In the beginning of 1989, I took a time out from writing and recording my own music for about a couple of months. I don’t remember exactly why but probably I was occupied with some other things to do, especially as a student so that I could not afford taking time for making music at that period. Then, I went back to sitting at my piano in March and experienced something unusual – to witness new ideas emerging spontaneously one after another through random playing on the piano. When these ideas were organised to form a composition, writing of this tune was simultaneously completed. Believe it or not, it took less than two weeks in total, to write this complicated composition from scratch. I called it simply Joy, to express my feeling of joy when I play music in general.
A simple thing I wrote in mid-1993. This was more about an
experiment in arrangement of three instruments; guitar, piano and synthesizer,
to exchange each motif in turn. The title came from the associated lyrics I
wrote, which had little meaning and removed from this video edition, as usual. The
tune became one of flagship songs for my band called Culotte, at that time,
because playing it was quite easy and I could cover a missing keyboardist’s
part when we played it live (as you can see in this video). Moreover, in my
perspective, it was genuine fun to play things like this with the band.
The main ideas for this piece of music spontaneously popped up while I was trying out the effect of a digital delay pedal plugged to my guitar in spring of 1989. When I decided to use the sampled echo sounds to fill the upbeats, I thought it would be more effective to separate the original guitar sound to one channel, and echo sound generated from the effect pedal to the other channel completely, to form a virtual symmetry consists of sounds mixed in stereo. Once this rule has been established, it didn’t take long before I completed writing the entire material including the guitar solo section, which was written on the sheet to carefully make sure each note including echoed ones are placed correctly harmonious to the flow of chord progression assigned to the bass and organ.
The title of this track was inspired by the album cover and title of AOXOMOXOA by The Grateful Dead. I wanted the tune’s title to represent its content – musical expression of symmetry – so I picked up five alphabetical letters that have symmetry forms and arranged them in this fashion, with slightly implying to a musical term; Mixolydian as well.
I don’t think I have suffered from any sort of dementia
or any other associated mental disorder, at least through my own self-diagnosis, however, at the same time I know I have to admit that I have very little or limited
memories on things I wrote or recorded in between 1997 and 1999. To be honest
with you, I have no recollection on the audio track of this video until I have recently
‘discovered’ it among other audio sources I had left in the said period of time. All I
can remember is, yes I tried to create something ‘oriental’ in those days and I
have also discovered seemingly some blue-print versions of this work too. I don’t
know why it features my own voice in the beginning, which never reappears in
the rest of the recording, or how I made this recording in what manner, where
and when…
The title of the track was obviously a reference to the
famous jazz classic. The choice of 'Persia', rather than 'Tunisia' owes to my personal tribute to a line from Jim Morrison's When the Music's Over - 'Persian night.'
As I have gained some experiences in writing pieces of music, a certain notion became clearer to me that to create a well organised Prog Rock tune with its length from six to eight minute long would be one of the most challenging things to do for me. In that sense, I admired a British Prog Rock band called Yes as one of the most successful examples in this particular form of composing style, from some of their landmark achievements such as Roundabout and Siberian Khatru. When I finished demo recording of this tune, I thought I have managed to create one of the successful examples in this sense and decided to call it in this fashion to express my homage to the main source of inspiration and influence. Also, I would like to point out that the idea to use delay effects on the electric piano part was inspired from Jeff Beck’s Blow by Blow album, one of my favourites at that time, though every keyboard part was actually played by a portable mini-key in this recording.
Finally, I would like to apologise for the bad quality of the audio track, caused by damages to the original cassette tape.
Basically, the main riff of this tune was written – or rather
conceived – while I was on a train journey heading for having a studio session
with my band called Culotte, sometime in 1994. By the time I made its initial private
demo version at home, I decided to extend the tune by featuring a long jam
section in the middle, especially inspired by Creedence Clearwater Revival’s cover version of
Suzie Q. Provisional lyrics were also written consisted of repetition of simple
lines start with ‘Tell me baby’, in other words, which were almost meaningless stuff. This thing was all about to express my musical
taste and to try out some recording experiments, such as reverse tape effects.
For making this video, I used Culotte’s studio version, which was recorded in 1995, as its backing track. Coincidently, it missed a part for
another layer of guitar to provide the main riff and secondary solo, and I duly
completed the missing part in front of web cam in 2014.
This tune was written in early autumn of 1990, reflecting few incidents took place during the summer that had just gone. In terms of music, it also reflected one of my favourite songs in that summer; Todd Rundgren's Long Flowing Robe. The time of writing this tune coincided with when I was learning built-in tones accommodated in my new synthesizer and I tried out some of my favourite tones in the demo recording such as double bass, harpsichord, and fade-in strings. Lyrics were written, as I have mentioned above, reflecting the incidents in question but now I regard them as minor trivia so that the voice parts are duly removed from this video edition.
The tune was performed live only once by a provisional band I called The Show later in the same year and footage from that performance is also featured in this video.
For about two and a half years before I wrote this tune,
I had been focusing on writing Pop stuff for my band called Culotte. Therefore,
this was the first tune over six minutes and longer I have written since a
theme tune I wrote for my former band called Elegance in early 1991. This
change of course for more Prog-oriented direction was rather welcomed by my band mates at that time but, with hindsight, it
resulted in to only accelerate the break-up of the band.
As the title of the track indicates, the main theme of
this tune was to create a piece of music that unifies a couple of opposite elements. I didn’t
specify which represents which, loon/moon or sun, but I prepared a couple of short
riffs of 12/8 and 14/8 to be combined in tune towards the end of the
composition. The original recordings, especially Culotte’s version, was way too
long so that I had to cut short to make this concise edition combined with the initial demo version recorded at home by myself.
A short composition I wrote for piano consists of merely
a repetition of a single idea. The original demo recording also survives with a
bit of damage to the magnetic tape, so that I decided to record it again for
making this video. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I failed to capture
something essential to its original recording at this attempt. There’s something
about music that is difficult to explain but, just doing the same movement on an
instrument doesn't always result the same, according to my experience here.
In terms of music, this thing was written while I was
experimentally tapping on the guitar strings by my right hand thumb with holding
simple chords with my left hand. Despite writing of music went quite easily, I
had to struggle to write a lyric for this tune and I decided to write it to
describe the situation with a bit of imagination. As a result, the song was
originally titled The Later Years of a
Poet.
By removing the words of artificial old man’s grumbles, the
tune itself sounds better and younger.
This tune was originally written as a part of a conceptual
work for delivering a story in summer, 1989. In the story, this tune had a role
to have its main character to sing a confessional soliloquy but the entire
work has been abandoned before its completion. I don’t remember whether I made
a demo recording of this thing at that time or not, but one thing is sure that everything
I recorded for the work has been destroyed, as soon as it was abandoned.
The content of the confession actually came from my
personal feeling towards one of my close friends in my real life. Now I recall
that feeling as a typical weird sentiment happens in one’s adolescence.
The video features newly recorded instrumental edition I made in 2012.
I quitted an office job at the end of summer, 1993 and
wrote this tune a few weeks later. This tune was more about delivering of my
words that expressed my mixed feeling of anxiety and optimism for the future,
ornamented by a series of fine autumn days with ironically clear blue sky – to
which, I rather felt it cruel to embrace. This kind of Narcissistic sentiment is
what I hate the most today and in making of this video, the voice parts were duly
removed.
When we gathered, as the band Culotte, in a studio to
record the basic track of this tune, I still remember that unlike any other
occasions, it was me who made almost all of mistakes that halted the band to play
on and restart from the intro all over again. I knew by then that I am not good
at playing the rhythm guitar part consists of plain chords like this, though I like the atmosphere of such things that reminds me of some Kevin Ayers songs.
For making this video, I simply played the lead guitar
part with a bit of improvising, topping on to the backing track we made as
Culotte, a couple of decades ago…
This piece of music was originally written as a sequel part
of a closing track for a conceptual work, which was divided in two; the first
half was a ‘reprise’ of the opening track and the second half was this short
jazz blues stuff. The concept was to provide a series of my original
compositions that would reflect my personal recognition of Pop Music in various
ways. In other words, everything featured after the ‘reprise’ could be
exempted from the concept itself, hence here we go with such old fashioned 12
bar blues!
As you can hear in a ghost track, it originally featured
a voice part that delivered a lyric called Goodnight.
When I made this video, more than a couple of decades later than the demo recording, I tried to separate this section from the preceding ‘reprise’
section to treat it as an individual work and by doing so, its lyric also
lost its meaning. Thus I tried to remove the voice part from the audio track
and changed its title to this simpler one.
The idea for the ominous intro can be traced back to a studio
session in early 1992. At that time, I was playing in a band called Elegance,
which featured a singer, who was not capable to play any instrument. While I
was enjoying a casual jam with other mates, playing on the electric piano, the
singer suddenly grabbed my guitar and began to provide musically meaning notes
for a short while. The session was recorded on a cassette tape and when I discovered
that piece a couple of years later, I simply thought it would be interesting to
reconstruct the odd moment that happened merely by chance. Whilst the singer’s guitar
part was reconstructed almost loyally to what had been originally played there,
our parts - the spontaneous jam in E minor - was transformed to a form of short
fugue for string quartet and written as a program for the digital sequencer. In
terms of music, all the rest was no creation but merely a simple Country thing.
The initial demo of this track was called The Boy’s Piano and the Devil’s Woman,
or The Boy, the Intelligence, and the
Devil’s Woman. These titles came from the content of the lyric I wrote for
this tune, which had a short story that featured some characters like ‘a boy’,
‘the devil’, ‘a woman’ and ‘the intelligence’, a personification of the abstract
idea. At that time, I thought the story was concise enough to fit in to such a
short tune and was well written, now I rather agree with my band mates back
then, who rejected my complacency.
In making this video, I removed my voice parts delivering
the unpleasant story and changed the title to a harmless one.
This tune was written while I was playing the piano to get a grip on the idea called on-chord, which was relatively new to me at that time. I don't remember if it was exactly the month of May or not, but was surely somewhere in spring 1989. Writing of the tune and its associated lyric were coincided with the time I happened to come across with other notions related to the month; I was reading about tradition of the Maypole festivities in a history book or something, and was listening to Syd Barrett of The Pink Floyd singing about 'the games of May' quite frequently for it was one of my favourite songs at that time. The initial demo recording was soon made, which was followed by making a new backing track of the tune for a live performance of Timeless, a band I was involved at that time. I would like to mention that the keyboard player of Timeless made a really good job on this occasion that later inspired my recognition of the tune.
Written in 1989 / Recorded in 1990
Around half a year later, while I was making a collection of pop themed new materials, I thought it would be interesting to make a self-cover version of this tune. Unlike its initial demo, this time I tried to convert it to fit into the theme, with making use of the inspirations gained through the experience from playing it with Timeless. The audio track of the video above basically consists of this second demo. The sound effects of the audience were sampled from Peter Frampton's Comes Alive album.
The audio track of the video below is a revised version, done in 1997. I tried to synchronise the audio with the live footage of Timeless performing the same track - with making use of the pre-recorded backing track - in 1989. I know it looks a bit awkward because the audio was made as an instrumental track, whilst Timeless had a singer to deliver the lyric. I would like to make it clear that it was not the case that the singer made a bad job that made me remove the voice part, but I simply wanted to remove the lyric written by myself for its immaturity.
Written in 1991 and 1993 / Recorded in 1993, 1994 and 1995 + Sound effects (2014)
This thing was originally written in late 1991 and its initial demo was recorded deliberately in unfinished fashion, as a part of such recording scheme. A couple of years later, I wrote additional parts for bass guitar, strings and woodwind to complete the tune and made a better demo recording, which is partly used in this video. I brought the demo to my band called Culotte and recorded the tune in studio for twice; in 1994 and in 1995. If my memory serves well, it was the drummer, who demanded to re-record it in the latter occasion. He was a creative drummer, who was especially enthusiastic at playing this particular tune.
While I was mixing the Culotte's second studio recording, I thought it would be worthwhile to add sound effect of sea waves at the end of the tune and went out to the nearest shore, bringing with me a portable cassette recorder, on a dead cold cloudy day in February.
In this video version, I didn't use the ending bit mixed with the sea sound because I prefer the earlier take with tom-toms to close the track. Therefore, I went out, this time it was a hot sunny day, to the nearest shore once again, bringing with me a digital camera, to capture not only the sound but also video footage of the sea waves.
This tune was written and recorded in a very brief period in early 1990 and, to be honest, I don't remember how and why I wrote this thing. Actually, I wrote a lyric to go with this thing but it was not a serious stuff but was rather a kinda word-play-thing, which is removed from this video version.
I also don't remember why I made this demo as if something like unfinished material captured from its rehearsal session or things like that. Probably, I was getting tired of making demos with the proper arrangement that requires layers of recording procedures and, instead, rather deliberately chose to make it in this way, as a bit of fun. In the making of this video, I chose to take a similar method to visually reconstruct some scenes associated with home recording procedures.
Remember Me was originally a song I wrote for piano and voices as the closing track of the soundtrack version of Zone, a students' theatrical project, in the end of 1991. That piano piece is featured in this video after the sequel jam section of Part One, from around 3:17, followed by the improvisation section played by the piano and voice, overlapped with my similar attempts made by the guitar and voice, occasionally played at double speed. I have no hesitation to admit that this section was heavily inspired from Robert Wyatt's solo works. The mixing of this improvisation section was newly made while I was making this video edition, which is designed to gradually bring back the second half of studio jam by my band called Culotte. This section of the jam was absolutely a spontaneous thing mainly led by the drummer and me on the guitar. The voices singing 'la la la...' were added soon after the studio recording by myself, to enhance the structure of this two-chord jam. The final bit, a short polyphonic reprise of the piano theme arranged for voice quartet, was all done by myself, at the final stage of entire recording of Part Two. The same arrangement for string quartet featured in the intro played a role for guiding my voices in ghost tracks as well.
The idea to write a song about a philosophical term 'Ressentiment' first arose in my mind while I was working like human trash in 1991. It was not the nature of job that provoked my mind towards pronouncing some resentful words to be expressed in lyric, but an experience I came across during that job.
An attempt of demo recording of the song was made in the same year but I am not sure if I wrote the lyric in question at that time, for all I can acknowledge is the existence of an unfinished backing track with no voice part at all.
A couple of years later, I picked up the idea once again, not being provoked by some nasty experience, but genuinely inspired by the rise of Grunge Rock, especially the use of guitar noises by Sonic Youth. In this second attempt, I changed the music style to more aggressive one but made a little change on the lyric, preferring to make it a bit challenging or provocative thing. By the time it was finally recorded by my band called Culotte, I changed the lyric to a bit more modest one, or at least, I totally removed quoted lines, rather caring about copy right issues.
When Culotte released its second single with a format of cassette tape, I picked up this song for filling the flip side. Nonetheless, partly because it was too long to fit in there, I made a clumsy edition of the song, by using fast-forward function of a cassette player, to deliberately destroy the song to junk status and reduce the lyric to be almost unrecognisable.
Making of this video coincided with the so-called Occupy Movement in 2012 and I took the opportunity to even change the title of the tune. In this way, what is presented in the audio track of this video became a mere remnant of what was supposed to be something utterly different thing, in other words, something worse.
Written in 1991 and 1996 / Re-arranged and Recorded in 1999
This piece was supposed to be the Part One of a long composition called Secret Jewellery Box, a re-working of my old stuff under the same title that I had written in 1991. The re-working never completed and this piece was left in this way before the entire scheme was abandoned.
When I decided to launch this re-working scheme, it was mainly about to give the original 1991 version, which was too long to be a pop tune but too short to be an individual Prog Rock tune, enough length of time to express itself. In doing so, I also decided to combine elements from some other works from mine and for Part One, I picked up a tune I wrote in 1996, which was later converted to a song called Jump Up to the Sky, to be played with a band called School in 1997.
Despite the re-working scheme was left unfinished, a mix of Part One and Part Two played continuously, which is used for this video's audio track, was made individually - probably it was an attempt for making the final mix in my consideration - but I don't remember when and why I made it and there's no other similar attempt between any different combination of Parts has been found.
Written in 1989 and 1991 / Re-arranged and Recorded in 2000
This piece was supposed to be the Part Two of a long composition called Secret Jewellery Box, a re-working of my old stuff under the same title that I had written in 1991. The re-working never completed and this piece was left in this way before the entire scheme was abandoned.
Following relatively aggressive and Prog-oriented Part One, this tune was designed to enhance more Blues / Hard Rock-oriented side. Additionally, while the main riff was taken from the original tune from 1991, the bridging mellow piece was taken from another old thing from mine called Ain't No Mercy Blues, written in 1989.
This instrumental tune was initially written as a sequel to my another work called Dance to Me. Soon after I made the first demo recording of this sequel, I expanded the idea to write further sequels to make a dance-themed conceptual work consists of these individual sequels, which were later labelled as Variations in the scheme. Some of these variations were well written and some others were not, and when I completed writing and recording all of these variations, I decided to abandon the scheme for various reasons.
Despite it was not a suitable stuff for a band like us to play, I brought this tune to be recorded by Culotte - my band at that time - in the studio. The result is what you can listen to in this video. The piano outro was meant to be a brief section for bridging this piece and the next variation.
This catchy pop tune was originally written as a song that accommodated a lyric addressed to a girl, who has been always exposed to anxiety towards things belong to uncertainty that could be only described with using words like 'if' and things belong to the future, in other words, 'tomorrow'.
Initially, I added the closing jam section to my personal demo recording less than a minute. When it was brought to my band called Culotte, the drummer had a determination to extend the section far longer than the main song section of the tune and we ended up to establish a habit to play the whole tune longer than seven minutes in total, usually.
This video version consists of only the song section and a bit of jam section; with voice parts removed, i. e., instrumental remix. The audio track was recorded in studio as one of our earliest attempts of self-engineered demo recording.
Written in 1991 and 1993 / Recorded in 1993 and 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/or works for a students’ theatrical project called Zone. This tune is based on a short theme for piano originally written for the latter occasion.
The original piano piece was the intro for a tune called Baby, I Love You, which was performed in Zone featuring myself on vocal. While the entire tune was converted to Music for a Story-Telling as a part of Operetta: The Grand Meeting, I wrote this variation developed from the intro piece to introduce a character called Imayya, the General Stuff, who are to be featured in both tunes. In the story line, this tune is all about establishing the character as a passionate and committed General, who accidentally discovers Kelp, the intruder, during his routine patrol and straightforwardly orders his ranks and files to arrest him. For Imayya, anything unusual for his task of maintaining the order has no room to be considered as anything else but intolerable evil, because it means 'disorder'.
In making this video, I tried to combine my personal demo recording and a studio recording done with my band called Culotte.
The main Idea for this tune spontaneously emerged while I was trying out an unusual guitar tuning. Later, I recorded other versions of this tune with adding the rhythm machine, only to realise it's the less layer of instruments the more powerful and raw.
The title of this track was not supposed to mean anything at all. It was more about a kinda word-play. 'Pow!', alternating the word 'I' was taken from a scene in the film version of Quadrophenia, where Jimmy, the main character, tries to catch attention of Steph while she is working at a supermarket till. Using of 'thy' for alternating 'your' inspired by some of Syd Barrett's compositions, most notably Scream Thy Last Scream. The lyric consists of actually a couple of lines; a mere repetition of the song title and a quote from another Syd Barrett song, Waving My Arms in the Air.
Written in 1991 and 1993 / Recorded in 1993 and 1995
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/or works for a students’ theatrical project called Zone. This tune consists of ideas taken from the works I wrote for both occasions.
As I have already explained in the annotation entry for Overture to Part One, I divided the entire work in three parts and decided to write an overture per each part. Each of them was supposed to consist of musical motifs assigned to each respective part and everything went quite well in this Overture to Part Two.
Following a suit of the counterpart for Part One, I chose to write this for a couple of guitars and bass guitar only, so that it could be easily converted for my band called Culotte to play. However, unlike its counterpart, this overture was played by Culotte for only a handful of times, none of them was played well, before the band broke up effectively by mid 1995. Therefore, I chose the original demo version for the audio track of this video, except for the very ending, where I had added an extra feature for the guitar in a studio recording done as Culotte. As for the picture, I tried to synchronise live footage of Culotte, playing the same stuff to the audio.
Additionally, also unlike its counterpart, this track is meant to contribute as genuinely musical function. Therefore, this only signifies the opening of Part Two with no reference to the story line.
I wrote this sophisticated 12-bar-blues for a trio band I led called Flowers, probably in between late May and early July 1987 - assumption can be made from the fact that when Flowers first played live in August 1987, this tune was already included in the set list. In those days, we simply called it The Original Blues in G or stuff like that. Though the band didn't last long but broke up by March next year, we played and rehearsed the tune for countless times and some of them were recorded in various ways.
As soon as I bought some necessary equipment that made the home recording available for the first time, this tune was duly picked up, along with some other pre-written materials, to be recorded as my solo work. It was simply a joy to play the lead guitar part for finishing the demo recording to far richer accompaniment featuring a layer of instruments such as second guitar and piano, than Flowers' low skilled bass and drums. When the recording was done, I thought this tune would be one of my trademark blues compositions for the rest of my life to be played for many more times in the future but, except for Flowers' a-few-day-reunion a few months later, ironically this was the last time for me to play this tune.
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/or works for a students’ theatrical project called Zone. This tune consists of ideas taken from the works I wrote for both occasions.
When I first planned to write this conceptual work, the basic story line was already there and so were the musical motifs. I had a strong wish to start off the entire work with an overture, which should be written formally, at the same time, I thought the amount of source motifs were too vast for constituting only one overture. So, I decided to divide the entire work in three parts and to write an overture per each part. As a result, this Overture to Part One consists of musical motifs taken from every individual tune included in Part One, except for a piano piece called The Brainwasher.
The idea of a conceptual work to deliver a story won a support from my band mates, especially from the drummer, and it didn't take long before we launched to record featured tracks of the work as a band Culotte. As the band was heavily influenced by The Who, I thought it would be acceptable for us to write and play something like quasi-Tommy things like this. In addition, the tune became one of our favourite repertoires and was played live in many occasions.
In the story this opening track is also designed to introduce the background information to be told. It features a Narrator in its later section but in this video version, I also inserted further written accounts in a bit funny way.
When I first bought a multi-track-recorder and a rhythm machine, in summer 1988, it didn't take long before I became to be enchanted with attractions associated with the home recording. I could enjoy the recording process of each and every material, without caring about its consequence because it was not about the quality of each work but all about learning from experiments and experience. In some cases, I forced myself to make up a provisional composition in order to conduct some recording experiments. This tune was one of such attempts.
The main purpose of this recording was an attempt to reconstruct the psychedelic atmosphere presented in Are You Experienced? by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. In doing so, I thought it would be effective to combine the guitar solo with reverse tape effects and programmed rhythm pattern of marching drum beat. Other proceeding parts to the guitar solo were written with little considerations; keyboard piece for the intro was most likely improvised during the recording, and the bridging quiet piece with singing 'la la la' sounds quite similar to one of my favourite Steve Winwood songs at that time, Back in the High Life Again. Overall, I think this composition was a failure in terms of its quality and coherence as a whole, but I decided to pick up some good pieces from the original recording as a remnant of my personal recording experiments.
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/or works for a students’ theatrical project called Zone. This tune is solely based on a theme tune originally written for the latter occasion.
When the tune was initially written, it was meant to be Poet's Theme for the said theatrical project. At that stage, the project was yet ongoing but the director, who was one of my close friends in those days, had given me a rough outline of the story to be performed and I thought it would be beneficial to write a theme for every main character that included the Poet. Despite I wrote this theme for the character's entrance (intro) and main body for his performance -probably a poetry reading - the director rejected to use this tune and alternated with a demo recording of his own original track for the former, and another original tune from mine for the latter, which was written almost spontaneously while we were rehearsing in the studio.
Three years later, when the tune was converted to Music for a Story-Telling, I thought this tune can be used without making any change for introducing Suetrea the Poet in its Part Two. Nonetheless, when I brought it to my band called Culotte for recording purpose, the drummer exercised his creative side and managed to change the impression of the tune dramatically.
In this video, I tried to present both versions as naturally as possible, especially focusing on preserving the slightly jazzy atmosphere in the original intro and the difference made by the drummer in Culotte's version.
In the story line, this tune is effectively the opening track of the Part Two, following its Overture, which is instrumental. It features Narrator, who introduces a new character Suetrea to present his case as a captive poet, who would be enticed by his inmate Kelp the Intruder for the Departure.
This tune was written largely under the influence of some mystical thoughts. Because of this reason, I didn't pay much attention in terms of music, or I might have used some specific knowledge relating to numbers. mysticism or stuff like that for writing such unusual chord progressions. Originally, it had a couple of voice parts reading things I wrote referring to 666 and other elements taken from The Book of Revelation and things related to alchemy. But basic notion of that written account came from an expectation for moving forward to the Age of Aquarius, which may coincide with theosophical human evolution from the sphere of Earth to the sphere Jupiter.
Now, as an older man who learned a bit more than who I was in the time of writing this piece of music at the age of 27, I am not able to fully understand what I was trying to mean, especially in the words associated to this work. Therefore, for making this video, I made the audio track remixed with removing the voice parts in order to make a room for each viewer's imagination.
The original idea for writing this conceptual work divided in three parts came from my personal experience of a day in early November, 1990. In the initial stage of composing, the work was supposed to be divided in four parts and this Part iii was assigned to represent actual deeds that took place on that day. Despite all four parts were composed and demo recorded in the first few months of 1991, I soon recognised some failures within the conceptual work as a whole.
When I gave another try for re-organising the entire work three years later, I decided to change the theme of the concept and to make it divided in three parts. Though the second attempt of the entire work didn't go well, the new concept coined at that stage contributed for making a series of videos to showcase the work titled Literary Works.
Under the new concept, the 'actual deeds took place on that day' has been converted to legendary acts and deeds attributed to ancient heroes and heroines, which should be depicted in the style of epic. Musically, I have to admit this piece heavily owes to inspirations absorbed from Thick as a Brick by Jethro Tull and Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield. In addition, the quality of first few minutes of this audio track is lower than the rest, due to damages caused to the original master tape.
Written in 1985 and 1989 / Recorded in 1989, 1990 and 2012
This tune was one of my earliest attempts for writing a composition. It started off with the intro, probably began as a certain mistake of the positioning of my fingers while I was practising on the guitar, and the main body of the tune soon followed to be written somewhere in 1985. At that time, I was not much accustomed to music theory and that enabled me to write a thing in such a way, ironically. Nonetheless, at that time, I didn't think the tune was completed and didn't make any attempt to record it.
After I got used to home recording, by making use of a cheap multi-track-recorder, I decided to make demos of some earlier works I have written but never recorded yet by then. A series of such recording was conducted before or during the summer of 1989, including this tune. At this point, I added a lyric of asking a girl to have a cuppa coffee with me, from which the title was taken.
Shortly before I made this video version, I found another similar home-recorded demo of this tune, which must have been done probably within the first quarter of the following year, 1990. The finding of this lost demo recording encouraged me to make the video of this tune, which also features the intro, newly played live in front of the webcam in 2012.
One day in spring or summer of 1993, I was standing in a train carriage packed with other commuters in the morning rush hour, looking outside of the window with reluctantly wearing suit on. The weather was fine and I saw someone walking a dog in a typical residential area along the railway track. At that moment, I simply envied that someone's freedom, which was visible for me but was out of reach. Within a few days or weeks, I wrote this dull and a bit pessimistic piece of music and wrote a lyric to go with it, reflecting the envy I felt on that day.
About a year later, the audio track of this video was recorded with my band called Culotte, where I played every instrument except for bass and drums. In the original recording, this piece was followed by extended jam part, which was based on the ending bit featured in my personal demo version recorded at the time of writing the song.
Unlike other videos from mine, I didn't dare to remove my voice parts for a couple of reasons; (1) I noticed that backing track without voice parts sounds a bit more clumsy, and (2) I remember the lyric of this song actually impressed a girl a bit younger than me, when I made her listen to this recording, back in those days. Therefore, it would make sense to write down the lyric with its English translation below:
(verse)
I happened to have dropped my time
into an endless repetition
As I noticed, the Sun's already set,
and tomorrow will taste the same
(chorus)
Guiltless scenery,
flat rituals
(bridge)
Having left in a
room too vast
Having lost life
at a tiny grain of sand
Though my main instrument is definitely the guitar, I rarely compose things for solo guitar. This was my second attempt at creating this sort of stuff but was not done voluntarily but rather from a request within a band called The Greybirds.
The band was formed sometime in May 1986 with my college mates at that time and a singer, who was my high school mate from the past. We started off with rehearsing some cover songs including one of The Who classics The Kids Are Alright. Because the song starts with harmonised voices following a strum of the guitar chord of D, the singer demanded to change the intro to something alternative, hopefully with something original. Since I was the only person within the band who was capable of writing such a piece of music, I wrote a brief intro in accordance with the singer's demand, which is presented in this video.
There is only one recording of this piece survived from that era, from a rehearsal of the band in a studio during the summer of 1986. It was tempting to make a video with featuring that old material in the audio track to make things easier, but I decided to learn how to play the tune again and capture the music with better audio quality in front of a webcam. Though I struggled a bit to play such a thing written in a long ago in a style I am not familiarised with, I reckon the tune deserves to be challenged and be recorded in this way.
The earlier recording mentioned above is now available in the video below, being featured in a virtual album titled K's Early Years. No worries, it is featured on the opening track of the video for those who can't afford plenty of spare time:
Lost Love Story was a conceptual work I planned to write in 1996. It was supposed to be a collection of works for delivering a story but soon after I have completed writing and demo recording a few tracks of them, I decided to abandon the plan as a whole. This tune is one of rare survivors written for this botched project.
Now I don't remember why I wrote this for various formats and arrangements here, but despite it's relatively a simple work from mine, I think it is well written. Or, at least, it makes me a bit sentimental whenever I listen to this lovely tune though I don't know why...
This was more about a tribute stuff I have made to show my respect to Jim Morrison and The Doors, especially for their blues music in the later part of their career; from 1969 to 1971. Originally, it accommodated a lyric quoting from some words attributed to Jim Morrison, which I came across through reading some of his biographies, but it was mainly addressed to a girl in my circle at that time. For making this video, I removed these embarrassing words I sang along with this backing track, which has been presented here.
In terms of music, it's all about the blues being played in urban and dry taste, including a musical quote from one of my favourite Doors songs, The Soft Parade.
This was originally meant to be a song addressed to a mean girl I came across in a work place in 1993. Despite the ideas for writing this tune grew up while I had to see her almost everyday in the office, it took three years before I eventually materialise equivocal ideas into this form. Though this tune was another new material for my personal recording scheme dubbed as The Soft Core Project, unlike other tracks, I declined to call it merely Untitled with its numbering system but to name and shame the girl in question by calling it with her real name. Additionally, due to the nature of the said recording scheme, wicked lyrics for counter-attack purpose have never been written.
Musically, this tune has Todd Rundgen's Marlene as its source of inspiration as well.
Written in 1991 and 1994 / Recorded in 1996 and 2012
Initially, this thing was written as a personal love song during the autumn of 1991. It only featured piano part for providing the accompaniment and voice parts for delivering the lyric, which was inspired by words I have exchanged with a teenage girl by the time of writing. Since it was a private love song, I didn't see any necessity for furnishing the song with any additional instruments and left it behind as the source of inspiration has left me too.
In 1994, when I made the second demo recording of this song, I added newly written three extra keyboard parts; alternating strings, French horn, and harpsichord, to furnish the tune musically. At this point, writing of this tune has completed.
This video consists of a couple of demo versions I made afterword; an instrumental version made for my personal recording scheme dubbed as The Soft Core Project in 1996, and another instrumental attempt I made for a video version in 2012, Since the former is played in faster tempo than the latter, it may disruptive to some of viewers, but from the composer's point of view, this edition is capable to present every single element that has been written for the tune except for the lyric and because of this reason, I picked up this video to be quoted above.
A short instrumental tune for solo acoustic guitar. This was originally written back in the late 1980s, when I was early twenties. At that time, I only made a sketch recording as an idea for feature composition, then the idea was soon forgotten and was discovered nearly a decade later, while I was reviewing old cassette tapes to pick up some ideas for my personal recording scheme dubbed as The Soft Core Project.
Due to a requirement of the scheme, this new attempt was recorded in two parts; intro part by solo acoustic guitar, followed by the main part accompanied with bass and drums, alternated with making use of the rhythm machine. The latter part is omitted from this video because I felt it doesn't sound good and is unnecessary for presenting this brief but smartly written composition.
This tune was written for a students’ theatrical performance called Zone, to which I was deeply involved during the autumn of 1991. In its initial phase, we started off with gathering random ideas for the project and I wrote some original tunes in accordance with the basic scheme provided by the director, who was my close friend at that time. The basic structure for this tune came from another track I wrote for the project called Talk Session Theme, which was rejected by the director along with an associated idea I have provided with the tune. Ironically, despite he was reluctant to set the assassination scene as the climax of the performance, he could not resist the pressure from other participants so that the scene was left to be performed.
The original demo recording of this track was played as background music in the scene and the melody written in the whole tone scale gave a cue for the lighting technician to change the colour, from green to red, for informing the actors the timing of the bang at the end of the recording.
For making this video, I tried to insert a roaring, performed by an actor who played the role of the assassin, as natural as possible within the flow of music. I also made an effort to synchronise the movement of actors in order to reconstruct the original theatrical performance with better audio quality.
After the break up of my band called Culotte, in early 1996, I reluctantly decided to go back to make music with using the rhythm machine. Whilst I continued to write new materials from scratch, I also reviewed some of my past works to be renewed for this new recording scheme. Ideas for this tune came from reviewing an old recording of a spontaneous jam I took part with my band called Elegance in the summer of 1991. The running time of the original jam was over half an hour long and it contained many impressive licks and phrases provided by a couple of guitarists there and me mainly played the keyboard. I picked up such impressive motifs and reconstructed the jam as efficiently as possible, with adding newly written bits for making overall consistency as an individual work. The result was yet a nearly-twenty-minute-long material separated in two parts.
Taking the opportunity of making this video, I tried to combine these two parts together, with eliminating unnecessary repetitions and relatively unsuccessful solos. In my self estimate, I think this video is the best presentation of what this quasi-composition was supposed to be.
A fictional National Anthem I wrote for a students’ theatrical performance called Zone, to which I was deeply involved during the autumn of 1991. In its initial stage, we began to discuss what kind of story would take place in what sort of space and time, etcetera etcetera, and by the time I decided to make demo recordings of associated music tracks, it became obvious that we need a national anthem for the fictional state, where the story takes place. Despite some other demos I made for the performance were later rejected by the director, this track could win him to be used in the performance as background music for a scene set for introducing the director himself acting a role of governor of the state.
A few years later, when I tried to convert the story for my musical conceptual work called Music for a Story-Telling, I re-recorded this tune with my band called Culotte in 1994. The band even dared to play it live for once or twice but none of their versions could exceed the quality of initial demo featured in this video. The pictures and footage are mostly taken from the students' performance. Unfortunately, the scene in question was not taken from the live show but from the final rehearsal session, hours before the actual performance.
A Tragedy is an instrumental composition I wrote during the summer of 1990. In those days, I was working hard at writing an essay about German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, as a course work, and was obsessed with ideas and facts I was absorbing from various books I referred for the essay writing. Along with his philosophical thoughts, I was also interested in Nietzsche’s private life as well and when I first completed this main theme piece, I decided to write a conceptual musical work based on what inspired me through the research activity by then.
For making a series of videos to cover the entire conceptual work, I have re-examined sources of information now available on-line and make some changes to the audio track in order to present the tragedy more coherently. Though the music I wrote has nothing to do with the 19th Century German philosopher, I hope some of you may enjoy this work.
This tune was written for a students’ theatrical performance called Zone, to which I was deeply involved during the autumn of 1991. In its initial phase, we started off with gathering random ideas for the project and I wrote some original tunes in accordance with the basic scheme provided by the director, who was my close friend at that time. One of the impressive ideas suggested from the director was that the theatrical performance takes place in several 'zones' and when it comes to shifting from one zone to another, the performers have to make strange moves because the laws of gravity are different between inside the zones and the outside space. Given such a unique explanation, I tried to create background music that would meet the requirement for this particular scene and in doing so, I tried the effect of rests inserted between successive notes for snare drum, in order to make the flow of music unpredictable. The melody I wrote for this experimental work was designed to re-appear in the later part of the performance; the assassination scene.
The demo version featured in this video was actually played as background sound-effect in the original students' performance and the footage of the actors' performance in that scene is also presented in this video, though they are not designed to synchronise here.
An experimental recording I made in early 1991 for filling a collection of my original works then titled Sunday, 'tis Raining. Though the making of this track was mainly motivated by musical intentions, for the sake of this video, it would be better to keep silence on behind the scene things as the composer, who wishes this work to remain ambiguously thought provoking.
This tune was written for a students’ theatrical performance project called Zone, to which I was deeply involved during the autumn of 1991. In its initial phase, we started off with gathering random ideas for the project and I wrote some original tunes in accordance with the basic scheme provided by the director, who was my close friend at that time. In the roughly drafted story, there was a scene where a convict, who was found guilty in the trial scene set earlier, is brought to a facility for execution. It was also discussed that it should take a wagon for transferring the convict. Since the judicial decision in this story only reflects the decision of the state, I decided to write this theme music for the scene as a variation of the National Anthem of the state, in the parallel minor key.
Along with the National Anthem, this theme for string quartet was played as the background music in the actual performance that took place in December 1991. As you can watch in the video, I played a role of a state officer, who was in charge of transferring the convict from the court to the execution facility and put a headset on the convict's ears as a preparation for the execution.
Additionally, this tune was re-used in my conceptual work titled Music for a Story-telling a few years later, as the intro (and the outro) of a tune called The Wagon.
