Written in 1991 and 1993 / Recorded in 1994 - Part One
This tune was first written in spring 1991, soon after I have finished my life as a student. The initial idea was to write a song that could accommodate a kind of pessimistic feeling I had had on a rainy night but the composition soon overgrew the initial idea during the recording process and it ended up as kinda quasi Prog stuff. Overall, it was OK as a personal demo recording, but I could not satisfy with it because of a technical mistake I have made during the recording and the lack of coherence due to the over-expansion of the initial motif. In those days, I rather accused of the change occurred to my social status that made me work at a full-time position, which inevitably reduced the time I could focus on making music.
A few years later, I tried to re-write the tune and made a basic demo for Culotte, a band I was playing with at that time. In this revised version, I focused on establishing a better coherence throughout the entire composition and in order to do this, the pessimistic song part that initiated the composition in the first place was totally removed. which was replaced by some newly added variations of pre-existing themes.
Written in 1991 and 1993 / Recorded in 1991 and 1994 - Part Two
The video above features the second half of the composition which mainly consists of my personal overindulgence on soloing by various instruments and mixing of them. Both my initial demo version and Culotte's studio version failed to provide a perfect performance so that I had to mix their best bits for making this video.
The title of this tune was conceived during the expansion of the ideas that took place in the initial demo recording. There must have been some certain philosophical sources that inspired me at that time, but now I can't recall what they were.
This video features bits and pieces from three of my original compositions, written and recorded in late 1988. These tunes have resulted from my struggling to create new materials out of scratch, which was new experience for me at that time.
The first bit - from the beginning to 1:25 - was an attempt to write a tune reflecting the time - the emergence and prevalence of new genres such as Rap or HipHop music - in my own way. I don't think this attempt was successful in terms of its original intention, but at least it went well for presenting my interpretation of so-called Funky music at that time. If you ask me if I have made any progress on the interpretation above, I would say 'no at all.'
The second bit - from 1:25 to 2:12 - was more about my personal recording experiment. It was originally written as a song heavily inspired by Syd Barrett, the founder of the Pink Floyd, and I simply tried out the same recording procedure as Barrett, or his recording engineered and support musicians, did. While I was recording additional instruments over the basic track, consists of the acoustic guitar and a voice, I thought it would be interesting to add the trumpet that I had but could not play. For capturing the sound of the trumpet, I connected the microphone to the multi-track recorder via a digital delay pedal designed for the guitar. Overall, it was not about writing a composition but was more about how it would sound if I made this and that... and here's the result.
The final bit - from 2:12 to the end of the video - was also an experimental thing. At first, I made a repetition of rhythm programme on the rhythm machine and recorded it with playing the lead guitar part. At this stage, it was more like improvised blues stuff except for the occasional guitar riff obviously taken from Marc Bolan's Hot Love. Then I added other instruments to make it sounds like the said T. Tex thing and it ended up in this way. Though I did own a wah pedal since sometime in 1985, I could never be good at handling it and one of the reasons why I started this recording from the lead guitar part first was that I wanted to try the pedal without caring about chord progressions or structure of a song being accompanied by other instruments but just for experimental purpose.
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 both occasions. The verse part, which is assigned to General Staff Imayya, is taken from the latter, whilst the chorus part, which is assigned to the Sovereign Governor, is from the former. Since both parts were originally written for different purposes - especially the former was written as the piano intro - I reckon the conversion of these parts into arrangement like this didn't go effectively. There were a couple of sources of inspiration for the arrangement; a song written by the director of the said students' theatrical project, in which I played the lead guitar during the performance, and the Grunge movement that flourished when the demo version of this tune was made in 1993.
In the story of the conceptual work, this tune has a role to conclude the Part One, which is mainly dedicated to presnet the framework of a fictional state governed by the Sovereign Governor, where the story is set. This partidular tune is designed to depict the stability and glory of the dictatorship, after some incidents took place, which are already described in the preceding tunes.
