Episode 191: Secrets & Lies

This is the first one where I set out to record a full LP for the show. Two sides, forty-four minutes and forty-six seconds, and I went at it sort of like Bitches Brew except as a solo producer. Every other episode has been a half hour that goes where it goes. This one has an A side and a B side that were made eight days apart and were always meant to be two halves of the same object.

Side A started on Labor Day and I only got sixty-four bars down before it was time to leave for the union hall. That was the IATSE 115 celebration in the AVL warehouse, which is gigantic — food the members cooked, a Stagehand Olympics that one of our riggers won, and a jam room that nobody much used because everyone was outside watching the free labour. I took my trumpet and played in there anyway, and it turned out to be the warm-up for the rest of the day. Then I took a long nap, woke in the middle of the night out of a dream with a motif still running, and finished the whole side before morning. I connected the Crimson II kit and drummed fills and grooves over the drum track I had programmed. I played guitar. I played trumpet. I played keys, in lots and lots of layers. It is one song. There are parts that are obviously different sections, but it is one song.

Side A sits at sixty beats per minute and reads A minor. It opens in E minor and stays there a good while, moves through A minor in the middle, and goes out through D major. Eleven tracks I played, and exactly one borrowed loop on the entire side.

Side B is the other thing I have been chasing — jam-feel trip hop jazz, which I think is legitimately the kind of music I want to be making. Eighty-five beats per minute, B flat minor, fifteen tracks, and all of it is me except the kick drum. Ten loops on that side and every one of them is a kick, stacked under the floor to hold the grid while I play over it. Everything with a pitch is mine. There is a Steinway carrying most of the harmony. It comes in on B minor, goes through E flat and B flat, settles into B flat minor and leaves on F.

Put the two sides together and the record walks off the sharp side of the piano onto the flat side, with that B minor at the top of the second half as the hinge. Sixty on one side and eighty-five on the other, which is the clearest tell that these were two sessions and not one. When I had Side B up on the playback and set for mixing there were a couple of sections that got me very close to gooseflesh. That is the whole reason to keep doing this.

Forty-four forty-six. Secrets and lies.