Semester in Vibrations

This semester was the beginning of the writing and recording process of my next full length our brother the native album. My hopes and goals for this record were initially to create my own take on western popular music, incorporating this sort of mainstream thinking as an obstacle and challenge to expand the breadth and feel of my work. Placing these contrictions on myself in hopes of being able to grow and be put in a situation that is a little more difficult than just making another eclectic record for the same kind of subculture audience. For as an artist, I need to grow an order to continue to feel excited about my own work and to make work that is not stale or a reproduction of my last work. so these first 7 songs I started of the semester have been exploratiions in trying to create dense, texturally exciting tracks that are still experimenting with sound and music, but are still somewhat digestable to the listener that may not have much knowledge of other music besides what they hear on the radio. With starting in a new direction of trying to create detailed organic sounding music with at its core pop sensibilities, I also began recording in a whole new way. I felt a lot of the ways I was comfortable with in creating music needed to be reevaluated if I was going to be successful in creating a new record that is a positive and progressive evolved piece of work; i.e a step forward from my previous album. I began each song writing on the guitar, I would then take all the rhythms from the loops of guitar and orchestrate the accompaniment and percussion. Working only on sections at a time, building each part up to its absolute breaking point of layers of sound, and once full sounding, I would then hi-light certain aspects of the whole that when soloed take on their own personality and creat the possibility for the next part or transition. It is this disection of the whole part and soloing of details of layers that maybe getting lost in the end when the entire mix is playing for me has been a positive way I have found in working on these songs. I start to make sure each layer is very very strong on its own just in case I were to have the measure break down into just a few of the layers, so each part I try to make sure they have some subtle nuances that are interesting enough to be heard just by themselves if need be. This forumla for developing new parts from a prexisting structure has helped me to streamline the writing process of the songs. Which by making the physical building of the songs much easier, it has allowed me to spend more time on the creative process of blending in world music samples and eastern instrumentation with western R&B and soul flavors. This has been the most important aspect in the creating process, that is finding two disparate sound sources or cultural music genres and finding this new context for them to oome together to harmonize in a way they never would have thought possible because of time or distance. It is this beauty of this recording space that allows all pre existing styles of music to be molded together in a way that elevates and appreciates the tone and source of the sounds in a pure way, making sure that the collaging of cultures is not constrewn as disrespectful, for it is my way of showing my admiration for the honest and organic nature I find within the samples I select. This been a very productive learning process and early incubation period for this first batch of tracks, I look forward to taking what I have learned and the feedback I have been given and applying it the next group of songs I start recording in the new year.