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.
