danksoul recordings

Home James and other Concepts

from the mind of cinch on 23 April 2007

Lately I’ve been battling with something as an artist. All of my life I’ve been interested with “lyricless” music without a message. Music thats an escape from reality. For example when I listen to a techno track I’m put in a temporary environment or atmosphere. I’m not directly associating the music with a person, concept, or message. One of my favourite artists, Mathew Jonson, has said he tries to write music that puts you in a place for a few minutes. I might call it a sonic jungle. With oscillator monkeys negotiating the tree tops, glitchy ant colonies making the forest floor modular, and the occasional abstract gryphon swooping across the stereo field. This is techno to me.

However, I crave something more. I want to tell stories, share ideas, and expose my views to an audience. I want to show people my music while also helping them understand my aesthetic. I want to get back into conceptual art.

A few years ago I played guitar in a 3 piece Math Rock band by the name of Home James. My 2 friends and I seemed to want to be the Anti-Band. We didn’t face the audience when we performed, our songs were often long lyricless structured experiments in repetition, there was no record label for Home James, no website, no t-shirts (unless you count the ones our fans made themselves), and no releases. We simply liked to play weird songs together and our intention was to get any reaction, good or bad. One of our songs was entitled “The number of century’s we’ve lived after christ according to the gospel” or “20” for short (it was 1999 when we wrote it.) In this piece we started with 2 chords chiming back and forth and with each repetition we would add a beat to the measure until we were playing 20 repetitions of the second chord. Here’s a live mono recording of the piece sloppily performed live at the Niagara Artist Centre (NAC) in St. Catharines Ontario Canada:

20

It’s ridiculous. I know.

Home James – Complicated-Core was our only recorded piece that wasn’t live. I tracked it in my father’s basement with 2 PZM mics and a cheap dynamic mic. All of this was running into a radio shack DJ mixer and then into my Pentium 1 333 Mhz monster. I mixed it in a freeware multitrack recording software package. It’s got some mistakes and the hi hat is too loud in the mix but I still love it.

I guess I want to get back to my roots. I’m going to try to get back to creating music with a very clear intention. Music thats thought out and concise. Focused…

So…. that’s enough doodling for now…