Prime Meridian - Januaries: 2006-2008

Though this may be a little absurd and self-indulgent, I'm posting my own music. I've never really gotten a band together though I write music and sometimes record. My school has a part of the school year called Winter Study, where we only take one ungraded class. I always went out of my way to take classes that fed into recording. The EP I've posted here is a collection of songs I wrote for the various classes I took, the exception being the first track. The overall sound is very ambient though the final track really expands on "ambient" as a genre by have a much longer arc. I even used a click track. There is no review for this album so I'll provide some helpful (and once again, self-indulgent) liner notes for each track.

All songs were composed in Pro Tools using only the following gear: PRS Santana SE guitar, Line6 Pod Processor, Line6 Tonecore Pedal Echo Park.

1. "Rusting a Perfect Day." This track was written outside of the context of a class. I started messing around with different melodic techniques using features of the Echo Park pedal in F# minor and just started layering parts of different lengths that all ended up propelling the song towards its crescendo.

2. "Hexagrams" gets its name because it was done for the class "Math and Music." It uses serial tranformations of the unordered hexachord (01457) and was composed in a loose adaptation of the twelve tone tradition. The general sound of this chord, when treated as a pitch set that can be used in a scalar fashion, is a mix of phrygian and hexatonic giving the song its somewhat "exotic" melodic lines.

3. "Pearl Silos" was written for an independent study on electronic recording styles. A friend and I had written three hip hop / pop songs in Digital Performer and needed another track, so I offered to write another ambient one in the spirit of tracks 1-2. The result was a further refining of the ideas on the first two tracks. It benefits from having the through-composed layering of "Rusting..." with the disassociation from perfectly tonal practices of "Hexagrams," though the piece in indebted to E as a pitch-center, if not a tonal center.

4. "Odalisque" is more sprawling and was composed against a click track. It has a D/A modal flavor. The structure of the song is three-fold. First the song builts up its component parts in the spirit of post-rock. Then the tonality dissolves as the twelve-tone background ambience overtakes the tonal center (though the main repeated guitar remains), and finally the song returns to its post-rock self with a guitar solo in the spirit of "Muffin Man" by Frank Zappa that takes the song to its close.

Januaries: 2006-2008 [2008] - Download