“It had that perfect commercial combination: startling originality and easy classification.” — Sarah Bakewell, referring to the first published version of Montaigne’s Essays in her book How To Live, or, A Life of Montaigne.
I’ve been thinking a lot about style and arrangement lately.
There is no one who, if he listens to himself, does not discover in himself a pattern all his own, a ruling pattern, which struggles against education.
– Michel de Montaigne, quoted in How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell (translation: Donald Frame)
Oli Arditi — one of my favorite music writers — chose Astral Law as one of his 12 albums of the year. Here’s what he had to say:
This is an album of experimental guitar sounds, often constructed around Beaudreau’s instrumental skills, but equally likely to foreground aleatory elements such as the sounds of accidental contact with the strings or body of the instrument, or environmental sounds such as passing traffic.
For a few years prior to putting out Java St Bagatelles in 2006, every time I ran into my friend Ryan Goodman he would ask me how the album was coming. It was coming slow. As I’ve said elsewhere, I wasn’t even necessarily planning to make an album until, probably, 2005 — I was just practicing.
Led Zeppelin IV was released on November 8, 1971 — 40 years ago today. How much do I love Led Zeppelin IV? Well, I referenced its cover in the design of my three albums.
And, of course, the working title of the album I’m currently writing is IV.
Yikes — another month! I worked all September on “Hermes,” which is finally done. Uh, done-ish. I should say that the demo for “Hermes” is mostly done. It’ll need to be mixed, but I think all the sounds are there — certainly the bones are in place.
Last time I mentioned that I was going through my collection of “ideas,” looking for the start of the next piece for my fourth album. I have a nice stockpile of them at this point, and was homing in on a few, but instead I started working with a little riff that came up one morning when I was warming up.
I know, I’ve been scarce around here lately. Here’s why.
There’s been a lot of exciting stuff to do at Masterdisk recently, and I’ve been spending more time doing it — full-time, basically. Then there are freelance projects that need wrapping up, and regular music work in the mornings (without spectacular consistency, unfortunately).
In my series of posts about recording (from a musician’s perspective) I’ve covered old-school “live in a room” recording, the convention of recording musicians separately, and one-man-band recordings. I’d like to add to that list something new: the remote recording session.
I was tickled to find this morning that my friend Jim Hanas chose to upgrade a quip of mine to a coinage on Google+. (Need an invite? Send me an email: james AT workbenchrecordings DOT com.) I’m sure the artists in the audience will relate to what Jim’s talking about here.
