old bleeding and impending collapse
If you poke back far enough in the history of industrial music, or was privy to the scene back in the day, you probably remember Controlled Bleeding. Hard to believe that these guys, who are more well known for their agressive industrial style, would produce a dark moody ambient disk like ‘the poisoner‘ which was released on Soleilmoon recordings of all labels :P. I had heard parts of this disk on a number of ambient net radio stations (most likely on Drone Zone) and decided a while back that i needed to find this CD.
THese days, of course, you can find just about anything if you look hard enough, and i was able to locate a copy via Amazon.com, which finally came in the mail about a month ago. I believe that the premise of the two elongated tracks is that it is wandering through a dying forest, and that we are ‘the poisoners’ so to speak… but delving too deep into metaphors in ambient tracks tends to dilute the emotive impact the music can have. To me, it’s better to leave these things vague.
I suppose one of the reasons i was so keen to get the disk was that there are runs on each of these thirty minute tracks that remind me somehow of the world and the collapsing enviroment Largo and Pirogoeth are dealing with in the Endgames story. The intensity of this overwhelming impending sense of collapse is not something that i’ve really successfully been able to convey in the bits of the story i’ve produced so far. The humor and the play between Largo, Pirogoeth and ‘the other’ guy have created more of a sense of fantasy world comfort than anything else so far (plus the retelling of the story in the last chapter was by Largo, so we don’t have Piro’s particular bent on it yet).
Music for me is often like soundtracks. While there are times i have to turn off all the music around me because it is distracting and prevents me from getting the feel and mood i want. Often i use musical selections to try to zero in and tune into a particular emotive subset, like background music to a scene. Of course, there are times i’m listing music that is almost paradoxical in contrast to the kind of scene i’m drawing (for instance, an amusing scene with Kimiko and Piro while listening to VAC) but contrast can also be an effective means to get where you are going. I wonder why things work that way.
September 19th, 2006 at 11:06 am
Your “soundtrack” remark is right on the money. I’ve long been of the opinion that life should have a soundtrack, and I’m quite put out that most parts don’t.
September 19th, 2006 at 11:53 am
It’d be interesting if you added, in the newsbox comment, the music you were listening to while you created the pages.
September 19th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
Creativity has roots in the basic functionaliy of the brain, things like the basic human ability to recognise, put together, and randomly generate pattern. However a persons speciffic creative prossesCreativity has roots in the basic functionaliy of the brain, things like the basic human ability to recognise, put together, and randomly generate pattern. However a persons speciffic creative process, how they access the basics, is a higher brain function. A learned one. Your creativity works like that because thats how you have trained it to work over the years. I do it differently, in a more precise focussed way, so that when I start working on a creative problem I lose track of everything else. Using music to try and help my creativity is pointless. I don’t think any particular way is worse then any other. They all just result in different creative works.
September 20th, 2006 at 3:18 am
The things that inspire the music I write tends to change on a daily basis. A lot of it depends on what I happen to listen to that day or if I see a live show.
Monday night I caught a great Scottish band called Old Blind Dogs and I suddenly have had a huge desir to start playing my Irish whistles again.
Btw, did you listen to the dark ambient tune I wrote a couple weeks ago? It’s on http://www.bsodmusic.com under Misc and it’s entitled Stalker.