Poesy (Literary Works - Part ii)

 Written and Recorded in 1991

The original idea for writing this conceptual work divided into three parts came from my personal experience of a day in early November, 1990. In the initial stage, the work was supposed to be divided into four parts and this Part ii was assigned to describe a dream I had before I woke up 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 and to make it divided into three parts. Though this second attempt didn't go quite well, the new concept coined at that stage contributed to making a series of videos that could showcase the work finally titled Literary Works.

Under the new concept, the ‘dream I had before I woke up on that day’ has been converted to represent a literary style of poesy. Before the entire structure was fixed, I played a blueprint version of the entire work on the piano in front of the audience. This means that the core elements of the entire work, including ideas assigned to other parts, was largely written as a piano composition. In that sense, Poesy reminds me of the initial mood I have set for the work as a whole and selection of instruments, deliberately excluding the electric guitar, clearly explains what I was aiming at.  

Diamond Love

Written and Recorded in 1998

I wrote this tune being requested from one of my ex-girlfriends in 1998. It was about a year later since our relationship abruptly ended, and when I heard the request from her, it was a bit of surprise. What she asked me was just to write a new original tune dedicated to her, and duly I made it. The audio track of this video is what I composed for her. In those days, both of us didn’t have any platform for sharing music files and she could only listen to the result of her request played by my stereo through the land line. In addition, it was the last phone call between us.

Ain’t No Mercy Blues

Written and Recorded in 1989

A well written Blues Rock thing I wrote in 1989. I don’t remember much about how and why I wrote this thing but probably I was interested in conducting a recording experiment like this; to overdub three layers of guitar tracks in a relatively simply written stuff. A couple of years later, I wrote a different lyric for this tune to play it with my band called Elegance. The only surviving audio of them performed live is also available on my YouTube channel though it’s not the complete performance but a brief instrumental edition. 

Like a Crow

Written and Recorded in 1997

This tune was written for an unfinished conceptual work I called Lost Love Story. Because of this reason, the guitar solo section in the middle shares the same chord progression with On What Ground?, which has been written for the same purpose. The title of this track came from a remark made by my former band mate, who described his new hair-do as ‘being cut like a crow’. Then, he continued to complain it was his girlfriend, who ordered him to cut his hair neat so that he could be seen as a normal bloke. I have to admit that this silly story partially stimulated me for the idea of the said conceptual work, which was abandoned soon after writing and recording of this demo track.

One More Time

Written in 1992 / Recorded in 1992 and 2011

I admit that I have put too many ideas together into this piece of music. Actually, when I brought this tune to my band to play, I had no hesitation to cut off the programmed piano piece entirely, from both the intro and short before the ending, to make the entire impression much more like a Rock stuff. Maybe I could write another, utterly different piece of music by developing ideas from the piano piece but, ironically, the rest of this piece of music rather emerged from exactly this process of developing. Therefore, in making of this video, I decided to pick up this original version, rather than Rock edition by Culotte, when they played live in 1993 or another demo version I personally made in 1996. The additional guitar part was recorded for this video version, to replace what was originally presented by my voice, which delivered some silly lyrics of begging a girl to have sex with one more time… typical in’it?

Dreamin’ #3

Written and Recorded in 1998

Actually, this piece of music was written and recorded as the closing jam section of my instrumental composition titled Room. At the same time, I found this section separately mixed in a different way, with the string sections more weighed on. When I first re-discovered the latter rough mix, I felt a certain similarity to my earlier attempt called Dreamin, which was written and recorded in 1988. From these reasons, I decided to make a video of this tune separately from its parent tune and call it in this way, taking another earlier attempt in my consideration in terms of numbering.