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These songs were created during sessions of the Immersion Composition Society; this...thing that I conceived in the Spring of 2001, and co-founded with my dear pal Michael Mellender. I wrote a book about it, with Karl Coryat, which is available in most book stores. Here's a fairly excellent article on the subject. The ICS Myspace page is very informative. (top friends below).
~About The Songs~
• "Black Ship and Fragment": In the Society, there is a game called "Hat Lib" (not in the book yet) that we use to create a plot for a musical (or concept album, or film score, etc..) that we will then write and record in one day. The plot is generated randomly with a hat game. This game can be used to generate any kind of story, but Michael Mellender and I like to use it to create fantasy film scores. For some reason. "The Black Ship" was created in response to a scrap of paper pulled out of a hat, on which the following words were scribbled: "A ship the size of a planet with black sails". The second section of the song is from something different.
• "Simalcrum and Dayballad": Dayballad was created in one lazy ICS day where I couldn't be bothered to make even one full song. I got up in the middle of the section and made someone else make the bridge of the song.
• "Cryptic Works": "Cryptic Works" is an ever-expanding daisy chain of tiny ICS songs and vignettes from over the years. The overdubbed orchestra section is made up of Michael (horns) and Carla (violins) and myself (stuff).
• "A Pop Song": Originally made on an ICS day pretty far back there, and then eaten by the digital 8 track I was using, and then the wheel flew off my bike on the way to the meeting, and then I cried a lot. So I recorded the song again the next day, and mixed it over about a week. It was recorded during my infamous *Before Click Tracks* period.
• "Nebulae and Arabesque": The first section came from my half of a "Composer Tennis" game with Steven Clark. He gave me a random sequence of numbers that spitted out of his printer, and I did musical things with the numbers.
• "A Perfectly Strange Old ICS Pop Song": This one is from the "Bad Old Days", the first couple years of the Society. It was all recorded with a looper pedal.
• "The Ugly Spirit": In "The Opus Game", the object is to write one grandiose epic in one day. The title comes from a William S. Burroughs quote: "America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting". I feel differently about that statement every day, but when I was writing this song, I imagined hovering over a dark prairie at night, passing over the little flickering dots of camp fires. And then I imagined a time lapse of industrial progress. Etc...
• "The Night Forest": One of those ancient, hissy ICS songs from my vault that I'm always arguing with myself about - whether or not to show it to people. But this is a favorite of mine. From the 2nd year of the Society. Yes, that is correct, I am not good at cello.
• "An Utterly Insane Old Noise-R&B ICS Song": The Bad Old Days, continued. I am completely amazed I am showing this to you. It started out with me trying to write a funk R&B kind of thing, and I imagined gospel singers in robes singing backup. That's what that "Waaaaaaaaah" sound is. How that start-idea ended up as this wad of burning noise is a mystery to me.
• "TrackSwap w/ Reinier: Time-Lapse Version": This is from an international track-swap I did with Reinier Loopik, lodge-head of Clutter Lodge, Holland. This one was started by me, emailed across the Atlantic, and then overlayed with compelling bleeping insanity and spooky choirs by Reinier. This is a special time-lapse edit. The first four bars, and a couple of the heavy breaks are from the "Before" version I gave him, and then rest is from Reinier's completed version.
