let freedom ring (original discarded outtake)

so, this is an interesting thing to have sitting on my shelf. it's the 'i have a dream' speech, orchestrated with some soaring guitars.

i should point out immediately that i got a lawsuit thrown at me by the king estate when i tried to upload this back in early '00. i thought that was really trite, but it's not really a legal battle i want to have. i would react more or less the same way should i be threatened a second time, except to point out this time that it's fair use so long as i remove the price tag and basically just do that.

the story behind the song is not very remarkable. the working title for the track was just 'progblues thing'. it was intended to be a structured instrumental guitar track that mixed the flair of hendrix with the minimalist structure of steve reich. the speech sort of came to it by accident.

it was also the result of my dad getting himself a drumkit for christmas that year, which my step-mother promptly placed in my bedroom as a disincentive for further use. score, i guess. but it didn't survive the move a few months later. in the mean time, i got some recordings out of it - as well as a few moderately crazy drunken weekend jam sessions.

i'll note that that christmas also produced a grand piano a few feet outside my door. it's intended recipient was my sister, but she wasn't around much. me? new pc, with a convenient recording interface, and some more functional microphones. despite talk of family jam spaces, one might suspect my father was actually conspiring in my favour. there is probably a great deal of truth in this suspicion. these conditions held for less than a year, but i made the most of them.

so, the idea of the track was initially about experimenting with the new reverb system built into my new soundcard interface, by triggering it with the drumkit that had recently magically appeared out of good fortune. it had been a few years since i'd played the kit much, and, unfortunately, it kind of does show. i had spent a little time practicing along with "nevermind" and "siamese dream" for a few weeks to get back in shape, but i wasn't really "there" yet at the time of this recording. i didn't want to program loops into the song, so i compensated by splicing the track up. of special interest in this wave editing is the backwards cymbals, and especially how they intersect with the soaring guitars.

and of those soaring guitars? a fairly simple blues pattern. sure is lovely, though, isn't it?

the speech became attached to the track when chance managed to have them playing simultaneously for me. i had cnn on in the corner. it was doing some kind of special on mlk, perhaps related to an anniversary that is related to a yearly holiday. placed together, it knocked me flat on my ass.

the idea in my mind from the start was integrationist, if not really consciously so. on the one hand, the guitar part is raw southern blues. on the other hand, the structure is sterile white minimalism. i didn't just realize this juxtaposition, i was trying to exploit it, even if the racial context hadn't occurred to me. when king's speech was played over it, though, the idea really exploded; the context became much deeper. it was an instant exponentiation in profundity.

i also thought it would work well as a foil to the doonesbury sample that is in the track that follows this one [entropy (original mix)].

in hindsight, there are some problems with this. i was a moderately wealthy white kid from canada. there was never much chance of me turning a profit on this, but if i did it would be a type of appropriation. this track does appear on the deny everything demo (jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/deny-everything) but under the title of "a commercial break" - and without the dr. king samples. that's probably for the best.

that doesn't change the feeling i got when i first heard the two things together, or take away any of the power that the pairing produces.

i think this is worth sharing.

recorded in january, 2000.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/let-freedom-ring

missed connection (original discarded outtake)

this was initially written to be the first track of my third record, which i was calling trinri as a working title. yet, it was written about the same time as i was finishing up my covers disc. i wanted to add at least one more track to the disc to make it a bit longer. for whatever reason, i ended up using it as an introduction to the hummer cover, rather than as it's own track.

i've pulled it out here, in instrumental form.

recorded in sept. 1999. isolated on nov 25, 2013.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/missed-connection

hummer (remix/cover for inrimake)

this is two things.

the introductory synth section was created independently as the introduction to a theoretical third demo (which became deny everything). i had also already decided to compile the covers disc and ended up using it for an introduction to this cover of hummer, instead. so i "lost" the section. i've regretted letting the part go a few times since. and, going this route factored into the decision to include the first two tracks (which are not covers). anyways...

the rest of it is actually two different approaches to the same thing. i ended up using them both by stringing them together rather than one or the other.

i was also feeling trapped in the covers project, generally. this is something that took a huge amount of time and energy. why wasn't i applying that towards original material? the samples at the end are meant to represent me breaking free of myself, and letting myself loose to get back to my own ideas. so i could live again. i plead guilty to all counts of being a drama queen.

i also ended up co-opting the song, mildly. i focused solely on the instrumental part in the second half of the track, which has a very carefree quality to it. it's not explicitly about rejecting war. but it fits.

musically, for the second part, i need to weight two tendencies. first, it was consciously meant to have this silly fake-jazz strut to it. second, i was clearly more interested in free jamming than composing anything with structure. it's a weird juxtaposition that sounds kind of dorky. sometimes, you have to begin analyzing something by determining whether it accomplished it's goal or not. i feel this did, but the intent was admittedly unusual.

this is so dramatically different from the original that it's reasonable to say something like that it's "inspired by" the original rather than a remix or a cover. it does contain creatively reinterpreted samples of the original.

created in sept & oct, 1999.  

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/hummer