The Rotten Brains

Written and Recorded in 1990

A brief instrumental one-chord-jam I wrote - or rather simply recorded - for my personal rendition of Pictures at an Exhibition, a very famous classical work by Modest Mussorgsky. The first attempt I made on playing its main theme Promenade with a rock band goes back to 1986 when I played the guitar part live on stage as a trio called the Band of Umasans. Four years later, when I formed a new trio band called The Rotten Brains, it was a unanimous willingness among us for challenging to play Promenade by only three of us. This further encouraged me to conceive if we could play the entire suite. I thought it would be definitely worth to try and began to arrange the entire suite, originally written for piano, for us to play. During the demo recording of the arranged works, an idea popped up for inserting a brief 'original' material for bridging the end of the entire first half and the beginning of the second half, more precisely; between the end of Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle and Promenade allocated as 'reprise' in a modern term. Because of its bridging function, I called it Intermezzo and since it was meant to be played by the three of us, I dubbed the name of the band as the title of the track.

Unfortunately, the idea of playing the entire suite met a quite reluctance, especially from the bass player, and the band broke up while rehearsing some pieces from my rendition.

Untitled #4

Written in 1992 and 1996 / Recorded in 1996

Basic pieces of this tune were originally written in 1992 for enhancing another tune I wrote months earlier for my band called Elegance. However, the resulted work failed to meet my satisfaction so that I decided not to use the additional pieces whenever the song was played later on. The discarded pieces were later discovered for my personal recording scheme I dubbed as The Soft Core Project and recorded in this way.