Another one of those songs where I let my unconscious take over, which improves my productivity, but not without certain difficulties.

I originally intended it to be a song about hating school, or more specifically having hated school, but I suspect it's become slightly more sinister.

Anyway, basic tracks recorded towards the end of 2008, it was supposed to be one of the tracks I was going to do the vocals for with Juan, but the lyrics didn't quite get finished. Early-ish 2009 I added the strings, which made me very happy. Then they lyrics came in a bit of a splurge, and I recorded them last weekend. I think. And the guitar solo I did immediately before uploading it, largely because I'd forgotten to do it. I listened to see whether it would have been better minimalist, without anything, but I don't think so, really.

Mufti day was... perhaps still is... a tradition at school* - essentially for a fee (that went to charity) pupils could come in on that day not wearing school uniform. Because of my inherent resistive nature, and because I'd managed not to wear school uniform anyway,** I didn't actually do this.

Another one that was a chord progression and a title for a very long time. I don't know why lyrics lag behind the rest of the song so much. It's worth thinking about, perhaps.

*I'm sure you know this. This explanation is for the benefit of Martians, and the Chinese bots that seem to enjoy my site so much.

**Broadly speaking. I wore something that usually looked like school uniform, but didn't actually adhere to the rules. I was never challenged, which I found extraordinary, since I never even had an official school tie. Sometimes I wore the school tie of a different school. Actually I was challenged once, when I wore a black shirt and a flourescent yellow tie. It was suggested to me that that wasn't official school uniform and I had to agree. The following day I returned to wearing a plain black tie. I don't know if they didn't notice or whether they just didn't want to cause a scene, though that wouldn't be like teachers, would it? Not wanting to cause a scene?

Like Free Time, which I uploaded last month, this is a long-term collaboration with myself - in fact, even longer.

I recorded the nylon-string guitar and the original drums (and an original bass, which I since abandoned, as I never got it to work even after hours and hours of tweaking. In fact it may have been where I discovered that if you have to tweak it that much there's not really any point in keeping it), in May or June 1998. It was very hot, anyway. I was recording in Cubase at that time, doing the drum track on a MIDI channel, which was fed into the trusty TR626 and then recorded back to audio channels (two separate ones, I think - this might have been before stereo channels).

I think the vocal was done a little later, at the same time I did the original lead vocal for Free Time.

I did the choir a little later - possibly 1999. There are about 24 voices there altogether. I liked the way, if you multitracked that much, you got a pleasing mush. I think it was fairly late at night, and very hot - I had to keep breaking off in order to open the window and get some air in. Actually I think it might have been a Sunday night, that went a lot later than I'd have liked.

I left it there, really, and abandoned it in favour of the stripped-down version that's on Secret Agent's Dream.

In 2001 I got a VG88 and Godin guitar, and while I was looking around for things to do with it, I recorded the electric guitars on this, and redid the bass at the same time (using William George Q's wonderful fretless bass). And the organ, that was added at this time, too. And there was a mix of that that I was listening to for a long time (this was still in Cubase). The main problem with this version was a legacy from the original version - what I call the Regrettable East Enders drum roll. You can probably imagine.

So a couple of years ago, when I was retrieving old Cubase tracks, I dumped it all into a Logic file, along with the original MIDI of the drums, which I edited a bit, and finally found a drum sound that didn't intrude too much. I could tweak some more, but it's probably best just to upload and be done with it.

Improvised pretty straight one night, in as many passes as there were instruments, choosing instruments from the World Music Jam Pack that came with Logic. Not sure why Persiana, as it's not in the least bit Persian (ironically, because it uses instruments from everywhere else, pretty much), but there it is.

Actually, tell a lie, that zither took a few goes, and I'm not sure I got it right in the end, but verité can be messy sometimes, eh?

There's not much to say about this, actually. Um. Originally a loop, that grew a bit one day until it was several verses. Also the melody was originally played on sampled wind instruments, and it sounded kind of jazzy that way.

Then the words just happened, as they sometimes do.

I added the vocal (which I later rerecorded), then an organ. Then, not sure what to do next I did the organ twice more, and decided to leave them all in to fight it out among themselves.

So a kind of vocal bagatelle, really.

This is another very old four-track song. I think this might have been the third time I tried recording it, and this one stuck. Actually the first version might have been better, but I think I turned the noise reduction on the four-track off for some reason, so it's very hissy. And anyway, the four-track doesn't work any more. So this is the version we have today.

I don't know why I did that with the noise-reduction, actually. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. I couldn't really help it, I was bewildered.*

I think it may have stemmed from a piece of dialogue for something that I'd fantasised, to the effect "That's probably the only song about n-dimensional geometry you're likely to hear for a while". And so it is. Not that I understood n-dimensional geometry any better then than I do now, though I was nearly twenty years nearer to the time I read Flatland, so some of it might have stuck, despite the bewilderment.

Also, I should probably point out that, although one can do wonderful things with modern digital technology, this is a four-track recording made by a bewildered young man in 1991, so we have to allow a certain amount of lee-way. In any case, I think we can invoke that phrase that used to appear on CDs when they first came out: "May show the limitations of the source material", which is a twenty-year-old TDK SA90.

And ultimately, of course, me.

*I spent most of the period 1979-2001 in a state of bewilderment. Occasionally, for a change, I switched over to befuddlement, but mostly it was bewilderment all the way.

I originally uploaded a guitar-and-vocal basic version of this a couple of years ago, so this is the bells-and-whistles version. Not that there are either bells or whistles. Although there are flutes, sort of.

For a long time, if I could get an excuse to perform using the VG88 I would, and I would do River Rise with a drone using the rudimentary looping facility that that box provided (much like I did on the version of The Sea I uploaded a few weeks ago). This recording is based around a more complicated take on the same thing - two drones, both improvised to what I thought would be the right length using the VG88, one of them reversed (I think - it was a while ago), and filtered and so forth.

It was a lot later that I added guitar and vocal, and finally the sample instruments, backing vocals and electric guitar.

The vocal was re-recorded during the long session with Juan, who said I should cut the guitar for most of it, and he turns out to be right - the nylon-string used to run through the whole song, but when it was removed it transformed the whole thing. I put it back for the bits it currently appears in because there was an obvious hole there.

There may well be an accompanying video to go with this, when I've got time and my computer is behaving itself. There's certainly a very fine picture.

I uploaded the second of the two inconsequential guitar instrumentals I recorded some time ago. This one is slightly longer, a lot more melancholic and has a possibly unnecessary dub echo on it. I quite like it like this, and what I say in that department goes, at least on this website. It's the prerogative of the internet, and is possibly rotting culture from the inside out.

Anyway, these were useful things to do - at the time I wasn't really doing anything, and it was good to record something, no matter how small. And as I said before, I thought there'd be more of them, but there weren't. Ho hum.