worked very well.

I wanted the song to sound dark and cold. The "timpani" in the beginning sound a bit like bells.

I made a rule for myself: the bass cannot play on beat 1. This represents the cyclical delay of having to defrost the car every morning before driving. The rule holds steady until the very end, which has the bass on beat 1. You can pretend that this symbolizes the end of the frosty season, and the beginning of spring.

The title is short for Zarafa, which is a brand of South African wine that we recently discovered. We liked it so much that we decided to be more adventurous in our wine purchases, trying a different brand each week.

The rule was to try something new for each track. As far as I know, I've never used any of these instruments before.

The end result? Uhh... Well, there's a reason I don't use these sounds!

Standing up is supposed to help singers inject feeling and energy into their performance. I decided to give it a shot to see if it had an effect on my playing.

So, the rule for this song was that I had to stand up the whole time. Yep. I couldn't sit down while working on the song.

This turned out to be a very painful rule, one which I don't intend to repeat. Every day I worked on it, I ended up with an incredibly sore back. Ouch!

The resulting music is energetic, but somewhat shallow. I recording and edited everything very quickly (due to the painful crouching). I'm not sure if I like the end result.

Around here, it gets very windy in January, which is when I started this. Happy New Year, by the way. The title and some of the lyrics are also a reference to the Trex album Januweary.

I secretly borrowed G's brand new violin for this. I wanted to see how it sounded with a reverb effect applied to it. This was the first time I recorded myself on violin, which I don't know how to play. I mixed it so low that you can barely hear it. You're welcome.

My favorite part is the chanting near the end, which is kinda catchy. The rest of the song is so-so. I tried to make it modal but didn't stick to a single mode consistently. Then I got bogged down in editing the violin, which was pretty hopeless. Oh well. At least we got the violin experiment over with! :)

I'd been listening to lots of krautrock and japrock. Julian Cope pointed out in his book Japrocksampler that a lot of those bands would repeat English words based on their sounds rather than meaning. I decided to give that a shot.

The song starts and ends with rhythmic chanting. The middle part has the usual Tripecac instrumentation and vibe, but I tried to keep things sparse and trancy. I don't know if it worked.

The title is a butchering of "uninspired". Most of the lyrics are simiarly chopped up almost to the point of being unrecognizable.

Okay, so that last song ("Unspired") wasn't nearly as krautrockish as I intended. Which makes me wonder: can I even do krautrock? Part of me doubts, and that's where you get the title for this song.

My goal was to make this as non-jazzy as possible. I wanted it choppy and slightly robotic. However, I didn't want a Kraftwerky feel; I wanted a more organic Can feel. So I added several guitar parts, some of them just percussive banging on strings.

So does this one feel more krautrockish than the last song? I don't know. It certainly feels less jazzy and more trancy. To my (tired) ears at least.

The rule for this one is very simple: I can only use one instrument. So, I chose a [fake] acoustic guitar sound, and layered a few tracks together. I suppose a really talented guitarist could play this, but not me!

The song had to be short, since there was room for only about 3 more minutes on the CD.