The Brainwasher (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 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.