In an act of archival house-cleaning, I’ve uploaded volumes 2 & 3 in the “words scores” ALPHABETA series to Bandcamp.
The first is ALPHABETA 2: Outskirts. In 2011 I recorded the original ALPHABETA (released 2012), an album of music composed using the letters that spell words for the notes of each piece. For instance the melody of “Defaced” went D-E-F-A-C-E-D. A gimmick situated somewhere between artistic creativity and laziness.
The nine tracks on this EP were first sketches, demos and out-takes. Some I rejected purely for (what I now see as relatively minor) flaws in the recording or performance, some because I recorded two versions of the “word” and chose the other for the album. Ironically, I feel these abandoned takes hold together more cohesively than the original album. There’s a continuity of sound and approach (a sort of spaghetti western jazz) that was missing from the hodge-podge approach of the official album.
Interestingly, the first track ACE DECADE takes it’s name from the Scooby-Doo episode “The Diabolical Disc Demon” which possibly was the subconscious inspiration for this whole project.
Ace Decade is the nephew of the owner of a music studio. He is a Caucasian male with dark brown hair and wears glasses. Ace Decade is disloyal, sneaky, jealous and conniving. Decade was smuggling records out of the studio in trash cans in order to sell them for personal profit. When a music writer, Tony Symes, realized his actions, Ace disguised himself as the Phantom and kidnapped Symes, locking him in a cupboard in the cafeteria. Decade attempted to mislead the Scooby gang whilst they attempted to solve the mystery, leading them to a tape recorder wired to the intercom in his office in order to give the appearance he was being framed. However, Symes left a clue which was Decade’s ultimate downfall; his last piece of music spelled the culprit’s name in the first three bars: ACE DEC ADE.
The second album is one I’d posted last year to the BABEL Soundcloud under the title ALPHABETA {organ redux}.
The inspiration for these recordings was that about half the original album turned out exactly as I intended. The other half… I suppose I was never happy with it. Some pieces were too cluttered in the arrangements, others too cutesy in my attempt to tie the dictionary definition of the word thematically to the piece. Often that approach resulted, I felt, in some ham-fisted results where the music suffered as I forced it to conform to the concept of the project. Still, other pieces disregarded the literal meaning of the word altogether and because of this, it seemed, the work as a whole was disjointed. Here I returned to the concept and reduced it to its basic elements: the notes themselves.
To aid in this, I used the same synthesized organ voice for each track and used echo loops in the manner of Messrs Riley and Reich. This time, I’ve let the notes speak for themselves and ignored the literal meaning of the word. Save, perhaps, “DEAF” with its tinnitus-like ringing at the end and “BE” could be used as an aid to a meditation on simply being.
For this reposting I changed the title to ALPHABETA 3: Organizm.
Both titles are available in micro-batch edition CD-Rs.
And finally, not on Bandcamp but back over on Soundcloud, I’ve uploaded a live recording from the ALPHABETA launch party.
Since I was releasing an album of electronically manipulated glockenspiel titled Glockengeister that same night, I combined the approach of the two in a composition called DEFACED/FACADE with the help of Pavlov’s Dogs Handbell Ensemble. The performance was captured by recordist Joe Strutt but sat in his vault for a couple years and then mine for another. You can listen now, or download it (free), below.
BABEL 