Content
Random thoughts, settings, characters, situations, perhaps leading somewhere
Saturday 23 February 2013
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Filed under
Lyrics
Take Me Around
© 2003 Mindhue Studio
Take me around and then
Take me away and then
Tell me you’ll leave and then
Tell me you’ll stay
I can’t remember which
Side that you’re on so I’m
Just acting casual in case
That you’re gone
Why are we dancing a-
Round in this twist was there
Something important that
We might have missed?
So take me around and then
Take me away because
We’re so much better
Alone anyway
You come on over and sit on my bed and then
I can’t remember a word that you said and then
I come on over and sit on your couch and then
you get all nervous and then throw me out
I think I love you but what’s that you say
You think that you love me but can’t find the way, honey
Could be we’re losing our grip on the thoughts that if
You do and I do then we are both lost
Chorus
Alt 3rd stanza:
You know and I know that
We are insane but that
No one else does so let’s
Shift them the blame
If two share delusions then can they agree that the
Things that they know are the things that they see? Tell me
Five thousand wrongs really can make a right if they
All band together and put up a fight
I think I love you but what’s that you say
You think that you love me but can’t find the way, honey
Could be we’re losing our grip on the thoughts that if
You do and I do then we are both lost
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2013-02-23 ::
Edward Semblance
Saturday 23 February 2013
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Lyrics
Underground Zero
A hookup or a lookup or a query on Google
Take me out and get me down and bury me under
Static plastic drastic measures spun in a tangle
Sunny splashing thrashing trashing bassmatic thunder
Your piercing eyebrowed steeloid gazes draw me in flashpoint
Crashing smashing bloody lives smeared on the asphalt
Overturning years of learning joined in the chaos
Beating meeting churning yearning the beat of your heart
Upanddown upanddown underground zero
Upanddown upanddown underground zero
Underscoring overflying down through the basement
Aim me up and shoot me low and catch on the rebound
Ricocheted leaden bodied slumped on the pavement
Strip the jacket bare the wire and plug in the reground
Feedback ripples shearing stipples dots in my vision
Chromes and zippers circuit trippers clipping the signal
Shiny leather come together gimme the blackburst
Shut the starry nights to gain a moment to linger
Upanddown upanddown underground zero
Upanddown upanddown underground zero
Solo
Pulsing pounding jerking pumping reeling in backbeat
Chainlink chainsaw slicing splicing peeling the layers
Socializer equilizer flatten the bias
Spacing bassing placing facing racing the players
Your piercing eyebrowed steeloid gazes draw me in flashpoint
Crashing smashing bloody lives smeared on the asphalt
Overturning years of learning joined in the chaos
Beating meeting churning yearning the beat of your heart
Upanddown upanddown underground zero
Upanddown upanddown underground zero
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2013-02-23 ::
Edward Semblance
Thursday 31 January 2013
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Filed under
Snapsongs
The first impression that comes to me is heat. Heat and the sound of a Diesel engine. This was the soundtrack of a late summer, a summer in the cusp of the 90s, an era I spent quite a bit of time driving around in a ’81 Diesel VW Rabbit. That particular model of automobile was solid, drove like a German car, and got me places, but had approximately 63 horsepower available to it, so air conditioning was pretty much out of the question. So I drove around with as many windows open as possible, listening to the clear but treble-rich sound of a $50 car stereo my father had jury-rigged into the dashboard. My uncle had donated a pair of decent-brand speakers to the cause, which I ingeniously wired with strategically-placed home speaker wire, so there was some bass coming from the back, but not much. Quite a bit of Zeppelin, Rush, Primus, AC/DC, Metallica and the Police went through that system. And, as I emerged from high school, other things as well.
Kirsty MacColl was a hit out of left field. She was a female singer/songwriter, of which genre I was not terribly impressed with. Of all those earnest late 80s voices like Tracy Chapman, Natalie Merchant and the Indigo Girls, the only one I had any time for was Suzanne Vega. MacColl was also connected to the Smiths and to Moressey, which I lumped in with the Cure, Information Society, Erasure, and Depeche Mode as being whiny, twee, digital and automated. (Of course, any student of late 80s music would know how confused and unfair that grouping was, but I was 19.) Completely contradicting this particular pigeonholing, she also ventured into country and folk byways, which was perhaps even more anathema to my tastes at the time. Not that any of this was immediately apparent upon seeing the CD cover, but I definitely wasn’t feeling open and accepting to any of those musical styles.
I don’t remember the exact details, but I probably first heard the album Kite over at a friend’s cramped studio apartment near the University of Texas. This particular friend was always trying to broaden my horizons, and was probably the reason I knew that such bands as Erasure and the Cure existed. He put the CD in his 6-disc changer (he loved his CD changer, although it was one of those tight-tolerance magazine-style changers that would gouge a millimeter-deep canyon in any luckless disc that didn’t line up perfectly) and turned up his stereo (he also loved his stereo, I forget the exact brand, but he was even happier with his KLH speakers, which were actually pretty good). The first song was somewhat countrified, somewhat odd, somewhat dissonant. My first instinct was to immediately shut it out, but… the words were hilarious. This woman was pretty snarky. There wasn’t any humorless feminism or political correctness or subtle holier-than-thou smugness. There was a tongue-in-cheek lament for a degenerate boyfriend, a fast-paced examination of the present world state of affairs, the story of a working girl with kids in waltz time, a Kinks cover, a bad breakup song, and a fatalistic takedown of the fame machine. All in fifteen minutes!
And “Fifteen Minutes” was the song that did it for me. It starts off like a girl with a guitar and something to say: strumming guitar and woman’s voice. But her sardonic tone keeps it from being insipid. She’s basically in a pissy mood, which is not your typical trope for such a setup: T&A sells, man, and sometime it just gets me down. Perhaps using Warhol’s Axiom is cliche, but she doesn’t belabor it, and I would sumbit that the use of the word “bozo” elsewhere mitigates that. Ethereal vocal overdubs doppler around the mix, Spanish castenets emerge in the reverb, and a good solid bassline anchors everything. But the coda takes it to a whole new dimension. With a swirling clarinet whine, suddenly this singer/songwriter complaining about the fickleness of fame is swamped by an entire clownshow erupting around her. Her guitar keeps playing, but raucous brass, razzing trumpets and a thumping oom-pah beat drown out any more commentary she might have and continue through the fade-out. Glorious. It was nothing that I expected, but that no longer mattered. I purchased my own copy of the album in short order.
So, the scene stays in my head: negotiating the cloverleaves of the 35th Street exit on the Loop 1/MoPac expressway, the August heat beating down and softening my car’s already wrinkly headliner fabric. Stopping for the light at the bridge, drumming on the steering wheel in loose time with the beat. Maybe I didn’t know what the hell was going on in college or in my life, but there’s nothing a little snark can’t fix.
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2013-01-31 ::
Edward Semblance
Thursday 24 January 2013
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Filed under
Snapsongs
Perhaps it is a truism, but people tend to forget: children remember things. They also understand more than you expect. Perhaps their understanding has gaps or naivetes, but the basics are usually there. I say this because of my memory of one of my favorite songs from the early 1980s.
I was all of eight years old when it started getting airplay, and it wouldn’t be the first song you’d think an eight-year-old boy would gravitate toward while playing with Legos. (I use the incorrect terminology for the LEGO brand of toys because that’s how I referred to them at the time.) But “Hey Nineteen” by Steely Dan was one of those songs. It was cool, laid-back, had a workable beat, and had definite hooks. It was probably one of the more radio-friendly songs in the Dan’s oeuvre. And it had a mood that I could only describe as an appealing world-weariness. I know, I know, what does an eight-year-old boy know of world-weariness? Well, in 1980 there was quite a bit of that going on. The Carter Recession was still in full swing, there’d been lines at the gas station the year before, the Rust Belt was crumbling to ruin around me, and Candidate Reagan was honking the Evil Rooskie horn. The whole situation was a little iffy. Perhaps I wasn’t having an affair with a woman half my age in order to cover up my dismay at my increasing age, but my Dad’s job was in trouble and things were tight at home.
Thus, Donald Fagan copping a louche and distant singing persona was something of a catharsis for me, in a way. Here’s a guy who knows the situation’s bad. He’s with this girl, they have nothing in common, they can’t dance or talk together, and she doesn’t know who Aretha Franklin is. I couldn’t say I could have sung you a song by Aretha Franklin at the time, but the name was familiar and she was evidently a soul singer of some merit. (Soul, of course, was the type of music showcased by the TV show “Soul Train”, the long-drawn out intro of which was the unmistakable signal to my brother and myself that Saturday morning cartoons were over and it was time to go outside.) No matter how you sliced it, you had to be a little out of touch to not have even heard of Aretha Franklin. Couple that with the fact that this guy was big in Boston in 1967, which was before I was even born, so he’s obviously pretty old. His clueless girlfriend was nineteen, which was old, but not that old. Doug, my favorite babysitter who was a really cool guy, was about nineteen. So this guy must be older than my Dad. And he obviously didn’t make the jump to Scarsdale, where all the young and willing sweet things ended up. So he’s a bit lost, a bit out of his element.
So — a bad situation, but he’s evidently handling it. He’s somewhat disappointed with how things turned out, he’s a little depressed, but he’s gonna put a cool face on it. A somewhat disdainful face. A cynical face. If you wonder where Generation X gets its base-level world-weary cynicism from, look no further than here. My personal situation was different but the strategy was the same. Chill out, lay back, and let things take you along as they slide on down. Perhaps it was fortunate that I didn’t quite understand the lyrics in the final bridge. I knew that there was something that would “help make tonight a wonderful thing”, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I just kinda sang a nonsense mondegreen along with the words when the song came on the radio. In this case the Dan’s penchant for speaking in code — an easily-deciphered code if you were an adult and into tequila and cocaine like everyone was at the time, but a code nonetheless — may have prevented me from an early substance addiction.
And it wasn’t just the story contained within the lyrics, or the way Fagan sang them. It was also the construction of the song that made complete and total sense to me. I didn’t know what a harmonic was, but the triplet harmonics at the end of the verse lines were bright flashes of gold in a steel gray stage. The drumbeat was the perfect tempo for lettings thing slide. What I didn’t know, but now am amused to report, is that “Hey Nineteen” was the first track to make use of a digitally-timed drum machine for most of the beats. Becker and Fagan wanted a metronome-precise drum track, so one of their engineers went home and programmed a microcomputer he had kicking around to interface with an early digital sampler. The guitar noodling in the background, the simple tracking bassline, the layered voices for the chorus, they all provided aural gingerbread to mull over while listening to the radio laying right next to the speaker. And the extended lead-out, with the melodica lead weaving a very, very Seventies sonic signature through the drum fills and cymbal splashes. It fit, and it fit well. Just like my favorite bricks in my space Legos.
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2013-01-24 ::
Edward Semblance
Saturday 5 January 2013
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Filed under
Snapsongs
The word that comes to mind when I think of my first reaction to this song is: unearthly. Why? I’m not sure. I was in fifth grade. On first thought one could say, What would a fifth-grader know about unearthly? But it’s not like nine-year-olds never hear music. By that age I’d had a long and fruitful relationship with radio technology, scanning my favorites in Toledo and wondering whether my personal radio station (which I would enjoy running) should have call letters selected after my initials or after my name. Until that time, however, WMHE had the lite pop, WOHO had the hits, and CKLW out of Windsor had rock, if I was in the mood to jam. I had an extensive collection of greatest hits tapes for my airplay catalog, captured off the air by breathlessly shoving my Radio Shack tape recorder against the nearest speaker when I heard the intro bars and squeezing the little orange “Record” tab down along with the dark gray “Play” button. Moving to Austin was merely an exercise of mapping out a new spectrum of experience, at least as far as radio was concerned.
Moving across the Mississippi meant that I needed to substitute K for W, of course. KHFI was the station I frequented the most in my new home, and from an adult’s remove it was a decent choice for the early part of the 80s. It mixed New Wave, rock, soul, and teenybopper pop, although I could have wished my early self had heard more punk. But there was more than enough variety for me to have heard all sorts of things, including other songs by the Police. But, for some reason, this one was different.
My stereo is an integral part of the memory. It was a hand-me-down, given to me when my parents got the brushed-steel component stereo set from Fisher that they still use today. Mine was a typical 70s model, possibly a Panasonic, with a wooden chassis, chromed front frame and a green-glowing frequency band with a brilliant red indicator needle. It included a separate automatic turntable with integrated 8-track tape player. I loved it, because it was mine, and I already knew how to set it up better than my father did. When I was propped up in my bed under a little red reading lamp, the receiver sat in dimness in a far corner, surrounded by its speakers on navy metal shelves, softly illuminating the closet doors as it played. That’s the scene I remember, on a cold winter evening in early 1982. And then the DJ (this was before Clear Channel turned DJs into personalities, of course) spun “Spirits”.
I don’t recall if I was reading The White Mountains by John Christopher at the moment, but I know I was reading The Tripods Trilogy that year. The post-apocalyptic feel of that young-adult novel fits right in with the anomie of the New Wave scene and its attendant music. And the cover of the book, showing three stylized figures running frantic from arcing tripedal silhouettes appearing through murky watercolored clouds, almost becomes the perfect dust sleeve for the 45 single tucked into my brain. Unearthly? Well, the connections and connotations I remember certainly were. Perhaps an instrumental version of the song would probably work well as the soundtrack to an alien-invasion movie.
Using my childhood memory and my musician’s ear, some of the sonic unearthliness can be explained. “Spirits” hits with a drum fill that hangs for a moment before the music bed starts. The synth patch is a fuzzy simple oscillator that sounds vaguely space-age, vaguely string-section. It follows the scratchy guitar riff, so the two blend together into something not-quite-right. The bassline starts busy, smooths out, then stops, leaving a breath of rest that accentuates the synth/guitar mix. All of this is wrapped into a crypto-ska beat that, to an untutored ear, would sound off-kilter. (My ear, at the time, was not yet versed in reggae.) The vocals, a multiple of voice tracks that have been pushed back into the soundscape, have the feeling of a solemn liturgy, something of a churchy recitation. They’re also not terribly understandable, which deepens the mystery, at least for my nine-year-old self. (In fact, it took me a long time to actually scan the song’s title from Sting’s lurching phrasing. There doesn’t seem to be enough time allocated for anyone to really be singing all of the syllables required.) The guitar break in the bridge does nothing but add to the oddity, since it’s not a typical flash of guitar virtuosity, and simply adds another layer to the repetitive pulse driving forward. And, finally, at the final chorus and fadeout, another synth voice adds odd beepings to the goings-on.
Of course, there were other songs of the time that could be described in similar vein. Some of the “unearthliness” can be attributed to the sparse, spacious, open mix that many New Wave acts used in their songs. “Show Me the Meaning” by the Pretenders gave me twinges of the same feeling, although that particular song owes more of that interpretation to the lyrics than does “Spirits”. And for whatever reason “Spirits” stuck out for me, it also made the Police stand out as well. That was one of the first acts that I would start to seek out, and I actually felt a twinge of jealousy when a friend of mine came to school with a T-shirt from the Ghost in the Machine tour that his brother had gotten him. And, much later, I began to appreciate that busy, abrupt bassline in my own experience as a player.
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2013-01-05 ::
Edward Semblance
Saturday 5 January 2013
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Filed under
Snapsongs
So a new concept here is something I’m calling “snapsongs”, in which I do a quick sketch of the scene a particular song evokes in my head when I hear it. These songs may not be my favorite, or even ones I like terribly much, but for some reason they evoke a specific time, place and situation in my mind.
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2013-01-05 ::
Edward Semblance
Saturday 5 January 2013
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Filed under
Housekeeping
So the original experiment didn’t exactly work, but two years later I’m back to see what happens. I’ll try smaller bits of writing, musings and scenes and whatnot, to see if I can get back in the swing.
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2013-01-05 ::
Edward Semblance
Monday 28 February 2011
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Filed under
Housekeeping
Edward Semblance started as more of a joke than anything, because I liked the sound and connotations of the word “semblance” and “Edward” can be contracted to “Ted”, my present nom-de-mundi. It later became my alter-ego for various musical projects I’ve done, including the never-popular and long-defunct live bands Külip and Conspiracy Theorists and the long-dormant one-man studio band Twin Boom. Some of this dormancy has to do with a sojourn in the visual arts, which leaves less time for music and writing and less creative mana from which to draw from. But this dormancy also has echoes of a longer dormancy involving my fiction writing.
Time was, back in my late teen and early twenty years, I would write future histories or toss off planetary maps or flags or shoot black-and-white photographs or what-have-you at the drop of a hat. There wasn’t much self-editing in any of it, at least not neurotic self-editing. The visual creativity has continued to be relatively free of neurosis, but the music and especially the writing started to be trammeled by strange anti-productive feelings. I would try to work everything out in my head without actually writing everything down, as I wanted no continuity problems. Most of what did come out was mood music, settings with no heat and characters with no fire, and all with no plot. I have ideas, several of them, some of them possibly interesting and fun ideas, all floating around in my head, but they won’t come out. It’s annoying. Perhaps I can’t channel the Muse, and shouldn’t try, but I’ve attempted ten years of “just letting things come” and nothing has come. So maybe a little bit of automatic writing would help, some kind of seance to contact the Muse and see what she’s mumbling about up there in the aether.
To do so, I decided to take the site named edwardsemblance.com—parked with an index page giving some basic information and a smattering of Twin Boom music—and turn it into a tabula rasa for the Muse to rap against. It was already a fun assumed name with an assumed alter-ego behind it. Why not let that alter-ego channel the Muse without caring about what came before? It might work. It just might. Plus, it would be easily available without being tied to a specific computer or application.
So. Here it is. I will see—and any reader might witness—what happens on these pages. Mostly me, but you are welcome to read along.
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2011-02-28 ::
Edward Semblance