Theatre of July (2006)

Recording "Theatre of July" in July 2006, was one of those special experiences that I wish would happen more often.

I have recorded dozens of pieces of music, sounds and ideas.  99% of them are incomplete, gathering virtual dust waiting for me to get to the process of finishing them.  This piece is one of those gems that sort of emerged, fully formed, and is nearly unique among my work as being relatively untouched since its original mix.

To those asking "Where have those deep dub-grooves and crazy synths gone?", the response is that this is the closest I ever came to writing a real melodic piece with a pop-song structure.  My "Here Comes Your Man", if you will.  It has a wistful, sad nostalgia to it; the AM-radio style sound to the production, which I realise now was common to a lot of my music written in this period, reminds me of listening to radio as a child, and the chord progression feels warm but sad.  To alleviate this, the final coda shuffles the chords around so that it travels upward to a more optimistic fade out.  This piece was written as a rhythm section for a vocal that never actually happened, which makes it sound both lacking and spacious, as the mix itself isn't too cluttered with sound, despite having a lot of harmonic density.

"Theatre of July" came about while living in Scarborough, Queensland, and caring for my two young kids.  We lived two blocks from the sea, and I would spend each day between day care, play dates, the Kippa Ring supermarkets and the playground by the sea, where both of my kids, at the time not even two or three, would hog the swings at the local playground.

I remember doing the vacuuming one day, and hearing a fundamental pitch coming from the resonance of the vacuum itself in the room.  Once I could identify the pitch in my head, I could hum a melody that progressed with it, and from that emerged a bassline, key changes and instrumentation.

I used to be afraid of losing inspiration, and my memory of this occasion is that I dropped the vacuum and ran downstairs to lay down tracks as quickly as possible.  The beginning was a combination of pads and strings from my Korg N-Synth, and mixed to sound a bit like a vacuum moving backwards and forwards.  All of the bass, keyboards and guitar were recorded in a series of live takes over a rough drum beat, which was a combination of freeware synths and my Korg.

The drums were the most complex aspect of the mix, but the result is a pleasing, deep, shuffling beat.  When mixing, I accidentally set up the drums incorrectly in one take and got a wild, phasing mess of about 30 kick drums.  Not to be deterred (I was on a roll, after all), I went through them all and pulled out the most obvious problematic sounds.  From there, following up with an over-complicated idea never repeated to that extent, I EQd and processed the remaining dozen or so drums and mixed them together to get what I think is a perfectly weighted kick for this song.  It feels live, without the loud click of a synthetic drum, and the tail is like a deep exhalation of cool bass air.  Through some quirk of the process, only picked up listening to it recently, over 12 years later, do I realise that the very first kick (at about 29 seconds) is missing its transient, and sounds like an echo of a far away impact.

This mix is relatively untouched.  The original was heavily compressed and has a very boomy, dominant low end, which starts phasing with the electronic piano in a way that tended to the dischordant.  The made here was to sacrifice some of the low end body and allow the mid level instruments to shine through, in particular the piano and rhythm guitars.

Again, this is quite a special tune for me, given its "miraculous" birth and the sense that somewhere there is a vocalist who never helped me finish it.  I hope others will enjoy this as well.

To finish with fair warning - the next episode will be back to more familiar territory.