cellist TK The definition is: Someone who plays the cello Yet what I always think of is a biologist wearing a lab coat in an ice cold laboratory hunched over a microscope doing something with cells. Doesn’t make much since but it’s what I momentarily picture in my head before correcting the imagery. 141003 ... raze friend of a friend, and now maybe a friend of mine too. her name is karen. she came and played something i'd mapped out in five different parts, mimicking the sound of a whole string section one layer at a time, and then she floated on top of a piano fragment that had no written part. at the end of the first song there was a guitar track where i'd been sweating (what is it with the sweating lately? i don't sweat) and i said loud enough for the microphone to pick up, "ugh, sweat," and when she heard it she said, "that's not what she said." so what did she say? in any case, we had fun. 141004 ... TK I like the name Karen, it sounds like the kind of name that would be attached to someone who volunteers at a soup kitchen and helps children learn to read ^.^ anyway It sounds like the two of you and an enjoyable time, although the layering of music sounds complicated (?) either way though can’t help wonder if I could ever find a sample of what you’ve worked on in the past, yet I wouldn’t dare ask such a thing as I know part of what makes Blather Blather is the anonymity and mystery. Actually raze I think you just helped me figure out my Halloween costume, This year I shell go as a Blatherskite *L* 141006 ... raze haha! awesome. glad i could help. at the risk of ruining some of the mystery, you can check out some of the process of recording that cello song here: https://vimeo.com/108261807 i am not a professional filmmaker by any means (my cameras are these cheap little things the size of cell phones, and they've never spit out anything that didn't look kind of grainy), but it's a lot of fun filming and editing footage of some of the stuff that's been happening around here. i don't usually get the chance to record with as many different people as i have been lately, so it feels like it's something worth capturing, because i don't know if it'll happen again. (she's totally the kind of karen who'd volunteer at a soup kitchen, too…) i've sent music to 'skites in the mail before, and there are some i still mail music to when i've got something new to share, but i'd understand if it felt kind of odd sharing something as personal as an address with someone you don't really know outside of this place. it's something i've always enjoyed doing, though, writing letters and sending mail to friends, sharing things i've made, having an excuse to give people a ridiculous amount of bubble wrap to do with as they wish. 141007 ... raze i think i should have written "to do with WHAT they wish". not "as". but who can say in these troubled times? 141007 ... e_o_i My editing angel says "as they wish" is correct. 141007 ... raze three cheers for the editing angel! she's much kinder than the evil angel who sometimes sits atop my shoulder. 141007 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Ah yes, and the recording video! The cello does have a nice sound played low, very full and mysterious. She has a great texture (she, and it; I mean it sounds good with her playing; let's just call 'em another cyborg, human-cello, like me and my bike sometimes). But it ended in the middle of a line, and I was curious what was next. The intro has a sort of Philip Glass thing going on that I like, and then there's the lyrical twists and turns. The first two lines were normal enough, and then the third with "wasn't free" made things intriguing all of a sudden. That reminds me. I have a question concerning addresses so I'll send you a quick email. (Don't worry, you don't have to bother about the picture or the drawing in the last one. I mean, sometimes that's a stumbling block with me about answering things. I see there's an attachment, and I think, Oh no, something to pay attention to! and then I delay opening it. Of course, my mind isn't entirely rational this way; yours is probably better in that regard.) 141007 ... raze i've been crummy about getting my head into email mode lately … i'm sorry about that. but i've been meaning to put one together. don't be too surprised if you get a rambling e-novel at about six in the morning tomorrow. i think human-cello deserves to have a comic strip detailing its wild adventures. and the ambiguity was definitely a deliberate thing. i thought it would be kind of fun to end the song mid-sentence, so you never find out what her first words were or if there were any words at all. another idea that kind of grew out of this was to maybe have the next song on the album finish the thought with its opening line. i'm not sure how i'd go about doing that, but it's interesting what your brain will do when you give it problems to solve. mine either says, "yes! i will solve this! look at me go!" or, "huh? you wanted me for something? make it quick. eating grilled cheese. busy." and if the intro made you think of philip glass, i must be doing something right! 141007 ... Toxic_Kisses Raze I must say every single time I’ve watched the video that you put up I cant help but get excited about actually getting to hear the music you make! You talk about your songs so much that I’ve silently been dying of curiosity to hear some of it so thank you for sharing this! I haven’t a a technical prowess or a natural “ear” for music they way you and EOI do so I don’t know if anything I have to say on this has any real weight to it. I do however really enjoy the beginning, it makes me think of an old pirate ship bobbing though waves in the ocean on a moonlit night, yea I know a lot of scenery there sorry =/ but yea that’s what I automatically pictured in my mind as Karen started playing, and so then when you were singing that’s where I pictured Freedom’s birth taking place, my mind also added a thunder and lightning storm for extra drama to her birth, then when you said she wasn’t free , well admittedly my first thought was “well who is?” but getting past that I couldn’t help but think maybe she was born to one of the slaves being transported on the ship. Seriously doubt any of that’s even remotely right but without the whole song my mind made up its own story to try and fill in the blanks, guess I don’t do well with open endings. Which is also why I imagined the next unsaid line was most likely “and all hell broke loooose” in a raspier agryish singing voice and then the instrumentals get loud, deep and ominous with the guitar you were talking about earlier in the video Blah feel weird for admitting to all of that imaginary stuff going on in my head while your song played, mainly bc I’ve no doubt that your song is actually far better then what my imagination is making up. And honestly it had never even occurred to me that Karen would even sing until you wrote about it so now I’m doubly curious as to how the rest of the song actually goes. As for the cameras, I like it grainy, as far as I’m concerned it gives the vid a since of authenticity and realness to it, where as that HD stuff gives the feel of a slick GQ magazine full of ads and cologne =/ personally I like things a bit grungier so the grainy quality of your camera works quite well in that regard I think. . 141011 ... TK Cello-Women Pictures http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/04/Bizenghast_v1.jpg and http://gallery.photo.net/photo/7321532-md.jpg Just because . 141011 ... raze i like how their bodies are their instruments. the first one is especially cool. and hey, don't be sorry! one of my favourite things about putting songs out there is hearing what other people decide the music means to them. sometimes they get something out of it that's so far removed from what i put into it, it almost makes me hear the song a little differently. for example, i played that song for a friend the other day and he said he thought i was singing about 9/11, with all the talk of freedom and "her eleventh day". there's nothing the least bit political in the song, but now i don't know if i'll ever be able to hear it again without thinking of that for at least a split second. so i like the water and storm imagery you get from it … it gives the whole thing another new wrinkle. it's fascinating to me, the pictures music can paint in someone's mind. i'm afraid there isn't any more to the song, though. it was designed to be a short thing that kind of trails off. i like doing things like that sometimes, where a song seems almost like an incomplete thought. (and thanks for the kind words!) 141012 ... TK What is the original meaning behind the song? where did your inspiration come from? 141013 ... TK Just listened to this for the first time with my eye closed so as to completely cease any distractions Damn Raze! You have such a warm smooth velvety voice. So focused was I an the music and the lyrics and what I was seeing that even though I thought you have a good voice it wasent till my eye were closed that I realized just ~how~ good! This seriously makes me wish the song were longer just so I could hear more of you ^.^ And yea I know, should of thought to close my eyes far sooner then now *L* 141013 ... raze that's really kind of you to say. i've always had an uneasy relationship with my voice. i'm more comfortable with it now than i used to be, but i always felt like someone else could have sun the songs better than me. which is funny, because now that i actually have the chance to have other people sing on things, i'm having a hard time letting go of a lot of songs and selfishly want to keep most of them for myself. i guess my voice is wrapped up in a lot of what i do, whether i like it or not. as for where that song came from, the initial idea came from a dream. a few weeks ago i had this dream i was listening to something i'd written for a violinist. i didn't play or sing anything on it … it was just layers of violin, really pretty and sad-sounding. even in the dream i remember thinking, "how on earth did i ever write this and get someone to play it?" when i woke up the actual music was gone from my memory, but the feeling of it was still there. and i thought, "well, why not try to write something like that while i'm awake and make it real? the worst thing that can happen is i fail miserably." i thought cello might work a bit better than violin. i hadn't met karen yet at that point, but we'd talked a bit through the internet, so i ran the idea by her and she said she was up for it. i did some research on which keys are most comfortable for a cellist to play in and wrote something i thought might work, figuring it out on a guitar, trying to work out separate single-note lines that would intersect to create harmonies. normally i just sit down and write songs without thinking much about how all the pieces fit together, so it was a different way of working for me, really composing the thing and trying to arrange it for an instrument i'd never written anything for before. she's also classically trained. i'm … not so much. i took piano lessons for a bit early in my teenage years, but music theory never clicked for me. i haven't looked at a piece of sheet music in fifteen years. but i thought i should try to give her something more than a rough demo recording to work with. so i took a look at wikipedia to see if i could re-teach myself where the notes are supposed to fall on a staff, and somehow managed to write out the different parts so she'd have at least a bit of sheet music to look at. i had no idea i could do that. i mean, it was pretty crude, but it got the job done. this is what it looked like: https://www.flickr.com/photos/8509479@N05/15344363627/sizes/h/ the lyrics were mostly about playing with images. i liked the idea of something much larger than a person, like a feeling or a state, being born into a human body and developing at an accelerated rate, coming out of the womb not even looking like a fully-formed baby but maturing enough to stand and walk before even being alive for two weeks. and then, when it opens its mouth, does it even speak in a language we'd understand? does it say something profound, or just gibberish? part of it is just playing with words, but i think on some level some of the inspiration might have come from another dream. that one involved infants learning to talk before they could even crawl and saying some pretty mean things to their parents. one baby looked up at his mother and its first-ever words were something like, "i have to say i don't care for you very much." it was funny and painful to watch at the same time. when it comes to writing lyrics, i seem to be better at fragments and impressions … kind of like the things i write here. when i try to get some kind of long-form story going, i tend to run out of steam pretty quickly, as that whole ill-fated box_of_fire thing will attest to. sometimes there's a theme or a shell of a story, and my brain kicks into problem-solving mode and works it out. but a lot of the time it's just random stuff that comes out, trying to find new ways of saying familiar things, trying to put words together in a way i haven't before. musical ideas are always bouncing around faster than i can keep track of them, but words only show up when they feel like it. so when something comes out that seems to want to be small, i try not to mess with it too much. plus there are a few eight and nine-minute-long songs going on this album, so it's fun to shake things up with some really short ones too. and hey, if you want to hear a bit more, take a peak at the email address you use for blather. i sent you links to a couple mp3s, just for fun. 141013 ... raze (holy long answer, batman) 141013 ... raze (and "sun the songs" is a typo i almost like. i hope they remember to put on their sunscreen.) 141013 ... e_o_i It's cool to hear insight into musical processes... me, usually I make stuff up on the piano, or singing, or occasionally just in my head first. I don't have trouble writing down notes, but writing down the rhythm how I want it is really frustrating. So putting written instructions in like "stop six beats before the end of the chorus" or whatnot is a good solution - it makes sense to you and the player. (Tangential, perhaps related: Orchestra people I've talked to say they get tired of counting measures of rests, and it's hard for them to really "feel" it until they've practiced with the other parts for a while and can hear, "Okay, so I come in right after the part where the horns go da-da-DEE-da..." and good composers will catch on to that by putting in what other instruments do just before they come in.) 141014 ... raze i may never live this down, but "da-da-dee-da" immediately made me think of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DNQRtmIMxk oh, grade school dances. oh, memories. oh, silly nostalgia. 141015 ... raze it looks like she's coming back next week to play on another song. i mean, i had to try and get her back over here after how much fun it was last time. maybe there's something to writing string parts when you're just waking up or about to go to sleep. maybe there's something there worth bottling for a bit. 150523 what's it to you? who go blather from