The Karl Marx Communist Ball

Yesterday I bought a cajon and a ukulele you can actually get a tune out of.

I played around with them for a bit and the next thing I knew I'd turned into The Bonzo Dog Band. Anyway, here's the result:

The Karl Marx Communist Ball

Fifty second of genocidal whimsy. Enjoy!

After the Revolution

First off, apologies for not updating the blog recently. It's not that I've stopped working on the music; it's more that the endless hours of mixing and remixing leave me too tired to write about the bloody stuff.

Anyway, two tracks have been completed since my previous post: 

Follow Me Down and After the Revolution. 

Yes, it's yet another version of Follow Me Down, but this one is more or less definitive. It's certainly much more carefully thought-out and produced than the others. I changed the key and the tempo, rearranged it and adopted a singing style that was intended as a sort of faux Tom Waites, but actually sounds more like Burgess Meredith. I'm not unhappy with that. Then, of course, there's the long descent into chaos at the end, which was good fun to do.

Tom Waites

If anything, After the Revolution was even more carefully produced and (hopefully) marks the start of me getting to grips with compression. It's there on the vocals, narration, bass and kick drum to help them cut through, but I used none at all on the master mix as I wanted to preserve the song's full dynamics: it starts in a laughably simple fashion (using the time-honoured pairing of melodica and Stylophone) and builds to a point which is hopefully a bit creepy and strident (the song has 50 tracks, 28 of which are vocal tracks). You diminish that development if you use compression to make everything nice and loud.

Owen Jones

There's also a bit of collaboration, which pleases me. Kath Sutherland narrates and joins the Chorus of the Glorious Proletariat for verse three, along with Graeme Sutherland, William Sutherland and Mark Thirlwell. Your status as Heroes of the Revolution is assured, guys.

The Cruelty Man

If you've been checking out Mark Thirlwell's music blog you'll have heard a short piece he recorded a little while back called "The Cruelty Man". I think it's a splendid piece of music and so I decided to have a go at reworking it. That's probably completely wrong-headed - since I think it's already excellent, what exactly am I attempting to add?

Fair point, and because of that I haven't really added much at all. I've slightly re-ordered it and added my melodica and a recording of some geese at Swanswell park. I might try to add a little more, but I'm scared of ruining it by smothering it in cheesy effects in a misguided attempt to justify my intervention.

Anyway, the result so far is here, and, the above doubts notwithstanding, I'm pretty pleased with it.

Synth Pop

Still recovering from the flu, but when not collapsed in bed I've managed to knock up a synth-pop version of Follow Me Down.

Follow Me Down

A couple of weeks back I suddenly got the urge to do a song using the melody from If It Wasn't For Dickie by Leadbelly. No real reason, except I find the song (which I only discovered about a year ago) haunting and compelling. It's not so much the lyrics, which I can only half make out, as the way the melody keeps taking unconventional twists and turns.

Anyway, I worked out the tune on my melodica, put some chords under it, and let it rest while I got on with Bourgeoisie. Then yesterday and today (while recovering from a mercifully short bout of flu) I started working on it seriously and it quite quickly became Follow Me Down. As usual it's not finished, but I quite like what's there so far. I hope it doesn't trample too much on the original.

By the way, the line "follow me down" isn't in Dickie, but I took it from another Leadbelly song:

Seven Pounds for Debt

I've been working on the opening section of A Message From the Bourgeoisie - shortening it by about 12 bars and making it busier. Still not quite sure what to make of it. Really it's a bit of a musical folly and my fear is that I've just thrown production and fx at it to hide its slightness.

Progress Report

I've been working on what is something like the fourth version of A Message From The Bourgeoisie, and it's gotten a bit out of hand. As always, it's far from finished. In fact (a) I'm starting to get a bit fuzzy about how a recording can ever be called "finished" these days - the concept is losing all meaning for me; and (b) the more I work on the track the more work I create for myself in terms of polishing and tweaking what I've just done (and then polishing the polish, and so on ad inf).

Lots of violin in the first two sections. I'm really enjoying learning to play the thing; it's such a delicate, graceful instrument. Who'd have thought it could produce the horrible sounds I manage to wrench from it?