Life of My Own

Written in 1988 and 2015 / Recorded in 1988 and 2015

When I began my personal recording by making use of the multitrack recorder for the first time in my life in summer 1988, I already had some ideas for this unique and new activity for me. I wanted to record some of my old stuff that had no opportunity to be recorded in a proper way. In a meanwhile, I was also fascinated for writing new materials and one of them must be a long stuff that could fill the half side of a 46-minute cassette tape. I had been accustomed to listening to such attempts since I was 15 years old when I first bought an album by Mike Oldfield, but most recently, I was given a kick-ass from the side two of the Todd Rundgren's Utopia album, filled with a long track called The Ikon.

The ideas I used in my first attempt for writing a long composition have been mostly accumulated for a few years by the time of recording. Nonetheless, when I began writing and recording simultaneously, in terms of the structure of the composition, all I had in my mind was merely a rough image so that I had to struggle to find a way through track by track, part by part... The result was, needless to say, not bad but no more than that. If I could take a time for planning the entire structure before beginning to work, the result must have been quite different.

For making this video, I made some changes for reducing meaningless repetition and that inevitably required to add some new recordings. Despite the audio quality of the original demo is obviously lowered due to the passing of the time, I think I did justice to my first serious work with these additional new pieces.