This is a song I wrote a couple years ago, inspired by a woman who I had been going out with for a few years at the time. It was about 75% finished a month or so before we broke up... I actually quit work on it after we broke up, and then got used to hearing it in it's state of "suspended animation". The song became a sore spot and I put it "on the shelf"!

I pulled it up on a mixing board at one point not too long ago, with the faders/eq/mutes/fx, etc. still up from a session before (one of my little quirks... I do that all the time). Things in this mix were muted, the vocal was kind of obstructed, the lead guitar in the middle wasn't there. It felt like it conveyed this kind of weird perspective that the song had come to take on for me. It's as if you aren't "in the middle" like in a normal mix... you are in some weird Dali-esque sonic landscape. Which was the original intention anyway! Very influenced by Brian Wilson, Edwin Astley, and the High Llamas.

In the back of my mind, I feel like I am going to go back and do a "full" mix, and "whip it into" a regular "pop" setting, because this one is a little out there. It will make people complain about not hearing the vocal well, some odd turns... but I secretly like how these kind of odd ball things sound more than the "normal perspective".

On the "of love" harmony... probably 48 tracks? Can't quite remember, but there are some weird harmony and phase inversions going on, because I remember recording this using "erect audio" techniques (lol.... a thing that I was experimenting with at the time, in conjunction with Steve Gursky, to record and mix for an experimental playback system with two speakers high, two low, so that up and down could be perceived in the stereo [really quad] mix.) Because of that, some of the things have an interesting phase correlation when mixed in regular stereo. It seems like I also probably used some experimental techniques taken from an idea invented but never really utilized by Dolby to keep one ear from hearing what the other ear hears. I didn't mix it with that in mind, so that probably doesn't come across too much.

This also makes extensive use of "crystal element" microphones, which have gone by the wayside, and aren't really used at all in traditional recording, as they are severely skewed frequency wise and have horrible signal to noise ratio. I use them more like an eq in combination with other microphones.

There is nothing "looped" or edited in this recording, even though it may sound like it... and every part/track was played from the first second of the song to the last, one take, no edits. If I screwed up 80% of the way into the song, that entire track would get scratched. There are definitely some hard mute/unmutes though. I really had to spend a great deal of time to achieve the "loop like" effect by playing some of these parts exactly over and over.... though at this point in my life I would probably spare myself and just loop the crap! To achieve such a consistent but simple drum part with the exact groove was probably the hardest part. The cymbals may have been played at a different time than the kick/snare/toms, since that was a pretty common technique I was using at the time, so that cymbals wouldn't effect the compression settings on the main kit. I also think that it is actually double or triple tracked kit... that all comes out of Mack Emerman / Steve Gursky stuff.

The animations are all Quartz Composer, and are mainly a mix of 3 different setups. One is a particle composition (kineme) inside of GLSL shaders that were from toneburst's desaxismundi solids example, that is being blurred with v002 plugs, and also Quartz Crystal motion blur at one point. All of it was rendered through Quartz Crystal, but had another pass through iMovie to synch up the music...

There's another macro with a panorama, and polygonish looking particle thing on top of a man-hole (when the music get "grittier"...lol, I don't get that "gritty). That's been posted here before, not too long ago.

Then there is a "woodblock" looking universe setup that also uses kineme particle tools, and the "bullet time" idea, which Steve Mokris included in his demonstration of particle tools. That's also been posted (been working on this one for awhile). The earth in that example is setup with a sphere and a standard GLSL image map.... all in a render in image with a custom core image kernel that was setup to be a higher res version of the stock "edge work" patch that is included in Quartz Composer. Just tweaked from trial and error on that one, no logic involved...!

Visually, it's inspired by Matisse's Icarus, Michelangelo Antonioni, Picasso's Taureau et Picador... and a local fellow who comes to many of the art festivals in town and has woodblock prints (it's killing me that I can't remember his name) though I'm sure it doesn't really look like any of that! The part where there are the triangles over the manhole... was partially inspired by vimeo.com/1730392 , "tracker01" by tsaworks... though it was more of a case of having used this setup many times, and seeing his and the positive reaction it was getting and going "why haven't I used that?". All of the tsaworks stuff looks really eye catching. I used the panorama concept macro that I came about through Chris Wright as a way of getting the background. Basically a particle generator, inside of GLSL, inside of a wireframe mode on one side.

Sooo..... probably going to come back to this one and change it up some later. But this is ok for the "deconstructed" version, and I'm putting it out there in lieu of putting it back up on the shelf.

This is like the "bootleg / Beatles Anthology" version, of the release that hasn't been released!