Just received the very rough mixes of three songs that we've done as demos to potentially drum up label interest. We'd like to not have to self finance the album this time, see it get a wider distribution and hopefully more attention from people who might like it.
My response is mixed. On the one hand we've got three very strong songs recorded. On the other, being able to hear them from the outside has made a couple of us realise how much more work we want to do on structural fine tuning and rewriting them.
I can't help but feel that we're at a crossroads at the moment.
Two of the completed songs have very tight structures already that lend themselves to be played the same way each time, in a way that not many of the songs on the first album really had. We used to have more of a loose cues approach, some sections that could last as long as we felt was right on the night. An increased amount of detail, more melody and a greater desire to break out of old ways of playing and working has meant that we've gone more in the direction of having actual definite songs... at least so far.
I can't help but feel that this is working against the resources we have available right now, though. Right now I see our resources as being our willingness to try fresh ideas, to rewrite what we see the band as being about, to try to sound like something unlike anything else we've heard, and having a much greater range of sound options to draw from.
Our main limitations are time, money and the logistics of one of us living in Bristol, another in London and the rhythm section being in Hampshire. Plus the irregular lifestyle that I lead with work means that not all weekends are free to rehearse.
Writing with a great attention to structural detail is great and I'm very pleased with the results we've got so far, even if they need further work. However it's very time intensive, which is the major resource that we just don't have at the moment. A greater complexity and depth of arrangement is a fine thing and I want all of our new songs to have it, I'm just not sure we're going the right way about getting it.
I'm increasingly thinking that we'd get equally fulfilling results if we started to play games more, set up rules and parameters for songs rather than explicit structures. It's a logical progression from some of the patterns we fell into on the first album, with us listening out for prearranged cues, only a lot more intensive than that. Whole pieces could be structured like games or systems, with strategies rather than linear planning. That's a lot of what I see in the demos so far, they have hints of amazing structure but the points that require work are a little like watching blocks of four move across a Cubase screen, and it requires a great deal of finesse to get away from that blocky feeling.
With game playing you get away from that blocky sense. There are no formal number of repeats, just what feels right. There are no definite linear passages, instead you get four instruments playing off each other in more of a free dimensional space with without strictly metred timings. Structural moments happen by accident rather than design and the capacity for re listens is higher because even in a recorded version the forms are that much harder to predict. It plays to another of our strengths, the sense of barely organised chaos that I'm starting to regret us slowing moving away from.
If all this is starting to sound alarmingly art wank then I guess it depends which games you choose to play, which parameters you seek to set. It's a means of generating surprise and complexity from comparatively simple rules, it makes it free from the tendency to jam wank by forcing you to play in a non-idiomatic manner and use your imagination, but it can still be played with a lot of energy and groove. When I talk about this kind of thing the loss of visceral impact and dance-ability is the last thing I want to lose.
Not that anyone dances at our gigs anyway. Well, rarely. But the point is that we'd like people to dance.
With this different approach we'd essentially be choosing the path of least resistance, in that it plays to the resources and works around the limitations that I've listed above. Yes, it takes time to learn to play in this manner, but I don't think nearly as much time as it does to come up with complete songs as we've been doing up to now.
So... again, it's slow going. Frustratingly slow. We're playing at the edge of what we can achieve and pushing ourselves, and it means that our egos are sometimes getting rubbed the wrong way and we spend ages chasing down dead ends. It's hard to be in a band, especially hard if you really care about it, are hugely opinionated, bloody reactionary, stubborn and have extremely high standards. We've made decisions not to repeat ourselves and not to fall back on laziness, it's really showing in the quality, but that quality is only a hint of what we can achieve if we push ourselves just that bit more.
Of course, it's all going to be trickier now the Transit is written off. RIP Nirvash. Does anyone have a Transit or Transporter they can lend us? |
