Tripecac - Whatcom Home

I was tired of the sparse, crisp, and bluesy feel of the previous album(s), and wanted to start the new one with something dark, bleak, blurry, dense, European, and krautrocky. I also wanted a more "live" sound. So I cranked up the reverb and delay and started thumping out some repetitive, dramatic, trancy stuff.

The result is this song, which doesn't really fit with my original idea for the album (a band playing at a mental hospital). However, I really enjoyed immersing myself in the thick, murky texture, so I didn't try to make this song fit the theme any better. In fact, I decided to change the theme to fit the song; to what, I didn't know, but I could defer that until later.

Anyway, the title is a pun on "sin" and "intro". It's supposed to give you a feeling of foreboding. The idea is that the main character is committing a sin (antisocial act) before getting admitted to the mental hospital.

Okay, well, it's a thin premise, but the template is thick. And that's what matters to me right now. :)

So we're being admitted to the mental hospital for being bad. That's the joke in the title.

I was away from music (on vacation) for a couple weeks before I started this, so I felt a bit rusty. The musical ideas are tentative, a little nervous, which I guess fits the original theme of the album. The music kinda represents a semi-sane person knowing he's being institutionalized, and roughly the reason why, but not quite able to think coherently enough to get out of it. The ending of the song depicts his inevitable surrender into despair.

In a way, Tripecac has been heading down the same path. Sometimes I feel my music has become "sick" in that it has ceased to say anything insightful. Instead, it mutters to itself little snippets of rhymes, or sometimes long rambly improvs, always repetitive and blank-eyed.

Is anyone in there, Tripecac? Anyone home???

Boxed in, box din. I wanted something more aggressive, to represent the frustration of being trapped.

The music ended up sounding pretty typical, though. I guess we can say Tripecac is trapped in its own musical box? And I just cannot think outside of it, eh? Oh well.

I was supremely bored with this song, so I "broke" it at the end by adding strange muttering and alarm sounds. This was supposed to express the paranoia and panic leaping out of a corner.

So now we know for sure that we're trapped in the mental hospital. We've accepted that we are officially abnormal; no more pretending to conform to other people's expectations. Now it's time to let loose and act like an aminal!

I forced a wildly different sound by drastically tweaking the effects template. This allowed me to create music that sounds both hectic and trippy (no pun intended). Musically, I tried to portray a torrent of hallucinations, a cascade of pills. Our head is spinning and we're whirling around in profound confusion.

The title is derived from "electroshock", but also refers to the feeling of being "shackled" by electronic music composition.

For the past few months, I've been finding Trex (which is recorded live) to be more relaxing and, well, more fun than Tripecac (which is computer-based). I think I'm getting tired of grids and want a more jamming feel, even if it means more blisters (and sloppier production).

Maybe the upcoming Sonar 7 (announced the day I started this) will help me shake off the feeling of being shackled. Maybe color changes and template changes will stir some enthusiasm back into my synapses. Or maybe not.

Maybe Trex will become more and more fun, and Tripecac more tedious, until I find myself abandoning the latter for months at the time... like I did in the South or Southeast era. We'll see...

Anyway, back to the story.

So, our hero is lying there on a hospital bed, being strapped down in preparation for electroshock. This song is supposed to represent his reaction. At the very end we get buzzed repeatedly, and our consciousness shrinks away.

I saw a "No-wave" documentary the night before. This inspired me to make really loud, distorted, abrasive music. It's a bit over the top, I know. But so was the stuff on the documentary. So there ya go.

Also, as a complete coincidence, some college student at a political speech got hauled off by police and then tasered while (allegedly) wearing handcuffs. I read about it the morning after I started the song.

Bzzzt!

If you shun your medication, things start to get weird. At least, that's the premise behind this song. It's another weird, effects-laden trancy thing.

This was the first song I started using Sonar 7. I didn't really do anything differently from before. I did, however, get frustrated several times at the new version's sluggishness and weird interface.

I thought about using the new step sequencer, but found it too confining and confusing. That feature looked cool in the demo videos, though. Hmmm. Maybe I am inept at learning new things, or maybe I am just afraid of change? Dunno.

Would I be similarly resistant to [prescribed] psychoactive drugs? Dunno that either.

On the previous song, I noticed that Sonar 7 was acting sluggish. I noticed the same problem on this one. So that explains the title: slow + Sonar = slonar.

Anyway, in terms of our story, well, I guess you can pretend that the medication and electroshock made our hero's brain a little sluggish too. Ummm... Yeah. I guess that's it. Yep.

I tried to make the music more "live" sounding than the previous songs. It ended up being a semi-muddy jazzy jam thing. I liked bits of it, like the fact that it actually had a verse and a chorus, but my work on it felt kinda jittery and rushed, due to the technological glitches I was experiencing.

What's worse than being thankless? Being thankleast! :)

Okay, I know, that's a groaner. But so is the patient who is chronically unappreciative of the efforts of the doctors and nurses and other people around him. Groan, groan, groan, that's all he does. So stop your groaning.

The music is very simple, very straightforward. I was sick when I started it and had zero energy or enthusiasm. I was also wary of Sonar 7's glitches which had stifled my creative ambitions on the last two songs fun. Consequently, I played it very, very safe. So if the tracks ends up sounding "vanilla", please direct your groans at Sonar 7 and my overburdened immune system.

Well, back to the story...

If only the inmates could be vanilla; then they wouldn't need to be in there. Oops, did I say inmates? I meant patients. Sorry, I've got a cold. Please have patience with me!

Get it?

Groan.

I had a soar throat, and started chanting a silly rhyme about it. I decided on a whim to build a Tripecac song around it. (It's not like the current album had a lot of integrity to protect or anything).

So I started by recording that vocal, and then layered the instruments on top. It's light reggae, kinda predictable, and a little out of key in the vocals at times. Overall, it's pretty "dupid" if you ask me!

Anyway, so who's Soarth? Well, let's just pretend he's a psychologist who's examining our patient. And he's writing stuff down. Is that good enough for you?

Over the years, people have repeatedly tried to get me to relax. "Come on, Travis, relax!"

Well, sorry, folks; I cannot relax at will, just like I cannot sleep at will. I can only relax when I have no stressors, no tasks that need to be done, no worries about the future.

So when does that actually happen? Uhhh.... Well, if people keep bugging me about relaxing it will certainly never happen. Never, I say... Never!

Anyway, this song features guitar. I recorded it in a couple minutes when testing new audio drivers. Ditto for the vocals. I wasn't actually planning on using those clips in a song, but I liked the improvised chord progressions and decided to see if I could build a song around that. I did, and it was fun! The last part of the song is even kinda catchy.

Okay, now I have to go shower, brush my teeth, answer forum questions, research hard drives, reading a computer magazine for work, try to finish a chapter of the recent PIL book, etc.

I'll relax when I sleep. Hooray for multitasking!

My grandfather passed away the weekend right before I started this. My dad asked me to write a mini-eulogy to be read at the funeral. I didn't want to make it gloomy or predictable, so I made it light and poetic, heartfelt but almost funny. It starts with the words "squeak squeak". Can you imagine someone reading that at a funeral? It makes me chuckle just thinking about it. Good thing Grampie had a sense of humor. :)

Anyway, I wanted to make the music solemn. It ended up trancy. Close enough.

As for the story, well, let's just say a patient's pet cricket dies and he decided to have a funeral for it. The other patients shuffle in to join him as he starts to eulogize his lost pet. Then one of the patients starts making chirping noises. Another patient joins in, and then another starts oinking like a pig. Soon all the patients are barking, meowing, hooting, neighing, mooing, screeching... They have lots of fun.

To our hero, life has been feeling very surreal. He comes to a realization that his confusion might never go away, that he'll be stuck in a half-dream world forever.

The music starts off with bells, which are tolling for our protagonist's sanity. There's a frantic undercurrent (the percussion) that represents barely supressed panic.

Our guy tries to calm himself, to clear his head of the confusion. For a while, the music simplifies, quiets down, mellows out... He can hear and focus on individual people talking to him (the solos). The clarity is soothing, relaxing...

But it cannot be sustained. As soon as people stop talking, things get a little too quiet. The guy starts to get self-conscious, and then suddenly...

Bang! Panic crashes back in. A hoard of voices erupt in his head. His world is full of tension, confusion... It's building, building, building, until finally everything crescendoes, collapsing upward into a single piercing chord.

Then there is silence.

No more panic, no more thought. He's unconscious. What will happen when he wakes?

Isolation. That's what the patient experiences when he wakes. It's also what many of us feel (at sometime or other) when we realize that we've been cooped up for days with only the pseudo-reality of the Internet for stimulus.

Who are we, anyway? Email addresses? URLs? Avatars?

Does it matter if the patient gets evaluated positively, that he gets discharged? Will he ever find the reality that he dimly remembers from his childhood, the fresh, unquantized "life" that he read about in books? Or will there never be a complete return of sensory and cognitive clarity? Is his mind permanetly scarred with bad sectors?

As for the music, well, it's a bit of a mess. Too many vocal tracks, too few instruments. Yuck. I really don't like the mix.

This is a very loose interpretation of "Ha Ha I'm Drowning" by The Teardrop Explodes. I recorded it for the third Julian Cope tribute album (Triple Vegetation).

By "loose" I mean Tripecac-ish. Repetitive, groove-based, with lots of improvisation. And lots of percussion. And geeky, self-referential gabbing.

Most of the guitar and vocals were recorded first take, with very little planning. I probably spent no more than half an hour recording them. It then took me several hours (spanning multiple days) to arrange and mix them together with the rest of the song.

To make it tie in with the theme of Whatcom Home, I gave it a slightly dark, unbalanced vibe. I don't know if it works or not, but what's done is done, and I'm glad this is finally done!