My PLace in the Universe
ALbum - 04/04/14
My Place in the Universe is my second full length album. Written and recorded in late 2013 and early 2014. The project grew from multiple sources of inspiration, which quickly developed into a much grander concept than I had anticipated.
Inspiration
My songwriting process often begins with exploring harmonic movement with chord ideas and motifs. In the case of this album, I had written a simple chord progression based on the idea of circling the I chord and vamping between a flatted root and an augmented version. The unstable key centre of this movement felt melancholic and dreamlike. Outlining this with an ascending and descending bass line created the basis for the opening song, From the Cosmos.
Around the same time as this was happening, I had also discovered Carl Sagan’s classic educational TV series Cosmos: A Personal Journey. Thinking about the fascinating scientific topics the show covered, through the lens of history and the progression of the hiuman race created waves of inspiration for me whilst I was building upon the initial musical motif I had written. The Cosmos TV series also featured an iconic synth soundtrack by legendary composor, Vangelis. The epic, otherworldly soundscapes that acompanied this TV series inspired some of the sound textures I would go on to incorporate in the album.
Further influences I had picked up at that time were the film scores of Maurice Jarre, a favourite of which was his epic, sweeping score for David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The haunting main melody and it’s multiple incarnations throughout the film were a big influence in the terms of the structure that I was developing for the planning of the album. I liked the idea of introducing a main theme, creating iterations of it and developing it throughout the album. I also decided I wanted to introduce secondary themes, weaving those in with the main theme and reprising them all at the end of the album. I felt like this would add a lot of cohesion to this project as a complete song cycle.
Writing and recording
Having worked out the major themes I wanted to explore with the album, conceptually and musically, I set about organising them into a sequence of songs. I found that having a solid set of influences and a defined framework led a speedy writing and arranging process. Creating permeatations of the central theme, changing the character of it by using modal mixture, adding secondary themes and building on this meant that at a certain point the songs started to write themself.
Once I had the chords and basic melodies for each song planned out, I set about writing the musical arrangements. I write my song scores out using notation software as I find this is the easiest way for me to visualise the themes and ideas. From there I recorded basic rhythm tracks with guitar, bass and percussion. Then I added the vocal harmonies and orchestration.
From a sound perspective I knew I wanted this to suggest a large cavernous space where the sounds would all kind of slosh together to a certain extent. To achieve this I routed the main busses all into one ridiculous reverb send and blended this with the dry signal, which added a certain orchestral scale to the sound. I wanted certain percussive elements to sound very remote and far away, whilst others would sound more intimate, so I varied the amount of reverb for certain tracks to achieve that.
Collaboration
I had always planned to invite some guest instrumentalists to play on a couple of tracks for this project.
I had connected with a fellow songwriter on Soundcloud by the name of BeigeMusic whose work I liked. I had previously recorded a cover of a song of his called I Am Lazy, so I invited him to play lead guitar on the instrumental track Nowhere. I sent him the backing track, with a basic melody guide track and my only instruction was for him to add lots of embellishments to the performance. I didn’t want to be too specific as I prefer to let collaborators have the creative freedom to bring their personality to a performance. That to me seems to be the whole purpose of a collaboration.
Another musician I had met through Soundcloud was guitarist Purposeful Prorpoise who plays the guitar solo on the song Lifestory. Again I gave him free reign to do whatever he wanted with the solo.
Tracks
From the Cosmos
In Dreams I See
Curiosity Killed the Cat
Moonlight
Nowhere (feat. BeigeMusic)
Lifestory (feat. Purposeful Porpoise)
Nothing is Ever as it Seems
You Dared to Chase Every Star
Hypatia
Dark Matter
Beyond the End of