THE 33-AND-A-THIRD-YEAR ALBUM (PART 2)

THE 33-AND-A-THIRD-YEAR ALBUM (PART 2)

(Part 1 of this essay can be found here: https://marpes165.wixsite.com/squallandscrawl/single-post/2018/03/24/THE-33-AND-A-THIRD-YEAR-ALBUM-Part-1)

It might be interesting to discuss and analyze all the reasons for the six-year production delay that followed. Then again, maybe not. But at this point, I can’t really recall what happened anyway. Suffice to say, once the project got temporarily derailed, procrastination and “funding” issues took over.

Even if everything else had been conducive, I was still in a quandary over the three unfinished tracks: Oxyrhynchus, Homage to Pollock, and Paleolithic Bouncing Pigs. I wanted them all on the album, but I began to feel I had painted myself into an artistic corner with them.

Two things helped me break through my “block.” First, I had started working on another recording project, one with my League Of Existence comrades. The album was THE WEEN OF HALLO, and it was a group effort that had everyone sparked up. (Topic for another day’s Blog) THE WEEN was being recorded in a studio closer to home, Night Train Studios in Westford, making it easier for all the League guys to participate. The excitement of being in a studio was rekindled, and once the flame was lit, it became irresistible. From the first WEEN session, November 2, 2012, to the time of this writing, March 2019, six full albums by either the LOE or the 4LT have been produced. WEEN opened the floodgates.

Secondly, I changed my mind – slightly – about the album. My original desire had been to make it a full-to-the-brim CD, using up every last one of the 79 to 80 minutes available on the little disc. But as much as I wanted all that music, I was still stalled out on the three tracks. Finally, I chose what should have been a fairly obvious alternative, and decided simply to jettison what was weighing me down.

Homage to Pollock and PBPigs, my greatest technical challenges, went to the chopping block first. Then, looking at the album without those two tracks, I saw an imbalance. One 20-minute-plus piece was all right, but two of them, alongside the rest of the reduced tracklist, seemed to leave the album out of whack. Alas Babylon in particular now felt like a space-hogger, sucking up too much oxygen next to the few three and four-minute tracks that were left. So off it went. The other marathon track, Oxyrhynchus, was not satisfactory in its current state but, rather than lose it totally, I determined to do a major rewrite. More on that anon.

With a little steam building and a fresh perspective on the album, I contacted Erik Lindgren at the end of November 2012 to say I wanted to do some salvage work on the project. Between his schedule and mine – I still had a great deal of production work to do on the League’s WEEN OF HALLO album – we weren’t able to settle on a date for nearly ten months. But on September 12, 2013, I was in Middleborough, mostly just observing as Erik oversaw the transfer of our session materials from his old recording system to his new one. Time had “marched on” in the intervening years, and Erik had concern about the feasibility of making the switchover between operating systems. Fortunately, all went through without a hitch. At the end of the day, I had fresh stereo masters of the previously completed numbers (Act Of Memory, Impossible Century, Hammers Killing Flies, November Beach, Alas Babylon), as well as the separate parts, vocal and instrumental, for Oxyrhynchus, Homage to Pollock, and PBPigs.

THE WEEN OF HALLO was officially released on October 31, 2013, clearing a big project off my schedule. Still, it wasn’t until December 2014 that I contacted Brent Godin at Night Train about booking some recording time, and not until May 2015 that I was able to get into the studio. The first thing to do was make another set of transfers – copying all the stereo mixes and extra separate parts from Middleborough over to the Night Train board. For Act Of Memory, Impossible Century, and Hammers Killing Flies, which turned out to be the opening three tracks on the album, the only further action was final mastering.

At this time, May 2015, I had reached a conclusion about the overall album arrangement. I would keep Oxyrhynchus, but only the recorded vocal parts. The long original foundation track, the abstract guitar freakout I first called “Ancestral Voices,” would be cut entirely, to be used in another project. To replace it, I returned to the ancient Greek song fragments that I had adlibbed on back in early 2005 at Erik’s studio. This time, I took those melodic scraps and worked out entire song structures to support the vocal segments, making them actual compositions as opposed to improvisations. The result was a piece about half the length (13-14 minutes), with musical motifs that could actually be hummed or whistled, although the vocal parts remained in a Schoenbergian Sprechstimme vein.

The revamped Oxyrhynchus needed drums, and I called upon Ken Adey, my bandmate in our classic rock covers group, The 45s. In July, I sent him demos to study and we made it for a recording session on August 26. In addition to Oxy, Ken also overdubbed drums on November Beach, which originally only had a drum machine in certain segments.

To complete the session, we recorded a new version of Sargon The Great, an instrumental piece that had appeared on the 1982 “Impossible Century” tape but had not figured previously in the studio project. Sargon is a homage to a Mesopotamian ruler of the 3rd millennium BC. The rudimentary original was based on the notes Eb-A-G (the equivalents, in traditional German Classical notation, of the letters S, A, and G – from the name Sargon, of course). The Intro/Outro in Am was added in the mid-80s, and around the same time, I made a melody for the Eb-A-G chords from the theme of an old (1973) song of mine called “Winds of Autumn.” The simple tune of that oldie somehow fit in with the discordant chord sequence of Sargon. The brief spoken word passage over the drum solo comes from an ancient Mesopotamian text about Sargon, written around 2300 BC. The middle portion of the eight & a half minute piece is a free-jazz improvisation, and engineer Brent did double duty by playing bass.

Another couple of editing sessions in September were required to stitch together Oxy and Sargon, and Howlin’ Dave Ambrose rounded out the musical soundscape with tenor sax overdubs for Sargon on October 2. Final mixing and mastering of the six album songs was done October 20.

Well before this point I had decided to call the album OTHERWISE. IMPOSSIBLE CENTURY would have been a fine title, but I wanted a title with no direct connection to any of the songs. In Part One of this essay, I mentioned my great teacher, David Landman, and he was the source for the new name. I had heard him say, way back, that “otherwise” was the last word spoken by his great teacher, Harold Isaacson. This ultimate non-sequitur – the final utterance that could never be resolved – captured a haunting oddness apropos of the album.

Speaking of haunting oddness, I would be remiss to not mention the cover art, which is the work of fellow League Of Existence member, James McCusker. The front is a reproduction of a painting he did in high school, depicting a giant football sitting in a field at the very edge of a forest; atop a hill in the distant background a lone cross is barely visible. The picture summons up visions of our hometown of Tewksbury, both real and surreal. On the back cover a miasma of abstract faces emerge and submerge, eyes and mouths laughing, staring, wailing, floating aimlessly. This comes from a small painting Jim made specifically for the OTHERWISE album.

One more thing I don’t want to neglect. I’ve given space to analysis of all the songs on the album but one.

The original Act of Memory was a four-minute sound montage piece that began with feet shuffling through autumn leaves, followed by a door opening and closing, footsteps up a stairway, and then a heavily distorted tape of excerpts from Schubert’s 9th Symphony, along with some Beatles and Hendrix. Some of the sound effects made it into the final studio version. For a long time I thought Act would remain just a sound montage piece, but eventually I determined to make it, like the others, more of a real composition. Digging through old sketches, I pulled out an instrumental nugget from August 1982 – just before the recording of the original IC tape – that could work as a foundation. It was a song in need of a little something extra that fit perfectly with some extras in need of a song. Over the basic rock-oriented track, which featured more sax work by Dave Ambrose, I layered a bunch of odds and ends, notably a few vintage family recordings. One was a homemade 78rpm disc recording made by my Aunt Rita in April 1945. She and some friends were making an aural letter to her brother (my uncle) who was serving overseas in the Navy in WWII, and the young ladies are heard singing & joking around. Near the beginning of the song is an excerpt from a reel-to-reel tape made in 1957 by a couple of my uncles, talking about music. Over the final “verse” of Act is the voice of my daughter Rose, captured on tape when she was about 3. She was singing a silly child’s song – an original tune or not, I can’t say – but when we tried layering it into Act, it fit the chords and verse rather well, and with Pro-Tools, Erik was able to make it fit even better. There is also, in the middle of the track, an abstract poem read by Erik, a pastiche of words and phrases from discarded songs. Of all the songs on OTHERWISE, The Act Of Memory is probably the most complex in terms of the sound materials utilized. I wanted to pour as much as I could into the piece, to represent a life of experiences - even beyond my life, when you consider those old family recordings. At the end of the song, the door from Autumn 1982 slams closed again, as we exit the realm of Memory.

OTHERWISE, the second studio album by The Four Last Things, was finally ready for digital release on CDBaby in January 2016, and in actual CD form a month later. I hope that, in the end, the “33-and-a-third-Year” album was worth the wait.