Dodeskjeggen!

So I’ve started jamming with some old high-school friends, Jason and Ed. What is most crucial about this new band is that I keep my drumming chops up. Since the indefinite hiatus of Grave-Robbing Extravaganza, I’ve only had my own desire and will to force me to keep practicing. While that’s taken me a long way in the last few months, I feel like drumming in a band again will force me to work even harder at overcoming some hurdles.

With that in mind, I’ve also made a concerted effort to improve my ability to create industrial sounds and grooves on the fly with my Electribe EMX-1 and my microKorg. I’m slated to perform a live industrial set and DJ at my friend Sam’s wedding this coming Halloween, so I’m under a bit of pressure to nail down that aspect of performing. It’s good though, because I feel like I’m compelled to work a lot harder knowing I have some sort of deadline (much in the same way I use this blog as a motiviational tool to keep me working hard).

Finally, Lewis and I have been refining our little progressive electro project to the point where we’re jamming less for the sake of jamming and more for refining ideas and phrases that we’ve come up with in the past. I’ve more or less hammered out a big chunk of the song structure and how I want to arrange things. The two artists I’ve taken the most insirpation from regarding this project are Klaus Schulze, Zombi, and John Carpenter.

According to Wikipedia, the Klaus Schulze album “X” which I’ve listened to extensively for ideas and as a reference point for composing music was designed as a collection of musicial biographies. Of all of the tracks on the album I like, Frank Herbet is undoubtedly my favorite. It features a very brooding electro atmosphere that builds upon grooves and subtle harmonic changes, supported by a simple-yet-effective rock drum beat. The end result comes off as sounding like an electronic krautrock piece, which I suppose is to be expected given the circumstances of Klaus Schulze’s musical surroundings. He was also involved in the German electronic group Tangerine Dream for a period of time.

Zombi is an amazing progressive rock duo from Pittsburgh that I think all of you should check out if you get the chance. They’re comprised of a bassist and a drummer who both program synthesizers to create very intense electronic soundscapes, and they do it with style, too! They often will play in odd time signatures, including 7/8 and 5/4. The funny thing about 7/8 is that it sounds like common time (just about any rock song you’ve ever heard is in this), but like something is just slightly off and you can’t put your finger on it. Oh yeah, they have also cite John Carpenter as a huge influence of theirs.

John Carpenter is the acclaimed B movie hollywood director who’s famous for taking shoe-string budgets and creating top-notch camp. He also composes all of the music for his movies. To me, the two most inspiring compositions of his are the soundtracks to Big Trouble In Little China and Escape From New York. Similar to what Klaus Schulz was doing, John Carpenter’s trademark sounds are driving rock grooves and synthesizer melodies. While I admit his work at times can come off as amateurish, I don’t see this as a problem. On the one hand, it’s the overall sound that truly matters, and his music is the perfect soundtrack for the distopian future-of-the-80’s seen in “Escape.” On the otherhand, I must remind myself that I am also just an amateur, and all things being relative, I probably sound like worse than John Carpenter. John being able to do what he does with his film scores gives me hope.

I took 5 minutes of the first half of our jam session last night and tweaked it inside of Ableton Live to give produce a sound very similar to “Frank Herbert.” Lewis is probably going to bitch at me to take this down, but hey, I’m proud of the progress we’ve made and I’d like to record as much of the development of this project as possible.