eponymous 4

The four-day Thanksgiving holiday weekend was just the right length of time to get a lot of work done. In addition to touching up the last few tracks of Original Confidence, I slammed through some initial remixes for Imprint.

Some of the mixes online right now are incomplete, and of course, I'll be tweaking them endlessly from now until time eternal.

At first, I thought I would be remodeling these tracks in the similar fashion I redid Restraint, but I found myself backtracking, even attempting to preserve a lot of elements in the original mixes.

The material calls for it -- the style of music on Imprint requires a more solid sense of rhythm than I can provide, so parts that I could conceivably play live, I've left to the machines. Except for the acoustic guitar parts. At some point, I'm going to have to face those.

But not on "Choices". This track was one of the last I wrote for Imprint. I vowed at first to stop writing when I reached 10 tracks, but the album felt as if it were missing something. I thought about the bass line to Sade's "Paradise", and I wanted to get that kind of feel. It ended up being "Choices".

I pretty much changed the drums and the guitar sample on this track. Nothing else was really touched from the original mix.

Listen to "Choices"

— Posted Dec 02, 2011 07:15:40

It's taken me six years to develop enough working knowledge about audio engineering to do some of my early demos justice.

At various points in the past, I've posted audio files of a cassette tape that survived a burglary in 1998, in which I lost all my early 4-track demos. The transfer to digital was never satisfactory, mostly because I lacked the equipment and know-how to do it right.

As a result, I've always considered that lone surviving tape as something of a bastard child, and I would always wince when friends would say they listened to it. The demos are crude in the way that dated technology makes it thus, and it doesn't help matters when the sound quality is crap.

But two weeks ago, I gave the tapes another go, this time applying copious amounts of multi-band compression to clarify some parts and to mitigate others.

It definitely helped.

In fact, it's making me reconsider tracks I relegated to the dustbin. One such track is something I've given the working title of "Acid Vogue". I was trying to co-opt the drum beat of Madonna's "Vogue" into something I thought qualified for acid house. Not that I knew what acid house was -- I just knew Duran Duran was influenced by it during the Big Thing sessions.

It's more Depeche Mode than anything else. I still don't know what to do with this track. Maybe nothing at all.

Listen to "Untitled (Acid Vogue)"

— Posted Nov 28, 2011 23:03:29

Back in 2008, I sent out a "Christmas card" to 10 select people -- a compilation of Eponymous 4 demos. It was the greatest hits that weren't yet hits, and the first drafts with any sort of vocal tracks.

It's now the holiday season of 2011, and that "Christmas card" has undergone some major revisions. Where there were samplers pretending to be guitars, there are now guitars (and basses as well.) Samplers are still posing as drummers, but the samples sound slightly more human. I've also replaced a two tracks, replacing a Japanese-language cover with an English-language cover and a piano piece with the semi-title track from 「風の歌を聴け」.

I gave this compilation the title Original Confidence as a tongue-in-cheek gesture, naming it after the Japanese version of the Billboard charts.

Have a listen, won't you? Here's a track called "Go".

Listen to "Go"

— Posted Nov 25, 2011 05:15:10