Shall We Dance Again?

Written and Recorded in 2001

One of the latest compositions I have ever written, so far. If my memory serves well, this tune hasn’t got any title at the time of writing of it. The concept was quite obvious that I must have wanted to make something fits into the atmosphere of the contemporary music scene in the early 2000s, as a composer whose main instrument was the electric guitar. Though it may sound easily-made, I remember that it took me a huge effort and time to make a programme for the synthesizer by using a relatively primitive model of digital sequencer. Another thing I would like to address over this tune is, even though it may give an impression of some influence from dance music, I can only give a credit to the music of Mike Oldfield, especially his works during the second half of 1990s, as the sole source of influence for making this tune – this is the reason why it features the tone of tubular bells as one of the main melody instruments.  

Room

Written and Recorded in 1998

I could scarcely remember this tune that was rather ‘discovered’ while I was organising a bunch of Mini Discs, which have been left in a plastic bag since I moved out of the ‘room’, where I had lived and made these demos, in mid-2001. There are several reasons why I can’t remember about things happened during the period of the late 1990s and early 2000s; I acknowledge that I had been suffering from mild alcoholism and mental depression, though I have never seen a doctor back then (or even now). This tune was digitally titled as ‘Room (Beautie)’ on the mini-disk. I don’t remember what I supposed to mean in these words but probably, I guess, the latter word in bracket referred to the extended jam section at the end of the track, which I have cut off from this video and issued separately under a title of Dreamin’ #3. In addition, I am also not sure if this recording was conducted under the Soft Core Project scheme or not.

Making of this video coincided with the last days I spent in a room in Cape Town, South Africa. So I took pictures and captured footage of the room while I was living there and picked some of them to be featured in this video. Despite I am not able to remember my original intention, I thought it must be a good opportunity to pay a tribute to a room, where I spent some portion of my lifetime.     

Floating Like a Ghost

Written and Recorded in 1989

The title was taken from a phrase I heard from my friend at that time, who described the way we were in those days as students, in a bit poetic way. The tune was originally written under a conceptual scheme during the summer of 1989 and was converted to an individual tune later in the same year. Despite it's just a pop tune in the typical 1980s style, which doesn’t provide scary atmosphere due to the source of inspiration I got from casual conversation mentioned above, in making this video I thought it would be simply interesting to feature a fake ghost shown on the screen. It took me less than five minutes to cover myself with a sheet and play the role of dancing ghost :D

On What Ground?

Written and Recorded in 1996

A couple of different works I wrote for an abandoned conceptual scheme called Lost Love Story. I even don’t remember what the content of the scheme was, but a thing titled On What Ground?, which is sandwiched in the middle of this video, shares a same motif with Indulgence, another work from the same scheme. The other thing also featured here is titled as Here She Comes that has extra three minutes of recording at the end of the original demo, where it features programmed synthesizers only.

In making this video, I tried to present these demos in a sensible way as possible but I also do not hesitate to simply admit that both works are not written well in the first place. 

Medley - Medley {reprise}

Written in 1989 and 1990 / Recorded in 1990

A demo recording of my original tunes played in a form of the medley. These tunes were originally written for an abandoned conceptual work I attempted to write in the previous year. Since the original scheme for the conceptual work was to deliver a story line, some tunes were written only for the convenience of the scheme, so that I had to pick and choose from some of these things to be re-recorded in a form like this. Of course, these tunes were also written on the extent of potential internal cross-references within the conceptual work and that made it easier for me to reintegrate them in this way.

Written in 1989 and 1990 / Recorded in 1990 and 2015

The Reprise section was made, not for the said conceptual purpose but for reminding the prospective audience of how the entire album began with the source Medley and for introducing a series of closing tracks. In other words, these tunes were converted to the theme tune for a Pop album, which would be packed with other individual pop tunes; the idea borrowed from The Beatles' SGT. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. For making the video, I added some new recordings to this Reprise section for better audio experience.

Indulgence

Written and Recorded in 1996

This tune was written as a part of an unfinished conceptual work technically titled Lost Love Story. Unlike my other similar attempts, this one didn’t have well-thought-out plans when I started writing things and the work was soon abandoned, partly because of a sudden change in the circumstance caught me think twice and partly because of poor assessments I made on first few pieces I had written for the concept. The change of circumstance rather urged me to do something different, whilst sticking to the concept demanded me to write and play in old fashioned style, as you can hear on this particular track. When I decided to move on, this tune had nowhere to go but to remain as a remnant of my indulgence into the same old blues. 

Dawning; a new day

Written and Recorded in 1991

Originally, this piece of music was composed to be the Part IV of one of my conceptual works, which had aimed to depict my personal experience of a day in early November 1990. At that stage, Part IV was assigned to present an ideal fictional ending of the depiction to close the entire conceptual work and I personally called it Nocturne, because it should cover the end of that day.

However, when I took another attempt to re-organise the entire work a few years later, I noticed that this Part IV has nothing in common with any other parts so that I had to change the theme of the concept completely. Thie automatically meant that I had to remove Part iv from the conceptual work, which was eventually titled as Literary Works. Because of these reasons, re-working of this piece of music never took place but it was simply renamed to the current title.

Yam Yam de sang Ram

Written and Recorded in 1996

When Culotte - my band I had formed and led for several years - finally broke up, I decided to continue making music basically all by myself. To fill the void of the rhythm section, I attempted not only to depend on using the rhythm machine, but also to play the drums by myself. This tune was one of those attempts and went relatively well. It still accommodated my voice parts, where I sang badly and aimlessly. For making this video, ‘song’ parts are largely removed except for further meaningless mumbling of the song title, which has no meaning at all. It might be worthwhile to mention that by the time of this recording, I have already lost interests in writing lyrics for singing because I felt there has been almost nothing remaining for me to sing about.

Digital Reich

Written in 1994 / Recorded in 1994 and 2011

An experimental composition I wrote in 1994, borrowing some idea(s) from Steve Reich. I don’t remember what the ideas were or where I found them, but when I came across with the ideas, I simply thought it would be interesting to apply such ideas to make a digital programme for the synthesizer, to reconstruct the theory accurately. 

It took probably less than five minutes for me to make the programme, which consists of a couple of tracks playing the exactly same pattern with a different length of rests – or the same melody line written in different length of bars. Both tracks are programmed with an endless loop attached, so once it started it will never end unless someone push the Stop button or stop supplying electric power to the sequencer. The longer it is played, there must be the wider length of the time gap between the melody lines. In theory, these lines must synchronise at the completely same timing, once in 10 minutes or 20 minutes, or even longer interval.

When the initial demo recording was made, I recorded the programmed synthesizer parts for over 20 minutes and could not spot the moment when these lines synchronise once again within that length of time frame. Nevertheless, I felt listening to digital music for 20 minutes a very boring thing, so I decided to write a suitable guitar part to the atmosphere of the composition and placed it in the relatively early phase of the recording. The result is what this video is all about.