The Outer Realms

Commentary The Outer Realms

This loosely reflects ‘the outer realms of my mind/and the edges I don’t often go to’.. I’ve always allowed my mind to go any direction in my quest for musical creatine. Although with time - one needs to place different boundaries to prevent chaos.  All the sounds are reflective of events or beliefs in my mind.  They are like my ‘pet sounds’.. I am drawn to this combination of sounds for my sound palette.

The piece reflects various moods, processes and motifs that have happened to me.

I spend  time on the Ringo Starr drum/orchestral percussion fills;  rather than rely on on steady drumming. The use of only fills allows me to include more musical matter without the piece getting too dense.

I again used various, sound rooms, halls or no reverb, or room acoustics.  I wanted different instruments to be coming from different environments. I realize too often in conventional music I get ‘stuck’ on the sound of the hall, or reverb that was used. To me, it often overpowers or dilutes the emotion of the notes of various instruments. I also feel the different acoustic environments on different instruments, adds to the quality of the piece in that it is ‘un-natural’ although concsciously most listeners will not be aware of it. I feel it also adds to the impact of different unanticipated sounds, instruments, thus setting up the listener’s mind for something different.

Like most of my pieces lately.. I start with a chord progression, generally a generic piano chording track. working on pacing, complexity of chords etc, As  piece evolves, I sometimes used chord substitutions,/more complex forms of chord, so the piece doesn’t have clear repeatable sections .  As I create the piece, I take the chord track out, other instruments play notes that alter what the original chord would have been.. I develop melodies, motifs, and harmonies, sometimes altering, what the original chords were, or making them  more complex.

Some of the tracks don’t have a real ‘pitch center’s or are complex UVI or Kontakt libraries, with arpeggios or built ing sequences (some quite subtle).  So these are notated on bottom of staff as a percussion type instrument.  Logic’s pitch detection, can’t isolate these notes accurately, nor do I have perfect pitch - so i don’t have accurate notes for these tracks.  Besides a piece needs some mystery to it.

Although this piece has more of a ‘jam’ quality to it, some instruments get to stretch out and improvise, etc. I am not concerned with tradition structural forms at this point.  So it is a musical ‘landscape’ piece’. one might say.  I enjoy the meandering and exploring nature, rather than predictable musical devices.

I was discussing with a fellow artist, my age, how he sometimes being new and creative hard.  He feels confined by all the musical rules and processes he knows, and it get’s hard to ‘think outside the box’.  I notice in my life, how my thinking gravitates towards, rigidity and rules, in all aspects of life, rather than blindly experiment with the unknown -  which was a frequent technique I used in my youth.

Piece is 9:35 - so sit down, relax..

Back to this piece...

It's been a wonderfu experience to follow the score while listening to the music. It's like a big puzzle of sounds. I love the way you combina so many elements and sounds, and hoy sometimes you make the music very thin... Big work....