Music of all kinds can be a vehicle for growth and transformation. For the listener but especially for the creator. I believe no other force has the same power to take negative thoughts and feelings and transform them into something of beauty. In this anecdote I share how through the creation of a song I got in touch with some of my unhealthy tendencies and brought them into the light.
If you want to skip the story and go right to the track the soundcloud link is at the bottom.
‘Make me an 8 minute song’ she says in a Facebook message. The girl I have had a crush on for more then a year. Why do I always do this? Bowing and scraping and trying to impress with my art. I know it never goes anywhere. My mind tells me that I should give up and move on. But there’s a challenge here that I can’t resist. If a psytrance song is going to have even a hope of impressing someone who I don't think even likes psytrance, it’s going to need acoustic instruments, a LOT of acoustic instruments. Which is something I’ve wanted to try anyway..
Part of me knows i'm just creating reasons here but I get to work, starting with a banjo sample I recorded at a fireside jam session. It sounds suitably heroic, in a hillbilly kind of a way.
The track gets dark really quick. I mean REALLY dark. There’s a feisty flamenco section in the middle but the whole first section is unbearably bleak and plodding. For weeks I am wrestling with gnarling, gnawing twisted synth sounds. Every new sound I throw in seems to make it worse but if there's one thing I’ve learnt it's that you can’t resist the places a creation will takes you. At one stage my friend Carliene is recording vocals into the track. I turn out the lights and tell her to imagine she is walking along a dark path surrounded by stalking monsters with only a candle, her voice is the one thing keeping it alight.
After about a month I am in despair. I want to give up on the track but I don’t want to leave it in this evil place. How did something with romantic intentions behind it get so dark?
As I am working with the synths I am pondering my seemingly useless ways with women. The demonic synth sounds have a yearning, clawing, frustrated whining quality to them. Maybe these little monsters are reflecting my own inner voice. The less I resist the dark sounds and work with them the more the track seems to lightens up.
3 months along it’s Christmas time and the track isn’t sounding bad. The first part is still pretty melancholy but the flamenco section is firing and there's a decent full-on psytrance ending.
I’m pretty over it though, I decide to call it finished for now and send it to the girl. She is mildly impressed it seems. Hardly a dashing climatic ending to months at work but strangely I don't seem to care too much. Working on this track i've been working on myself too. As I create sonic spaces there are spaces my mind goes that I am free to examine at will.
A couple of weeks later i’m at the Circus festival in Margaret River. I know I have to let that girl go. I think I know whats going on. There’s a massive tendency to fantasize and create future realities whenever someone shows me the minutest bit of attraction. I start to feel intense rushes of loneliness, pining for lost lovers, regrets from the past. There’s a deep pain there that my fantasies, my mental creations have been keeping at bay. A childhood wound that I desperately try to fill with affection, and when that’s not there, a dream of it. There are plenty of gorgeous women at this festival and I am getting plenty of attention. I can feel my mechanism at work. I get a flirtatious gaze and suddenly i’m thinking about travel and life partnership.
This is nuts! I don’t even know these people!
There are mountains of myths and social conditioning at work here, the ideals of finding the one, the perfect partner. I can see how I’ve been measuring potential lovers on an impossible pedestal and how it destroys the possibility of real chemistry happening in the moment. I breathe through it all and focus on just letting those feelings be.
It’s mid February. I haven’t had the chance to put my new realisations to the test out in the flirting fishpond but I’m feeling whole and good and confident. I’ve been singing and playing guitar, leaning into that loneliness, that black hole that lives inside that I’ve been so desperate to fill with fantasy. When I make music from that place I feel energy flow. It may be a black hole but there’s a sun on the other side of it and it has a lot of power.
I start working on the song again and find myself in an unexpected rush of productivity. After 6 years of trying I finally nail down that solid bwapping bass sound that is the vital ingredient of good psy. There is a massive confident, raging full-on psychedelic trance ending brewing.
The reason I share this stuff is because every track I write has a story to it, every track deals with something and makes me a more complete human in the process. When inspiration strikes it’s for a reason.
This is just my meaning and story. If you get your own story and meaning from the track then I’ve done my job.
I'd like to acknowledge the musicians that played on this track.
Banjoworm - Banjo
Marie Limondin - Violin
Lou Loumiere - Clarinet
Enjoy!
https://soundcloud.com/harlequinchameleon/fireside-album-preview-version