Not nice

It is with a mild but deep sadness that I blog right now. I'm not sure that it counts as "suffering for my art" but this is a deliberately induced sadness.

You see, I have been recording the next section. I'm getting pretty close to the end of the first pass, and I'm back in track 3 "Spirit". After the three sections on the trinity, and the three sections on the temptations common to man, the last three sections are about a human spiritual journey, inspired in part by "A Pilgrim's Progress" but mostly by my own spiritual journey and that of countless Christians around the world and throughout the ages. Phase 1: lost in sin.

Sin is not a very popular word these days, but it's a very evocative shorthand for broken, dysfunctional behaviour and for the inner brokenness which can make this behaviour so compellingly hard to stop, even when one wants to. Sin is born of pain and leads to pain, and is typified in many ways by chaos.

And so this section is deliberately attempting to evoke that brokenness and pain, and is deliberately disturbing, atonal, arhythmic, difficult to listen to. Random sounds and failed takes from previous sections are fed through a series distorting and bizarre effects, with little apparent reason or pattern. It starts with a deliberately discordant chord, Fsus2bmajor7/E and doesn't get much better.

It also breaks the immutable pattern of sections in that is it only 2 minutes long. This is deliberate for two reasons: 3 minutes of this is too much to listen to, but also pragmatically if you have 3 27-minute track the total time is 81mins. The max for a CD is 80 mins...

The other thing that is broken, is the solo-ness of the project. I have had a little help here - mostly from my son Sammy, but a little from my wife. A few months ago while he was having a disturbed evening, and was being left for 5 minutes to see if he could settle himself, I whipped out a microphone and recorded his crying. This also has been processed somewhat, but it is undeniably the crying of a child, and it is the repeated listening to this that has induced my sadness. It's bad enough that we are wired to respond to any child crying, but doubly so because he is mine - that crying voice gently tears me inside.

Well I did deliberately want this to be disturbing.

Quite nicely, I also ended up recording my wife going into him and speaking soothingly, and him calming down in response. This is beautifully timed at two minutes (pure accident) and so I will carry this process into the next section.