Listen to 'I Am The Oscillator'

The mood on this website is about to change. Recently I've been finding my sense of humor more and more in music, and the songs I have ready for future posts are way less emo than they have been in the past. Good riddance despondency! Hel-looo bemusement! But before I start sharing that material, we get one last song from Underhill Downs, the album that bracketed some major ups and downs in my life.

The All-Time Low is the worst period of your life, when you are so shocked that things could get this bad that you can't even conceive of things improving. We lose a lot of good people to drastic measures when they are caught in an All-Time Low. This song is for them.

I don't want to get maudlin about this heavy shit, I don't know what it's like for you, or if you ever feel that way, but if you don't (lucky you) I bet you know someone who does, and often. I treasure my despondent friends. They are brilliant, creative, and sensitive beings, unable to grow inured to things when everyone else seems to just adapt and lower their bar. They are their own worst enemies, yet payback the love and attention you give them a thousandfold.

Cheers.

To the friend who called a suicide hotline once, and was put on hold so long they hung up.

To the friend who swallowed an entire bottle of aspirin.

To the friend who felt trapped in a pretend marriage and a corporate lifestyle (second in command of a major company) and planned his own disappearance. He hired a private detective to tell him how people are found, so that he could learn how to avoid being found. He hid away small amounts of money in bank accounts all over the country while planning for two years, and then one day, got on a plane and never came back.

To the friend who got evicted, and lost his glasses after sleeping under a bridge.

To the friend who learned his wife was cheating on him days before his wedding.

To the friend whose every joke refers to how depressed she is.

To the friend who took his life, after a secret from his past resurfaced.

Fortunately, except for the last friend I mentioned, the rest are all still with us. May you all, no matter how low you get, remember to allow for the possibility, however slim it may seem, that the future is unknowable, and that things do change.

This song predates all the other songs on Underhill Downs, and took by far the longest to complete, and to mix. The bass line and an early choppy drum part popped into my head back in 2001 in Berkeley, CA. I was listening to a lot of Tortoise back then. I had met a drummer named Kyle through craigslist and we were basically jamming (something I rarely do these days) and I tried out that bass line for the first time in his graphic design office where we used to play after hours. That project culminated in one performance under the name Chase Scene, which I recorded. I spent months cutting up that original recording but never released any of it.

In 2002 I was in Massachusetts finishing Should Confusion and at the end of my session with drummer Scott Kessel, I asked him to play this choppy drum beat I had in mind. I hastily showed him what I was hearing and we recorded a couple quick takes, possibly for sampling later. Then Mark Miller pulled out this rare piece of gear he calls the Frog, and we recorded a heavily processed, "frogged" version.

In 2003 I was getting to know Rico Marcelli whose musical ideas are all over Underhill Downs. We had a drum machine at his place and I quickly did a mockup of my choppy beat, and recorded bass to it. The drumbeat has an awful, stiff, groove, but if you are curious, here's that first recording.:
blech this hurts my ears

Even though our jam was raw, we both heard potential in the ideas, and then I remembered I had recorded some actual drums, so I gave him those drum takes. He went off on his own and constructed a very cool take on the song, which at the time we were calling Sunrise. The intro is my favorite part, and it is all Rico's writing except for the "froggy" version of the drums.
Rico's version of 'Sunrise'

Isn't that intro nice? I tried to recapture it (he had lost the project files when I started Underhill Downs) but never could quite make it work, and pasting that mix into the new version didn't work either, so I had to let it go.

In 2005 or 2006 I got Gaby Alter (keyboardist Gminor7 of MC Frontalot), Dylan Cristy (vibrophonist of Mice Parade and the Dylan Group), and Noam Schatz (drummer of Mobius Band) and Anand Nayak (Rani Arbo) to meet me at the Slaughterhouse and try tracking this song.

I spent many, many hours editing the song after that, trying to assemble some kind of blend of real performances and artificial drum n bass feel. I was trying to get the choppy beat's groove to feel right with what I was hearing in my head, but it never really worked. Finally, a year later, Dan Cantor convinced me to give up on that beat and try something else. We ended up with a hybrid. That beat is in there, all edited to be drum machiney and stiff, but Dan pounded away on a kick drum with his hands to add some low rumble and we effected and toyed with the beat until we realized it was more of a texture than a groove. Also, Dan solved another problem with the mix - there were too many pretty sounds all with the same kinds of frequencies. Vibes and rhodes and round sounding bass. Once he convinced me that we needed textural contrast, the guitar part was tried and it really changed the mix. It also connected this song better to all the other songs on the album, since before it was mostly keyboards and vibes. Dan also added a zither he had lying around for more acoustic instrument texture.

The string section at the end is the oldest piece of music by far. I wrote a string quartet for my girlfriend in college (she was a viola player) and although much of it was pretty forgettable, I always liked the part I used in this song. Leah Bartell had played the lead part when we were in school together so I called her up and it turned out she had a quartet all at the ready. Although the violin during the verses was played by Joe Bennet (of Goldrush), organizer of the Truck music festivals.

Then in final mixing I turned against the string part. It was so overemotional, so bombastic. It seemed like a ridiculous and pretentious way to end a rock record, like, hey, this is art, man... so I needed to subvert it in some way. The song was already getting a little long and meandery by the end, but the synth part against the strings was just a sound juxtaposition I had never really heard before! Even if it was a little prog rock to keep it, it was such an interesting sound.

Dan Cantor really gets credit for producing this song and helping me navigate some vague ideas and inarticulate frustrations.

In the end, the song turned out totally differently than how I heard it in my head back in 2001. But the end effect was the same as I had imagined. The song is a journey.

And that, my friends, is the last story about a song that made it onto Underhill Downs. Tune in next month for some songs in an altogether different vein.

Thanks for reading.

Aug 1, 2010

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