i just recently completed this, my first solo effort under the hopi torvald nomenclature. there are 9 songs and the whole thing is exactly 36 minutes long.
i did two links, one for wav files, the other for mp3s...just in case someone wants crisp versions that they can convert however they please.
mp3's:
http://www.mediafire.com/?5jw9r5zo32o2l15.wavs:
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=cda326beff7a2c7324a64199ac7f73e5567c9bd77662fcd8f0a154af670496dabelow, i'm gonna actually dork out and walk you through the songs a little bit...it won't hurt my feelings if you skip over my candid ramblings... :)
1. thoughts of haiwasee - i created this song under the hazy influence of muddled romance. one of those "if you can't be with the one you love" situations...the person i was seeing was in love with another who she could not be with and during this time i had realized that i was trying to make it work because i was going through the same thing with someone else...of course things work out in wonderful, interesting ways, but those times were mos def pretty wacky...the crumbling synth washes with its barely-there melody are all about those hazy somnambulist ideals you can have when creating an image of someone in your head...all of it building up and vanishing in an instant, swapped out with an unexpected period of clarity, here represented by the happy little outro...
2. i hate you, the spectre - sometimes i feel like im being haunted by a grim spectre...a dark apparition who maintains vigil just behind me and over my shoulder...i'm ultimately responsible for my own actions, but i can't help feeling a dark influence, especially when i look back at certain times/behaviors and they seem like they belong to a completely different person. fresh off the heels of a nightmarish relationship, i wrote this song in anger...i was angry not at the trifling girl who caused me woe, but at myself and my spectre for allowing it to go on for as long as it did...this song was recorded very raw and i allowed it to stay in the red...just a warning to your pretty little ears...oh, and it has explicit lyrics.
3. from russian fields to cattle slope - this song is about nostalgia for place...i grew up in an area that essentially had no name. we had an Oakman, Alabama address, but the stretch of land our house was on had no official title...i've heard it called King's Mill, McCollum, and more archaically...Russian Fields...apparently, long ago, the land was occupied by a family with the last name Russian and they used it for farming. my friend matthew and i used to ride bikes to each other on the back roads behind my house...the place in the middle, where we'd invariably meet up...we called it Cattle Slope...where the one lane road dipped gently between two lovely cow pastures....anyway, though you may not sense the climes of backwoods alabama while hearing this song, i think that there is a pining in there, a sympathy for the past, punctuated by the sounds of my little nephew anderson..part of the next generation of youngins who will frolic through the russian fields...
4. dry flies barter for sleepy propaganda - this was my first foray into manipulated field recordings, done years ago...basically the sound of a washing machine recorded to tape and manipulated through a dictaphone machine i got at a thrift store that day. this reminds me of first moving to atlanta and, along with jason pratt and jennie, opening my mind up to new ideas in musical exploration. it kinda reminds me of the sounds of cicadas, also...they shed their exoskeletons and leave them clinging to trees early in their lifespans....back home we used to find them all over, hanging on to pine trees, and we would stick them on our clothes. my dad called them dry flies.
5. yours and mine - one of my many explorations using just a bass and vocals. a short song that really doesn't require a writeup, since it would most likely be longer than the song...
6. fortunes derived from a singular hearth anvil - this little ditty was concocted from a wide variety of source material...sounds from my parents house over christmas time, crowd sounds from karl kendrick's wedding reception, and house noises from chris white's place...so yeah...family, friends, and fraternity...i wanted to see how minimal i could actually work...few parts, few structural elements...ended up being a pleasant little mess i think...though it doesn't seem to go anywhere...
7. wolfmen bite - this song is about different types of changes...i wrote this song years ago, on the day that my nephew elijah was born to my youngest sister nicole. i remember being absolutely charmed to have a new critter in the family...anyway, yeah, the alterations due to innocence, the unexpected change of lunar induced shape-shifting, and the everyday changes that go unnoticed, often due to mundane distractions...i don't think i've ever done anything with this song before and figured i should include it here...
8. delusions of right on - this song is the one i kept having issues with. mixing issues...i was gonna just scrap it and do a new song but then i felt compelled to include it BASED on the merit of its flaws. the song is quite a mess, but then again, so was i the day that i put it together. partly inspired by seeing carnival of souls that morning and getting all yowsers over gene moore's delicious soundtrack, partly inspired by the newly awakened incarnation of the spectre...at that time a product of libations and sleep deprivation...anyway, there's a little anger in this one...
9. wetland oracle makes good - another attempt at minimalism...there are two sounds on here...a dolly from work and an ambient room recording. i tried to play with the ambient sounds so that they shift and undulate in the full pan spectrum and really, once i started messing with that, i didn't really want to do much else to the song...you can start to hear phantom sounds in the shifting white blur which can either be soothing or unsettling...headphones recommended for sure...
about the cover art: the photo was taken on the first night of our first big snow this year...i didn't have to do much to the photo because the colors were already so stunning...the sky seemingly on fire from the not-so-distant downtown atlanta lights...the view is from my backyard looking towards the street.
anyway, hope you enjoy.
love,
nathan
