#dureforever

The complexity of this film has exploded into the realm of madness.   In the delicate house of cards that is this story, any minor change can make the whole thing collapse.   Yet the recent changes were anything but minor.  It’s the equivalent of adding two new suits to a deck.

Without revealing too much - the biggest change is that Burn will no longer treat Dure Forever as sacred.  It will cannibalize its parent and will attempt to make the best film ever, regardless of the TV show/book.

Secondly and perhaps more significantly, the show will leave rock ‘n roll behind.  Yes, the film that made the bold declaration of wanting to make “the quintessential rock film” is not just moving away from rock, but going in the opposite direction.

What does that mean?  

Well, rock ‘n roll ain’t what it used to be.   Rather than use precious minutes to combat or reinforce rock cliches, this film will be leaving all that behind and attempt instead to make the sáz film.   Sáz is to rock as rock is to folk.  Simply put, it makes rock sound like kumbaya.

This change is significant - it will resolve a lot of anachronisms without changing the story.

Secondly, bringing sáz in instead of rock could allow us to replace jazz as well.  Maša and Dariuš could share their music as can the folk singers in the film.  Sáz in all its forms, from jazz-like to punk-like, from folk-inspired to thrash-leaning, is more of a smooth gradient and fluidness between the different songs than the banding and clear-cut borders of every piece.

Although color banding is an intentional choice employed in this film, the reason behind this is an aesthetic and stylistic one.   We want to keep the image simple, but everything else is complex.   So while the similar colors may band, the story, dialogue, sound, scenes and experiences all blend smoothly from one to another.  

Don’t worry.  It’s not dream blends into reality and you’re not sure which is which.  We’ve seen enough of those.

A starína (pronounced stareena) is the story of a song, what it’s about, how it was composed or how it came to be.

In Russian, a starína or bylína is an epic poem of heroes and legends.   The word bylína comes from the verb byt’ (to be) - i.e. “something that was”, while starína comes from the word star, meaning old, i.e. stories of antiquity.

We no longer have epic stories (besides Leicester winning the league) or many legendary heroes, but we do have a lot of stars.   So we’re taking the word starína to mean the star stories - a star telling a story = starína.   Close enough, right?

 Instead of a song or poem telling us about a legendary star of the past, we have a star of the present telling us about a song in the past.

 "I try to make thrisk, not genim.”  

Strange words, but I’ll explain.  Music composition deals with a lot of things that are abstract, concepts such as “heaviness,” “grooviness,” “bluesy-ness” are internal lingo with a shared meaning that is difficult to explain or quantify.  

Even words like “rock” and “metal” popped out of nowhere.

But all these define a piece of music outwardly - we use these words to refer to a particular piece of music in relation to other pieces of music, the library of songs in the wild.

Genim and thrisk are internal words, they describe the relationship of a song with the band.

Genim (which means “wheat” in Kurdish) is a single, original piece of music by a single band member.   Solo albums are usually genim, but many bands produce genim.  To cite a famous example, Pink Floyd’s “The Final Cut” is Roger Waters’ genim.  It’s pure Rogers, uncut.  

The problem with genim is that sometimes it’s not good.  Sometimes it’s good, but adding something trivial can make it so much better.   Raw chocolate is not good.   Black chocolate is not for everyone, a few people like it and most don’t mind it.  It’s just okay.   But milk is a small thing that can take black chocolate and make it milk chocolate, something that almost everyone loves, not likes, not doesn’t mind, but loves.   People don’t love milk.  People don’t love black chocolate.  But people love milk chocolate.

Milk, in this example, is what we call tarrigan (which means ‘rye’ in Kurdish.)   Wheat and rye, crossbred, make wheat-rye, triticale.  

This agricultural analogy is important.  We could’ve used an easier example like milk chocolate or caffè latte, or an alloy like steel, but they’re not as good - they only tell half the story.

Triticale (or wheat-rye) combines the yield and quality of wheat and the environmental and disease tolerance of rye.  In other words, it’s silk and steel.

We called wheat-rye (which sounds like “we try”) the Middle English word wheteryġe, which evolved into trydge.   A synonym for trydge is surgique (despite the French-looking spelling, this word is Ukrainian and it means mixed-grain [wheat+rye] bread).   Trydge is when two songwriters put their heads together (and their differences aside) to make something that’s better than their solo efforts.  The metallic meets the melodic, the depressive, introverted meets the political extroverted, the experimental meets the virtuoso.

First generation trydge, as the sound of the word suggests, is messy.   Just like first generation triticale, which was grown for fodder.   Many bands try to make some trydge, but give up at the first attempt and start making “band” albums with 12 genim pieces in which there is no collaboration.   The album becomes a compilation album of 4 solo artists, great in 4 ways, but flawed in many - imagine a great rhythmic drum song with terrible music and lyrics, an instrumental that’s just a vehicle for an amazing guitar solo, a great song that has no drums or guitar solo or a spoken-word piece that’s just a political message yelled through a megaphone.   A glass of milk, a shot of espresso, a shot of whipped cream, 2 cubes of sugar and cocoa powder, but God forbid you put them together.  

The reason why bands give up is that the trydge could sound terrible at first.  Whipped cream and milk is not a great mix.   You can’t expect instant results.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it needs more work.  The thing about genim is that it is refined.  A white sugar cube, as primary as it is, is a finished product.  It has been through so many stages, from sugar cane to sugar cube.  Same with the shot of espresso.  When you compare first generation trydge to genim, the genim may appear better.

Sometimes the genim doesn’t even need tarrigan.  It doesn’t need to be misked.  That’s also true.  If the song is stellar, then there’s no need to misk anything in or mess it up.   Why fix what ain’t broken?

But most songs aren’t stellar.   Even my best songs could use a tarrigan, they’re too Kennish, too Marlovian, too much me.  Iron is good, but steel is better.

And this is where the agricultural analogy comes back in.  The twist.  Modern day triticale is not the trydge of wheat and rye.   Triticale is a hybrid of wheat-rye and wheat-rye.  Two kinds of wheat-rye.  A hybrid of a hybrid.  It is a trydge of trydge.  That’s what we call thrisk.  

Thrisk (from Trisk: Triticosecale, influenced by thresh to become thrisk) is what you want, not trydge.  Trydge is an intermediary product.  It’s when a guitarist introduces a song to a singer, who writes lyrics and vocal lines for it.   That initial collaboration is trydge.  But thrisk is more than that.  Thrisk is when they each take this finished song, take it home and work on it separately.   There is no “this is my part, that’s your part.”   It’s all one.  There is nothing sacred about it.  Anything can change, anything can be thrown out.  You wrote the song for a girl called Tina?  Well now it’s about Anna.  It was a love song?  Now it’s about war.   It was in E minor?  Now it’s in C# minor.  Acoustic?  Now it’s electric.  

Just like how a DJ remixes a song, misking is the mixing of the song in the composition stage, not in the finished and recorded stage.   An electronic remix, however, is still in many ways trydge.  It is one DJ, taking someone’s genim, and adds his own tarrigan in the form of beats, tempo change, key shift and synth.

Thrisk is when you turned that sad, slow E-minor song for Tina into a fast, angry C# song about Anna, only to find out that the other member made his own drastic changes.  Thrisk is not just accepting the changes, it’s adding even more changes to them, rejecting some, being rejected and fighting for the survival of parts.

That’s what triticale is - it’s not just bred for taste, it’s bred to be a survivor - disease, pests, cold, and anything thrown at it.   That’s what thrisk is.   Every parent thinks their child is special.   Some may even be special, but thrisk is the grandchild outshining its parents and uncles and aunts.

Think of Pink Floyd - great band.  Listen to Roger Waters’ solo works.  Meh.  Listen to David Gilmour’s.   It’s okay.  But listen to Pink Floyd - it’s better than the sum of its parts.  But know that behind these songs was so much work, so many arguments and discussions, studio wars really.   An unchallenged Roger made The Final Cut, and listen to it.   It was so genim that Roger threatened to release it as a solo record. 

So what do you do if you’re a solo artist, if there’s no other songwriter in your band?  What do you misk your genim with?  How does a single songwriter make thrisk?    Well, multiple songwriters isn’t needed, but multiple personality disorder sure could help.  haha.  But on a more serious note, it’s definitely possible, but it takes time and creativity.  The other songwriter is a product of a lifetime of experiences, ideas, memories and thoughts.  When he suggests an idea, that idea is the result of years of musical thought.  It’s your years + his years added together that creates the blend.   So what your music needs is time.  

From my own perspective, I feel that my music is too me, too Marlovian.  As multidimensional it is, it’s many dimensions of the same thing - like the many sides of a sugar cube.  However you look at it, it’s still a sugar cube.

I don’t have any co-writer for any of my songs, so I have to be my own tarrigan.  I have to get out of my own skin, be someone else and hear the music as another person would.  

My Nirvana Playlist

Reflections

This is sort of two topics in one, but they’re related and this image above captures the intersection of these two ideas perfectly - an optical illusion, a play of light toying with your eyes and your mind.   Although one can make auditory illusions, they’re not that great sounding or that musical, the only trickery one is left with is wordplay.

By wordplay I don’t mean “So Far, So Good... So What?” (Although a great name for an album) I mean something along the lines of Slayer’s “Reign in Blood” with the last song being “Raining Blood.”

It’s not very subtle wordplay, but it does not need to be subtle.  It’s powerful.  The album name is perfect (as is the artwork) and the title Raining Blood is the perfect name for the last song with lyrics like:

Raining blood From a lacerated sky Bleeding its horror

Megadeth had similar wordplay.   Their album “Rust in Peace”, already a play on words, was followed by a video release called “Rusted Pieces.”  

This technique comes not from rock, but from punk, but I can’t recall any other famous examples, punk or otherwise.

Some non-famous examples are:

“Up the Ante” and “Up the Auntie”  “Heir to the Throne” and “Air to the Throne” “Band from the West” and “Banned from the West”

It’s better if the two songs are musically or lyrically related and not just named so as a pun.   

Some bands put these pairs back to back, in the middle of the album:

Dawn of Darkness Scourge Shallow Graves Heir to the Throne Air to the Throne War of Attrition Blood on the Ice Next Victim

It creates a nice symmetry to the album.

Others, such as Saint Punk, use the pair to open and close the album:

Weekend Squad Goalmouth Tossers Day I Was Born Born Has-Beens People For Sale Wannabe Nobodies Free Kick Dummies Weakened Squad

Long story short - for many artists the album is the complete work of art.  It is not just a random assortment of songs sold together, but songs specifically recorded together because they’re related to each other in one way or another.  Even if it’s not a theme album, even if the songs are written years apart with very different lyrics about disparate things, albums from great artists have an invisible spine that runs through the songs and holds them together.  

One of the defining songs of Neverdays.   

One of the music videos from that album had a scene in which I take a sledgehammer and smash the Neverdays mosaic tiles to pieces.   Ironically, I broke my arm before I was able to film that scene ending both the Neverdays music video project and the recording of Indifférement Différents.

Broken schedules, broken bones and incomplete projects.  

Neverdays, the only complete project I have, is the one I want to shatter.  I’m breaking it into pieces and using the fragments to build new songs and new albums.

When I started this blog, I was trying to document my absurd journey in trying to write 80 bridge sections for 80 songs.

But musical journeys are just like real life road trips - expect anything to happen.  While trying to write a bridge, I accidentally wrote a song.  Things like that happen.  Very often.  That’s how you end up with 80 songs with no bridges, or a whole album without lyrics and so on.   While it’s important to focus and finish one thing rather than building new projects all the time, it is futile to prevent the flow of creativity from streaming.