#trackbytrack

SPACE IN THE BLUES (CARL MARSH)

Very often - well, almost always, actually - my first step in building a Shriek song is injecting lyric fragments from a notebook into a sympathetic host groovelet. In this case, I had a few lines, including ‘be not afraid of beauty / do not avoid the light’ and ‘I am shimmer and glare / I am vanishing rare’, both of which made it to the final draught, and the over-arching - and, indeed, over-arch - working title, ’the sum of all our follies’, which didn’t, though it kinda tells you where I was at. So I clearly needed something pretty epic, quite downtempo, dramatic - or even melodramatic - and, the lyrics seemed to be suggesting, something in a 6/8 or 3/4 rhythm. Listening through the 20-30 grooves we’d spawned in our 2-day jamming session in October 2020, I think there was only one candidate with the required 6/8 feel, and, luckily, it fit - sometimes it’s great when there’s no choice: it saves so much time.

The improvisation had been given the working title ‘Space Blues’ because it was, well, spacey and bluesy, with a fair bit of Dave Gilmour-esque echoey guitar noodling. That was soon stripped out; I asked Martyn to send me a cleaned-up version of the drum groove and I started structuring the song over that. However, by the time we were in the rehearsal room in May 2021, I still wasn’t sure where the song was going - I had three distinct sections evolving, all quite promising, but not really unified lyrically or melodically: it sounded like there might actually be two separate songs there. It took a few hours in my hotel room in Eastbourne to get the three melodic/lyric parts to sit together as a unified verse/chorus and then expand the lyric to three verses. I ended up with this big, torch-songish thing where each verse surged unstoppably towards a cliff edge where our overwrought narrator would fall off… or through… what, exactly? I had no idea what that would be until I realised - either through desperation, luck, synergy or the benevolence of the Shriekback über-spirit - that, with a minor tweak, ‘Space Blues’ could become ‘the space in the blues’ and I could fall through that. Yippee: demo vocal recorded on phone, job done.

Except… I had no guitar or keyboard with me that night, so I couldn’t hack out the chord progressions. So the next day I sang it to Barry as we sat around the piano, old-school stylee. Which we hadn’t done for a long time… if ever, come to think of it.  Barry’s first take on it was full-on Berlin/Paris cabaret, which was a hoot but unfortunately didn’t quite work with my melody, so we got it down to the verse/chorus you hear on the record .Barry wrote the middle eight later.

UNHOLINESS (CM)

Like several tracks on the album, Unholiness began as an improvisation in a writing session at Echo Zoo i October ’20. As is a fairly standard practice for us now, - WFH veterans that we are - I sent Martyn some edited clips from the jam which he used to build a drum track which formed the bedrock to develop the song (no change there, then). I put down a rhythm guitar first, for groove and vibe; the next thing to go on, oddly perhaps, was the multi-tracked ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah’ vocal - it was a clear idea I had in my head and defined a certain part of the character of the song, so it went in early, as did the brassy synth part, which picked the bones out of some of Barry’s keys from the improvisation to make a hook. That was enough to sketch out the core vocal/lyrical ideas; I thought these might have to be extensively revised later, but as it turned out they survived pretty much intact. Finally, I had great fun putting on a nifty bass part - so much fun I even posted a video of it (it’s here, should you be following the trail - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkVTWuOqc3M).

So far, so funky. My only reservation was whether I was too far back in the Shriek-funk comfort zone when we had an intention to explore a new landscape of glitchy loops, unpredictable fx and a plugged-in electro-Mart. Hmmm…

Christoph and Martyn excelled putting the drum track together in the studio - the former obsessively swapping snares, changing mics and tuning the kit between practically every take, Martyn playing with impeccable technique and feel. Bang. Christoph was also particularly smitten with a little bit of rhythm guitar I’d left hanging around on the outro of the demo, for its groove and attitude (whatever, dude): that became the source of the dual rhythm guitar parts. Barry put down fabulous keys, mainly some Hammond that managed to both push up the rhythm and swirl into nooks and crannies in the groove. Apart from my disappointment at having my bassline voted out in favour of Scott playing it (“it’s a no-brainer” - bloody cheek!), all was going well.

So, an easy one, right? Well, not quite. Christoph was on a quest for the secret key to unlock the track, whether it was in a rhythm guitar phrase or a Hammond riff, so there was quite a bit of tidal flow. He requested a guitar solo NOW, so I did one, which I wasn’t allowed to redo, so hey, a one-take wonder. That’s what happens if you give someone a Producer hat - great responsibility is handed over, great trust is required. And we got there in the end, sassy Sids’ vocals an’ all.

The track sits in the album either as a funky outlier or as a sort of link back to Shriekback’s core DNA. Either way, it grooves like a mofo.

PORTOBELLO HEAD (Barry Andrews)

'I'm gonna have to dissect my own head'

Well yeah, I think we've all been there. Heads are good - Celtic heads, Riddley Walker (sorry but I insist) 'hedds on poles and ripe for telling'  (also ‘The Head of Orpheus’) and, more geographically apposite - the head of Bran the Blessed who guards London against the oncoming of enemies - now, they say,  buried under Pentonville ('pen' in welsh means ‘head’) Road. And, let's not resist the line of least resistance - the squishy hippy mind set of the pre-Julia Roberts inhabitants of Notting Hill - Portobello Head is a real condition, man..

A comic book thing perhaps - anyway, the point is our hero's sheer abjectness: cock block him, infect him, cuff him to the radiator - truly the dude is on his belly, rolling around on the leatherette in the fumes of burning rubber. What a fucking rotter.

The multi-synth/sampled, mad-as-a-balloon ending was my attempt to respond to Christoph playing us a Franz Ferdinand tune (forgot which) where the standard rocky instrumentation morphs into a technology-driven smeltdown.

In our version I like how a gazillion squirming plastic snakes burst out of the guts of the song and slither off into the night. WTF happened there?

Slowly at First Then All At Once (BA)

…was Hemingway’s reply to the question: ‘how did you go bankrupt?’ Then I heard it applied to the HBO show about Nazis taking over America (no, silly, it was a ‘what-if’ thought experiment set in the 40’s) and I thought that this template - a slow ramp up then a swift ascension, followed by a long decline culminating in a rapid plummet, is the pattern for a whole bunch of things. 

I guess also I was thinking of the Pareto curve - the savage law (or maybe more of a guideline - a savage guideline) that obtains in the pitiless game of Monopoly and, indeed, Life - it explains why most of the vinyl in the world is used by Adele, for instance.

It struck me as interesting that there can be mathematically coherent laws which govern human behaviour just as they define the parameters of physics.  I like maths, I think,  because I really, really don’t understand them (qv. ’37’).

So it’s a very intelligible song for us, I think.  Nice and clear. The music also is pretty trad: those straightforward chords with their hymn-like progression.

Its first encounter with the band had Mart going full-fat Power Ballad on its ass - massive drum sound wreathed in reverb and tubular bells - was it overegging the old pudding, I wondered? Christoph curated the present version, distressing further the already pretty lived-in loop the song was built on (from the Chase Bliss Mood pedal, since you ask, my new bff) and reducing the drums to Mart’s reined-in, best-behaviour brush/soft-beater combo.

The verses, rather like Nemesis, have a bullet point, issue-based organisation to them: 

 V1 is Love: falling/not falling in.. I question the metaphor. Isn’t it more that we suddenly notice it’s there and, heartbreakingly, when it’s not anymore?  As in all these examples there’s usually a catalytic, propulsive event - the Reichstag Fire of Romance, if you will. 

V2 is Nature - in particular the phenomenon of the Last Tree Standing - usually in November in the UK - one lonely, brave-looking fellow has somehow retained a lot of its leaves when all the others have succumbed to winter - clinging poignantly onto the summer as if to say: ‘nothing’s changed really, look - leaves! It’s still kinda August, right?’ Genetically talented or just aerodynamically lucky, he’s on borrowed time, that tree… Winter is, as they say, coming. 

And suddenly, and with one last decisive storm, it’s here.. and all the trees look the same.

V3  - and here come the fascists - I pick a pair of representative tyrants: Ubu Roi - the fictional fat dude with the spiral on his stomach  (merdrrrre was his catchphrase (Eng Trans: 'shitttrrr'). And Mu’ammar (Gaddafi). 

A pair of right little charmers. 

The point, I tried to make in as non-inflammatory way as possible (for after all it is just a pop song) is that - well, you know it by now, if you're ever going to - look after your democracies - they're not, by any means, a given and there are those who are (and how best to say this?) just cunts and we should really try and keep ‘em in check, before they get out of hand.

V4 - this time it's personal - our narrator foetally curled and thumbsucking in the terrible presence of these inexorable laws - contemplates the 'Ultimate Decline': these days very much along the Slowly at First model - you get old, then you get sick, then you go into hospital and you recover but not quite back to where you were before. Repeat for a few times until one day.... it's usually a Fall isn't it? - and then one condition which has tenaciously (albeit precariously) maintained - Being Alive - is instantaneously replaced with... you know - the Other One.

Good Disruption (CM)

This didn’t get its title for a while - it started off as the rather prosaic New Recording 16 - but I did want to try a couple of different things. The twangy, picky, surf-ish guitar tone isn’t one that I use a lot, and I haven’t really pulled out that whiny singing voice since, I dunno, Jam Science? Well, not as a lead vocal, anyway.

I don’t want to go into the lyrics too much here, but I suppose a note would be useful. I had noticed that ‘disruption’ had become a become almost a generic (and generally positive) term for ‘shaking things up’ in almost any context - business, politics, art - and ‘disruptor’ was being self-proclaimed as a title by  those fancying themselves as being on the cutting edge of radical change; I’ve even seen it used in peoples’ LinkedIn profiles. However, it also seemed like a lot of real disruptors weren’t working for the general good, ‘disruption’ in these cases meaning ‘wilfully vandalising existing stable paradigms’ through self-interest, ignorance or hey, just for the hell of it. Yes, I’m talking about you, Donald Trump, amongst others.

Then I found the little parable about the ants in the jar which had sprouted on the internet. Essentiall, it goes:

‘If you put 100 black ants and 100 red ants in a jar, they will co-exist peacefully. However, if someone shakes the jar, they will fight to the death, the black ants thinking the red ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in fact the real enemy is whoever shook the jar.’

You can find this trotted out all over the place to illustrate different conflicts - Black/White, Male/Female, Right/Left etc.. It’s such a neat little picture that no-one seems to care whether it’s actually true or where it first originated. I think I first saw it on a website called The Good Republican, which no longer seems to exist (maybe unsurprisingly), but it’s been attributed to all sorts of people, notably David Attenborough (it definitely wasn’t him). I just found it interesting as an example of how things are spread and appropriated and how the dissemination process becomes a kind of disruption in its own right.

Anyway, back to the studio and, in this case, a relatively straightforward build on Martyn’s once again excellent drums. The guitar sound posed some issues for Christoph, however: he loved the sound on my demo version, which was built in Logic, recreating the pedalboard sound I’d created in the writing room, and he in turn recreated it (ish) in the studio for me to play and expand the parts. I think I liked the result, although the sound was harder and brighter, but Christoph elected to use the parts from the demo, favouring sound over performance, arguably. Somewhere in the mixing process we also effectively lost a synth part I’d put on; having now lived without it for a while, I think that was a mistake, as it leaves the chorus vocal somewhat exposed and unsupported. (You just get a taste of it right at the end, pretty much the last thing you hear.) It’s that Producer trust/responsibility thing again…

To make up for that, we get some fabulous keyboards - squiggly synth and groovy, atmospheric organ: Barry’s not a Manzarek fan at all, but he gets his Doors on here. And of course The Sids, gamely chanting along to the, erm, disrupted middle vocal section, straight-faced but flexible. An interesting tangent, then, but worth pursuing further…? We’ll see, I suppose…

EVERYTHING HAPPENS SO MUCH (BA)

'That might as well happen' says Ryan George the Youtube comic as his Hollywood script writer pitches plots at his (thinly disguised doppelganger) movie executive. Every far fetched and arbitrary thing that happens might as well (happen).

https://youtu.be/PrAT_ncXr7M

Reality, of course, does not flinch from arbitrariness or ridiculously impausible content. A commonplace comment over the last few years has come in these variations: 'if this was in a film you'd say it was too over the top/on the nose/ downright unbelievable.' 

I mean check this out:

‘The conspiracy theorists behind Frazzledrip believe that Hillary Clinton and former Clinton aide Huma Abedin were filmed ripping off a child’s face and wearing it as a mask before drinking the child’s blood in a Satanic ritual sacrifice. Supposedly, the Hillary Clinton video was later found on the hard drive of Abedin’s former husband, Anthony Weiner, under the code name ‘Frazzledrip’.

So yeah. The wheels have come off on the Crazy Train, people. So, it’s no wonder that our poor narrator is driven to consult (in the bridge section) his spirit guide or an oracle to get a bit of perspective.

The whole tune was extrapolated from the little Mood pedal loop with which it begins - started off as a piano, as I recall. Really is paying for itself, that thing..

Different Story (CM)

This, the most ‘pop’ song on the album, started from Barry’s catchy little piano riff. It’s essentially a boy-meets-girl ditty, about how that’s a timeless story and yet different for everyone. What’s been different during the past couple of years, of course, is that boy couldn’t meet girl. That lack of personal contact has left story arcs hanging, and it’s become apparent that that narrative is not only a description of reality but somehow part of its fabric, so removing it has left a bigger hole than we perhaps would have expected. We have filled it in remotely, by Zoom and social media and by creating our own internal stories, but the lack of human face-to-face interaction has left a huge disconnect for some. In this song it’s the young: I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be so isolated when I was, what, 20-21 - there may not have been a Shriekback, for a start!.So the pop song is followed by a reflective passage about the ways we create and modify our stories and, through those, our realities, with a respectful nod to those we’ve loved and lost in these strange times.

Musically, the initial groove was developed into a loping, rattling thing that for a while clattered along so happily that it was the longest track on the record, until it was reeled in to an appropriate length for its pop status and is now the shortest track on the album. Still, there’s always a remix…

There was some sparring around the bassline - whenever Barry worked on the track he took out my bass guitar and used the keyboard bass; I did the opposite. Eventually we worked out the plot for a hybrid, switching between the two for different sections: a risky strategy, but it works. For the big chorus chord progression I decided not to do my usual Big Chord trick, but went for sharp chords cutting across instead. I sort of wish now that I’d done both: there’s a reason I always use that trick… oh well. The Sids are on point, of course - quite unusual choices, intriguingly dodging the obvious.

Now the story starts again…

1000 Different Books (CM)

This trippy thing emerged from improvisations using loops and atmospherics generated by the battlestar of new hardware that Barry auditioned, accumulated and harnessed during lockdown (quite obsessively, really, but someone’s gotta do it). From the start, it seemed to resist the structuring that we imposed on other tracks, going a different way every time we played it, so much so that we decided to let it be the only one that would continue to be developed through improvisation in the studio. If I may quote myself from a recent interview (indulgent, perhaps, but I think this nails it): “I’m usually fine with this idea, but in this case I sort of lost my nerve, mainly because it was too hard to develop a lyric and vocal over such a random piece… and, unlike the early days, we didn’t have unlimited time to follow ideas through. So it was structured, although there was more improvisation and layering than on some other tracks. At various points we had extensive piano sorties, a fair bit of feedback guitar, then it got reeled into what you hear. I really like the organic shifts in tone and rhythm, and how the drums work in a way you might not immediately think of as a Shriekback groove.”

1000 Different Books clocks in as the longest track on the record. I thought about shortening it, but again the organism resisted - I tried editing out the second verse (“rolling back the mind…”), the only lyric I considered potentially expendable, but a simple edit damaged the organic development of the track underneath: an actual remix would have been required, and we’d gone beyond the time and budget for that, so we have 5:19 of sonic evolution to live with forever. Nice.

The title, as you may already know by now, comes from a quotation from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sculpting In Time - “A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books”, which seemed appropriate not only for the alternative realities of our fractured times but for the multiple interpretations that any Shriekback release inevitably attracts (me reading reviews: “oh, so that’s what I was on about”). In this case, it’s a reflection along the lines of ‘what have we done with all this time, why are we still here, what’s next?’, a coda of sorts to Space In The Blues: we cry into the future, but at least there is a future.

WILD WORLD (BA)

Wild World was a bit of a turn-up - right at the end written very quickly with no big struggles (see also: Exquisite Corpse, Bernadette, Hubris) - like it just wanted to burst out. So weird how that happens and yeah, a gift. From.... our boiling interiors, the Universe? She-Ra? Wotan?

We may never know..

The use of the vocoder - completely unplanned - was just from improvising with the Big Rig (the coral reef of quirky musical equipment accreting and mutating constantly in my living room) and the way it lets me sound prettier than I can can usually sound (v much as on 'Evaporation' from Care). It was the prosthetic I needed, clearly.

How it becomes alien and impersonal like Laurie Anderson's answering machine was not really intended - I worry that it's a screen to hide behind but I wasn't about to fuck around with it since it obviously - on one level anyway - 'worked'.

My son Finn's song 'One Piece at a Time' was an influence - that idea of a beneficent, forgiving world - and the Martin Amis notion (from 'The Information') that pretty much everywhere in the Universe would kill you in seconds if you went there but this place doesn't - that's a very elemental kind of love isn't it?

'God's World' by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) should also get a shout-out:

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!

   Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!

   Thy mists, that roll and rise!

Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag

And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag

To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!

World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,

                   But never knew I this;

                   Here such a passion is

As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear

Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year;

My soul is all but out of me,—let fall

No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

EVERYTHING NOT SAVED WILL BE LOST PART 2

i listened to the youtube thing but tried to zone out for p2 part and comments, distractions etc.

1.Red Desert - this is epic. this is like pharoah entrance theme music.

2.The Runner - SHADOW! SEE! HOW! FAR! I! GO! love this song. the way yannis sings down..you know what i mean? like his voice is going downstairs? he does it on sunday too its so nice. this song is the correct length. oh shit that guitar bit i almost forgot. what a song

3.Wash Off - da kine. this has got a real beach cave party thing goin on. this is very talking heads, that lil riff. oh ya this is fun, this gonna be gooood live. oooh this ending all floaty

4.Black Bull - we already know but gadamn thats a tune HUH and i thought syrups was sexy

5.Like Lightning - BIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTCCHH uhuh this shit bananas b a n a n a s . Im all for this cadence and swing. this is fuckin rude and i love it

ps Jack is so dope i swear to god. his rhythm is IT

6.Dreaming Of - this feels sad or full of loss oh shit its a i thought it was an interlude ok hey Yannis is a genius, we all in agreeance there right?

7.Ikaria - oh. idk what happened to me but im all affected by piano anymore. and wow.

8.10,000 Ft. - this is the entirety of 90/early00s rock feel. no disrespect. im really bei ahhhhh no this reminds me of. this reminds me of something. holy shit this song is amazing ahhhhHHHHHHH im so in love with foals right now. that yell!??? I, plz

9.Into The Surf - that shaky noise, such a sad frequency. that in the night part gaah this song is magic. this song is like when you can feel your physical definitions fading

10.Neptune - give me that extra 3 now. this song could never end.

Whoa. i know what they meant by heavier.

hello perfect people!

it feels so lovely to be able to have somewhere i am able to (badly) articulate my thoughts and indulge in myself, so what better way to kick this off than a track by track of the results of my biggest self-indulgence of the past year right?

this is only going to be part 1 as i feel i'll have a fair bit to say, so let's split the tracks down the middle and do 4 at a time :)

TRACK 1: So Lonely

This was not the first or second pick for the intro to the album I'll admit. The first one existed before most of the other songs on the album, and was comprised of a monologue from Serial Experiments Lain and strings sampled from the Saw soundtrack. I felt it was a little too on the nose for what I was trying to convey with the themes of webspace and isolation throughout, but now the albums out I do sometimes wonder if it would've been a better pick lol. The second version is technically the same song as the one released, but is the original restored version of it. It's actually a full 1 minute 30 rap song with 2 verses over a sort of ambient boom bap beat (the same present in the studio version, just higher and less distorted). I didn't really feel like starting an album that is predominantly singing with a full rap song was the best choice, but adored the beat enough to want to savour it. I've always loved Chopped n Screwed style music and the culture around it, and thought it would be a really interesting experiment to emulate that style on one of my own songs. I actually think that it ended up turning out really cool, I think having this as the intro really cements the place of songs like Seethrough and Plug Me In amidst the more pop tones of Phoenix and HITSOAG. Maybe one day I will release the restored version of it, but it won't be with any major promotion.

TRACK 2: ily2

ily2 was not the first song made for Perfect Lu (although it is the first song made for it that actually made it on the album) but it is absolutely the song that solidified that this was a project I wanted to flesh out fully. At the end of the Summer of 2023, I had the opportunity to work on my good friend Kaeli-i's album "Scheda Madre", mixing the entire album and producing a few songs throughout (Bye being the notable production of mine). Whilst working on one of the songs that unfortunately didn't make it onto the album titled (WIP) "80s Kaeli", I became captivated by an extremely catchy melody in a one off adlib towards the end of the song. I continued working on it, but couldn't get it out of my head. I decided that I would export that little vocal riff to a new Ableton project and just have a quick play around and see what came to mind. I made most of the ily2 beat in the next 20 minutes. This song was the one that made me realise I wanted to take Perfect Lu in a much more diverse direction than strictly a trip-hop inspired album, and my growing nostalgia for the era of Cloud Rap at the time too began to influence Perfect Lu to have some more modern leaning conventions. ily2 since its initial inception was just undoubtedly going to be one of the singles for me that, if I ever had/have a chance to be a "one hit wonder" before, it would be for this song. The beat is admittedly quite simple, relying mostly on it's percussive rhythm and the general "vibe". I feel as though my production often leans minimal and I don't really have a problem with that at all, but for ily2 specifically I wanted to transition to a different palette of sounds for the second verse to relieve the listeners ears of a somewhat monotonous sound. I think ily2 probably encapsulates the general sound of Perfect Lu the best on the whole album, it has elements of both the modern and nostalgic feel laced throughout the other songs and ties it all up in a confectionary sweet hook. I am immensely proud of this song.

TRACK 3: Plug Me In

At this point I'm pretty comfortably into my 20s, and yet the idea of writing a "sex song" still makes me very uncomfortable. Despite the irony that my vocal delivery absolutely leans into sultry, intimate whispers actually tackling the subject of sex and physical intimacy still feels a bit awkward to me. Despite that, lu202 as an entire concept and the embodiment of it on this project isn't particularly shy about longing for intimacy and touch, but being able to detach myself from having to actually think about my own intimacy for metaphor instead was nice for me lol. This song starts with a sample of Chii from Chobits reading an extract from "A City With No People". Chobits as an entire concept with the question of what quantifies humanity and the ability to be compassionate is a theme that I wanted to explore subtly throughout Perfect Lus' lyrical content, so including a sample from it was a nod to the deeper themes of the album for anybody in the know. I also just really love Chobits, huge guilty pleasure anime of mine (shoutout to Rico Nasty for putting me on). The beat to this song is relatively straight forward, being a 202 take on a contemporary R&B offer. The piano chords that power through everything else really make the song for me, and I feel as though it is a highlight for my vocal melody craft also. I'm really proud of the second verse! I would love to incorporate more R&B elements into the 202 atmosphere, but unfortunately with it comes the pressure to really sing. I am not sure if I am qualified to do that, but this song is a real vocal moment for me that I am satisfied with. Also, the other more blatant sample was a total accident. I immediately knew it was from something but did have to look it up. I felt as though the song fit into the time-frame and general concept well enough, so left my accidental thievery in. Fergie did it better.

Track 4: Risk It All