It Goes On

Written and Recorded in 1988

When I first bought the multi-track recorder, in summer 1988, I really had no idea on how to use it at all. I started out with reading its instruction and this short tune was one of the earliest demo recordings I made while I was still learning how to handle the new machine to me, track by track. The basic idea for writing – or rather mostly for recording – this tune was to play something similar to Sultans of Swing, one of my favourite Dire Straits songs, and I planned to spare three tracks for the electric guitar, one for backing and other two for soloing in clean tone and with the distortion effect. While I was programming the rhythm machine, which was also new to me then, I thought it would be interesting to add strange intro that would have nothing in common with the main body of the tune. With exercising my playful mind, I inserted some rhythm patterns programmed in odd meters and the result is what you hear in the audio track of this video.

She’s Gone

Written in 1989 and 1990 / Recorded in 1996 and 1997

This might be one of the catchiest pop tunes I ever wrote but when the tune was originally written, it was meant to be a part of an unfinished Rock Opera for delivering an assigned story. The initial demo recording was made in the summer 1989 for this purpose, which was later destroyed when the Opera scheme was abandoned later in the same year. Then, attempts to rescue most of the musical ideas used in the botched Opera scheme followed and this tune was re-written as an individual pop song with a different lyric titled She’s Gone and recorded in early 1990. At this stage, I changed the arrangement not to feature any guitar instruments; bass part and solo were all played by the synthesizer.

Since then, the song was never played until I set up my personal recording scheme dubbed as The Soft Core Project, in 1996, to secure some of my well-written compositions from the past to be re-recorded in the finest way I could deliver at that time. Though She’s Gone was picked up for the Project, its Phase 1 stage was affected by my involvement to a newly formed band called School in a negative way so that -as far as this tune concerned - I could not provide the notion of ‘the finest’, in terms of its arrangement. After I was fired from School in the following year, I decided to go back to the Project and to upgrade it to the Phase 2 stage, which inevitably led the scheme to its final stage, Phase 3. She’s Gone was involved in both Phases and several demos were made during this period. The audio track of this video consists of, if my memory serves well, a couple of demo versions I made for the Phase 1 and 3. 

A Bouquet

Written and Recorded in 1995

A short instrumental tune I wrote for the unplugged electric guitar(s). The title was not meant for this particular tune but was taken from an unfinished concept for making an album with my band called Culotte. The concept itself was rather a silly thing that is not worthwhile to be mentioned here. By the time I recorded this demo, I remember Culotte was no longer operational and I was not happy about that. The recording method; to capture the sound of the unplugged electric guitar by microphones, was largely inspired by John Lennon’s My Mummy’s Dead. 

Sad News

Written in 1994 / Recorded in 1994 and 1996

One of my simple compositions consists of only a couple of minor chords. The initial demo was made for my band Culotte in 1994 and later re-recorded under my personal recording scheme I dubbed as The Soft Core Project, which featured the programmed rhythm machine. Both recordings were made relatively in rough ways so that I had to pick up best bits from them in order to make this video. Personally, I like the strings part that concludes the thing in the end. In addition, Despite its title seemingly has something significant, it doesn’t have any political nor social implication at all.

Slow Thing

Written and Recorded in 1986

A short instrumental piece of music I wrote for the Band of Umasans, which I formed and played the guitar from late 1986 to early 1987. I don’t remember how and why I wrote this tune except for a couple of following things; I wanted to try out my knowledge on the usage of tensioned chords I had accumulated by then, and I wanted to play something to pay my tribute to the Oldies music of the 1950s including a recent reminder like Sea of Love by The Honeydrippers. The audio track of this video captured the earliest existing recording of this tune, performed live in front of the audience during the Umasans’ very first live act in December 1986.

Slow Thing remained as one of the repertoires for the Umasans, which later renamed to Flowers, until 1988. Occasionally, we played it at a faster tempo and called it Slow Thing Jam. After the break-up of the band, I first made a demo recording of this tune by myself and enriched the accompaniment with adding the piano and backing guitar tracks. These later versions are yet not bad, for making this video I chose the earliest one that captured the very essence of the tune, which should be played as a ‘slow’ thing.

Madly

Written in 1992 and 1997 / Recorded in 1997

The basic idea for writing this thing originally built up in 1992, being inspired a bit from Going Quietly Mad by Al Kooper, one of my favourite songs at that time. Soon after the initial demo recording was done, I changed my mind to discard its chorus and bridge sections to make the thing smoother and called the resulted work A Beautiful Concept.

While I was planning a conceptual work provisionally called Lost Love Story, I had to revisit the said initial demo and decided to rewrite a new thing based on the discarded pieces. However, my personal circumstance at that time didn’t allow me to take the most efficient way, instead, I wrote further additional piece in order to accommodate enough room for new lyrics, where I could express my contemporary emotion. This time, it was musically inspired by The Village Green Preservation Society by The Kinks, another favourite song coincided with the time of writing this piece. The core elements of A Beautiful Concept are also presented in the guitar solo section due to the conceptual requirement.

For making this video, I have cut off unnecessary repetition in the later part of the audio and removed my voice tracks that delivered the meaningless lyrics, as usual.

(Noises I made) When I was 18 Years Old

Written and Recorded in 1985

The very first recording of my original stuff can be traced back to the summer of 1984, when I was yet a High school student, in a very primitive way by using a couple of cassette recorders. Then I bought a recordable double cassette player, along with additional instruments like a bass guitar and a mini keyboard and continued to record my own materials up to the spring of the following year. 

During the following period, I was so busy that I could not make further demo recordings and by the end of the summer, I decided to destroy all of my past recording materials due to their poor quality.

One autumn day, one of my friends happened to offer me lending his rhythm box for a couple of months so that he could concentrate on studying. When I first saw this so-called rhythm box in his place, I simply thought this must be the item to solve the problem of my personal demo recording, which had been lacking the rhythmic instruments. Within the given period until the end of 1985, I worked hard on writing and recording my own things and a summary of the result is featured in the audio track of this video.