Love Anthem (from 'Music for a Story-Telling')

Written in 1991 / Recorded in 1994

Basically, as far as the music concerns, my conceptual work titled Music for a Story-Telling is a collection of re-workings of my past compositions written in 1991; either works I wrote for a band that couldn’t exist long enough to perform it, and works for a students’ theatrical project that failed to feature the whole works I wrote for them at the actual performance. Basic ideas for this simple tune were all taken from the former’s acoustic section in the middle. For re-writing, I newly added the programmed percussion part in order to enhance exotic atmosphere that would fit in to the purpose of this piece within the conceptual work.

As viewers can clearly see in the video, this tune features exchanging of words between a couple of characters; a female character called Mikhi and a male character called Kelp. From the contents of their conversation, viewers could easily guess that the couple is chatting to each other soon after they made love. With a photo of forest placed in the beginning and closing of the video, it would not be difficult to guess that it must have taken place somewhere in the forest, both of them are possibly still naked and they must be whispering for most likely they are cuddling each other…

It would be also not difficult to make a stark contrast between male and female characters’ perceptions on having sex from words assigned to each of them. Mikhi tries to see things positively in various ways, largely due to her infatuation, whilst Kelp shows his indifference by repeating seemingly plausible but mostly meaningless words. Seemingly, her infatuation comes from excitement for looking forward to building a new personal relationship while he’s rather exhausted than seeing for the future because his purpose – to have sex with this particular girl – already belongs to his past. 

Just a Guitar Player

Written and Recorded in 1989

In late 1989, I launched to write a series of instrumental tunes mainly focused on displaying my guitar playing. In the beginning, there were ten ideas for prospective compositions and this tune, guitar soloing backed by the harmony of voices, was one of them. Despite the main purpose, to display my guitar playing, ironically I soon discovered that I was rather trapped to certain restrictions set by the initial ideas. For example, in this tune, while I was soloing, I could not enjoy playing guitar at my free will but had to stick to the rule over changing scales in accordance with the chord progression written by myself. In the meantime, while the voice parts gradually join into the ensemble, I had to bear with playing the written glissando section repeatedly in the middle. In summary, I recognise that these were caused by the progress I have made by that time, not only as a guitar player but also as a composer.

From the composer’s viewpoint, I am satisfied with the guitar part that met the requirements of the composition, overall. But from a guitar player’s viewpoint, I know I could play better if I could ignore these self-imposed restrictions and in that meaning, I regret a bit for having made this recording as a whole.

Whip Cream

Written in 1987 and 1989 / Recorded in 1989

Rough sketch of this tune was initially recorded sometime in 1987. I picked up the idea in a couple of years later and made a subtle change in the ascending chord progression for recording this. In the original scheme, this tune was provisionally called ‘something like Cream’ and there would be no point in annotating the inspiration for writing this tune. If a term ‘Absolute Music’ can be extended a bit, the title Whip Cream would fully explain the essence of this piece of music.

When the initial sketch recording was done, I was playing in a band called The Blues Association and I was quite eager for playing blues based stuff. Unfortunately, the band was led by another guitarist, who had little understanding of musical taste like this, so that I had to bear with playing some boring stuff he chose for us for a while. Though I could form a suitable band to play a tune like this in the following year, by that time I had have developed my interest beyond blues-based style – I was rather shifting for Jazz orientation – and again, an opportunity to play this tune didn’t happen for that band as well.

By the time I finally picked up this tune to be demo recorded, I have changed my direction from heading for Jazz to Progressive Rock once again and that made me play the guitar a bit uncomfortable here. Even though it would have been quite rougher, I reckon that I could have played the guitar part better in 1987, as far as playing in a manner suitable to this style of music concerns.