Written in 1988 and 1990 / Recorded in 1988, 1990, and 2013
Initially, this tune was written and recorded in the late 1988 and you can hear a shortend edition of the original demo after 4:37 on this video. I could not satisfy with this recording so that, about a year and a half later, I decided to re-record the same tune with a new arrangement and a newly written intro.
I tried to re-organise the whole structure of the tune for making this video, but I still can not satisfy with the result. Some keyboard parts are newly added in 2013 for this video version.
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 it at its
actual performance. This tune consists of a couple of re-workings from the
latter occasion. The main body of this composition – the piano piece – was
originally written as a theme for one of characters of the theatrical
performance. It was literally written on a piece of music sheet but its demo
recording didn’t go well partly for my poor skill on playing the keyboard and
partly for mechanical problems of the recording equipment. In this re-working,
I simply converted the written sheet music into a digital programme run by a
sequencer. As for the noise section in the middle, four layers of synthesizer
parts were taken from the original demo I made for the students’ stuff. The
demo was also used in the actual performance accompanied with an actor’s noise
guitar and performance of the brain-washing execution. In this re-working, I
just replaced the noise guitar part with the one newly played by myself.
In the story of the conceptual work, this tune has a role to introduce
Dr. Tarci to the viewers. Through the Doctor’s monologue, viewers are expected
to grasp what has been going on so far. He will also set the framework for the
story line for the next part, regarding to the treatment of Kelp, the main
character.
Overall arrangement and the basic idea for writing a thing for the guitar and percussion obviously inspired by Marc Bolan’s Tyrannosaurus Rex. I was deeply into their music when I wrote this sometime in late 1988 and was also absorbed in analysing random musical works from a wide range of my favourites. Other sources of inspiration I would like to mention are some acoustic works by Jimmy Page and Robert Fripp, for The Yardbird in their later years and for King Crimson in their relatively early years, respectively.
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 it at its
actual performance. This tune consists of a well-balanced mixture of
re-arranged bits from the both occasions. The intro and verse section for Wella
are both taken from the former, whilst verse section for the Judge and closing
section are from the later. Since I took the arpeggio part by the acoustic
guitar an important element of this tune, I newly wrote a line for the bass
guitar to take a solo in the middle.
As for the function of this tune in the story, this one is assigned to
depict the scene of a criminal trial. Viewers are expected to sympathise for
Wella, the defendant, for being tried unfairly to be found guilty of nothing.
According to the sentence delivered by the Judge, he is now facing to be brain
washed as the punishment for found guilty of, in defendant’s words, ‘having
been realized that he had been deprived of his own freedom.’ Though both Wella
and the Judge are minor characters in the entire story, the author intended to
present a stark contrast between the regime and general interests of its
citizens through this dialogue, which is set in relatively early stage of the
conceptual work for establishing the framework of the story.
When I first started multi-track recording of my original stuff, I didn’t have a synthesiser but a mini keyboard, which had five or six built-in tones. One day during the autumn of 1988, I thought it would be interesting to write a piece of music that could accommodate all of these built-in tones by using my four-track recorder. I didn’t have any motif to be built upon but began the project with programming the rhythm machine from the scratch. Since all I wanted to do was making something odd, I deliberately chose 7/4 time signature at the very beginning of this programming stage.
As for the keyboard parts, I basically wrote each part layer by layer. To prevent things going too far, the chord progression was set to a repetition of only two chords. At the end, for furnishing the atmosphere of the tune, I added my voice being manually modified by the digital delay pedal.
Unlike my usual stuff, I recognised that the resulted work sounds less human nor organic due to the fact that it consists of the tones pronounced by machines and a human voice modified by a digital device. When it came to thinking about how to call this tune, I must have referred to the words I heard at the end of The Spark of Life, an instrumental tune featured on the album Todd by Todd Rundgren, saying ‘No no no no, a little more humanity please.’
Ideas for exploring the possibility of mere 12-bar blues I always had in my mind, ever since I have heard some of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers’ works in the Psychedelic era. I simply thought it would be intriguing to play utterly different kind of music in the form of 12-bar blues, as Mayall pursued Psychedelic / Indian elements in Fly Tomorrow, for instance. When I first discussed this idea to my bass player in the band at that time, he seemingly nodded to the idea but was obviously unwilling to convert the essence of the genre with leaving only its framework. Three years later, I finally tried out the idea in a bit eccentric way; Christmassy music in the framework of 12-bar blues, and here is the result of it.
For making this demo recording, I thought it would be interesting to include a famous Christmas song in the middle to avoid monotony and picked up Jingle Bells by James Lord Pierpont. By switching the tone of synthesizer from Christmassy bells like one to organ, I wanted to pay my tribute to a fantastic cover version of the tune from Booker T. & The MG’s.
