Sunday, January 12, 2014

publishing ignorance is bliss (inri038)

the third of what will be four eps of material cycling around the deny everything lp, this is definitely a pretty heavy listen. as i tend to do, i've mixed some weird styles together here. electro-goth-grunge? noise-hop? industrial blues? ambient post-punk? i dunno. it's not easily describable, and i aim for that. as a piece of electronic music, it's pretty neat. let's leave it at that. three times in a row with subtle variations is going to require an interest in the topic. but, i demand some grit from my listeners; i expect that, in turn, from the musicians i admire.

so, have some fun tripping out into this. or don't. whatever.

--

this is a collection of versions of a track that was important to me around the turn of the century: three electronic versions and an electric folk version that i often played as a sort of a drunken party trick. the three electronic versions are arranged in decreasing complexity, and the electric folk version is at the end.

it's sort of about me, and sort of about my dad, and sort of about caricatures. we never had a dog drown, and i simply have no knowledge of the dynamics of my parents' sexual relationship. that's just an old country song. yet, there were a lot of stressful problems in both his work and family life, and that was being pointed to as a cause of his heart problems.

in hindsight, i'd tend to lean more towards genetics than stress. of course, that's something i have an interest in understanding further as i age. at the time, though, the focus was all about reducing the amount of stress he was dealing with.

i really just sort of didn't get it. i still don't *really* get it. stressed? well, chill out then. spark one up. put on a tune. it's maybe not as easy as snapping a finger, but it has to be about a general philosophy of life. see, i guess i place a lot less faith in the idea of free will than most people do - and my father, being a rush fan, and don't get me started on that travesty, put far more faith in it. when one is absolutely convinced that their entire life is determined by the choices they make, including the ones they don't make, it produces a lot of pressure to make or not make the right choices. meaning? he did it to himself - his atlas never shrugged.

ultimately, universe gonna hate. your so-called free will is doomed to be crushed in a wave of stochastics. the universe is a random, chaotic place defined by poorly understood probabilities. so, why bother concerning yourself so deeply with the consequences of your actions in this pointless existence, to the point that it might cut that existence short? it was the idea of him driving himself to cardiac arrest that pissed me off. you could be hit by an asteroid in your sleep. you could spontaneously combust. you could even wake up one day to find that aliens have landed and are taking over the world using robot gunships. once you get *that*, trying to fight for control seems pointless. embrace the random, and spiral out....

or, so, the debate went. i wasn't really comfortable writing a song *about* my old man, so i took a fictional first-person perspective and went to town with it a bit.

the vocals have come in and out of the track, but in the end they became attached solely to the electric folk version, leaving the electronic version solely as a piece of music.

the cover art bitmap is one of the files i put through coagula to produce sound out of light. inristart was a working title for the piece.

written and recorded, 1999-2001. track 2 was reconstructed out of existing sound in june, 2004. sequenced as is in jan, 2014. as always, please use headphones.

credits:
j - guitars, effects, bass, synthesizers, sequencing, drum programming, vocals, vocoders, sound design, sampling, digital wave editing, production

released july 11, 2000

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/ignorance-is-bliss

1) this was the meta mix: recorded from may to july, 2000 and included on the original deny everything demo. it's also the most produced mix, in the sense that it utilizes a number of electronic and guitar based sound effects that were dropped from the final mix. note also that the bass part is different and arguably better, if slightly out of sync.

i should point out, in the context of streaming it from this site, that it starts about 15 seconds in. this was a conscious thing that was designed to startle the listener. you're supposed to listen to the first fifteen seconds, adjust your volume, scratch your head, etc - and then jump a foot in the air when it actually comes on and scares the fuck out of you. even if you know it's coming, the suddenness is still jarring.



2) i've held to this version since june, 2004 but i'm going to update it for inclusion in deny everything, yet again. the fun part of being an unknown composer is that you can modify your works at a whim. well, known composers have done that, too. fuck the rock era. fuck rock stars.

it contains more of the track than the "original" inristart may, 2000 version but less of the track than the abandoned vocal mix (july, 2000).

the sections that were abandoned for this mix were largely overflows of the vocal version. for example, a short guitar solo was ignored because it seemed pointlessly indulgent and empty without it being an introduction to the vocals. there's also a sequenced "ukulele" part that ran through the vocal version that was discarded; it was a vocal accompaniment (in a way that may bring to mind lady in satin, or perhaps vespertine) that seemed to just appear out of nowhere. a thunder crack only made sense relative to the lyrics. a noise-funk guitar part was meant to work with the bass part and no longer did.

i was also in a more minimalist frame of mind back in '04 when i put it together. today, though, i want to bring in more of the vocal version. this version just feels half done.

this differs from the inristart version only in the addition of a lead guitar part that bridges the first and middle sections and a subtle feedback swell around twelve minutes in. these, however, are substantial differences that i feel are worth maintaining in their own mix.

the 2004 date seems anachronistic, but all the parts were recorded in the spring and early summer of 2000.



3) this is the oldest version i have and formed the basis of the final version.



4) this was never meant to be recorded like this, only played live, usually drunk, but a friend of mine talked me into recording it for inclusion in a radio rock project we were hatching up. well, he was hatching up. i didn't really have much of an artistic investment in it, i just agreed to play bass, because my friend needed a bassist more than any other reason. he wanted this to be a "hidden song". i obliged.

however, he was a little taken aback by the result. he wanted it to be twangy and country, which indicated a misunderstanding of the content. it's comical on a surreal level, but it's not a cheap comedy skit. his ideas would have devalued it and that sort of pissed me off; my refusal to redo it pissed him off. this was part of the reason that the project never went anywhere, except to spark rabit is wolf:
jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/rabit-iz-wolf

this recording did not happen until mid 2001, but i was playing it at parties months before that. it's only very slightly anachronistic to attach it to here; the conceptual unity overpowers.