Tripecac - Back Up

Although this isn't as in-your-face powerful an opener as "Convenience", it still gets Back Up off to a rolling, finger-tapping start. It's upbeat, driving jazz/funk, and was my first experiment with swing quantization. I also tried to give the groove a more "human" feel by nudging the notes a little off the beat.

The title had at least two meanings. First, I wanted something peppy, something with more "drive" than the song I had most recently started ("Skins"). Secondly, I started this during a time when I felt like I should to get out of the house more. I was jumping up and down in my room for exercise and realized that I needed to move horizontally (not just vertically) in order to have hopes of ever meeting someone special. I needed to move my car at least once a month (to keep the battery charged). I may have been thinking about moving to a different apartment (with more space and/or light), although I doubt it. Also, I was "moving" the notes off of the beat as part of my experiment.

By this time I recorded this song, I was in the habit of giving myself a one-week deadline for finishing songs. I felt like this muddy, moody groove song wasn't going anywhere, so I abruptly stopped working on it. The drums disappear and the ending devolves into a whining keyboard-guitar, clav, and bass ramble.

Initially this song was named "Crisper" (the same as the song on Convenience). It had no insert effects and very light master effects. I liked the "crisp" sound at the start of the song, but wanted more ambience during the solo sections.

As as experiment, I tried using SYSX dumps to make on-the-fly changes to some of the tracks' insert effects (listen to the sax and organ). This technique worked, but it wasn't very exciting. Also, I was worried that if I got in the habit of changing effects mid-song, then I'd just have more engineering to deal with, and less time for composing, improvising, and arranging. I therefore abandoned the idea, prefering to keep the insert effects static on subsequent songs.

The title was inspired by a party in Vancouver in which I drank wayyyy too much and ended up carrying around a puke bucket most of the next day. Thanks to that night, I'm now a lightweight!

This is kind of like "Convenience" Part 2. The lyrics were inspired by recent conversations. They start off from the perspective of a girl, then switch to a guy, then "degenerate" into improvised rapping, chanting, and whining. I don't remember the point of the lyrics, if there ever was one.

The title refers to my obsession with work space ergonomics. I never seemed to feel satisfied about how my apartment was organized. I spent many weekends reorganizing my rooms to be more social, then more convenient, then more open, then more convenient again. Maybe the restlessness was caused by general dissasfaction with being so isolated; I don't know.

I was also perhaps interested in social "ergonomics". I wanted to find someone who "fit me", someone who was comfortable, someone who would inspire me, help me work and live efficiently and happily.

I performed most of this long, mellow "jam" on my Dad's 55th birthday. I polished it up a few months later. I don't remember why I gave it a "world-beat" instrumentation. Maybe Dad had recently come back from travelling somewhere exotic?

For me, melody represents extroversion. When I write a melody, whether it has vocals or not, I feel like I am composing a "story", a "plot". It must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It must make sense, not just to me but to others. When I play a melody, I feel like I'm "talking" or "singing" to an audience, even if I'm just using notes. Melody is always aimed at the audience.

Rhythm and improvisation, on the other hand, always feel introverted. When I bang away on a groove or a long solo, my head is often down, and my eyes are closed,. I'm trying to immerse myself in the music. I'm not trying to say something. I forget about the audience, forget about communicating. All I'm doing is playing, having fun. I'm selfishly indulging in the emotions of the music.

This song is a mellow jam which starts out trying to be melodic, but then "retreats" into wild drum solos; it starts off extroverted, but then ends up turning inward.

The title is a play on "regret" and "retreat". I probably tried to do something extroverted that day, but then changed my mind and withdrew. Maybe I got invited to a party or something, but turned down the invitation. Or maybe I saw a girl I liked and prepared myself to say hi, but then chickened out, scurrying back to my hermit's hut of routine and "safe" isolation.

This starts off as a "dirge" but then gradually turns funky. It's intended to show how drastically a mood can change over the course of half an hour.

I recorded the "dirge" part on Independence Day, and then added the funky/manic ending a few months later. The lyrics were an aimless, adlibbed parody, loosely following the narration started in "Day Job".

This was an experiment to see how hard it is to add MIDI instruments to an audio track. It started off as a slightly overlapping series of guitar/Pod Pro tests; none of them used a metronome. When I added the MIDI drums later, I had to really struggle to play in time. I tried to edit the drums to be in time with the guitar, but found the process so tedious that I decided not to add any more instruments. The end result is pretty awful. Fortunately, it doesn't seem very long, at least to me.

I tried this experiment again on Disco Hike, with much greater success.

This song's title is a combination of "audio" and "idea". I was trying to see if I could inch closer towards post-punk by using the guitar. It ended up sounding more like heavy metal meets jam-band music than post-punk. The mix isn't very cohesive; the drums and guitar barely feel like they are part of the same song. When I finished them, this song and "Quickie" were down there with "My Old School" as my least favorite songs since 2000.

I loved messing around with the guitar, but I also realized that almost every time I had used guitar in a song, the song ended up being so unpleasant to hear that it "tainted" an otherwise listenable album. I decided to stop trying to combine my hastily recorded, hard-to-edit, effect-drowned guitar fumblings with my more polished, jazz-based keyboard grooves, because it just wasn't working.

Perhaps I should have abandoned the guitar at that point and focused on perfecting the keyboard-only songs. Perhaps I should have tried to sit down with the guitar and actually learn some chords and scales, so I could play it more effectively. Perhaps I should have taken the time to compose a Tripecac song that could comfortably feature some simple, carefully-played guitar parts. Perhaps I should have... but I didn't.

In fact, I did the exact opposite of what I "should have" done. A week after I finished this song, I recorded The Key of G, a guitar-and-vocal improvisation, with no keyboards, no editing, no planning, no second takes... all in one day. The Key of G, created in (perverse) reaction to the failure of "Audia", got me much closer to "post-punk" than any of my previous, more calculated efforts.

This instrumental version of "Ergonomics" predated the vocal version by four days. When I was ready to record the vocal version, I also remixed it and edited the instrumental verison slightly. I think the main change was giving it fancier snare drums at the end.

I think I prefer this instrumental version of "Half Hour" to the vocal one. Aside from omitting the vocals, I also shortened it and smoothed out the ending.