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The Book of Flame
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Overview While working on this album I found myself thinking about some pretty heavy stuff. In addition to the sorrow and soul searching I felt over the death of my close friend, Michael Hedges, which occurred while I was in the midst of conceptualizing the album, I became fascinated with the kinds of things people believe in, both sacred and profane. I was also interested in the effect those beliefs have on the world around us. I remembered the image of fire as the classic metaphor for life—we burn brightly for a limited time with beliefs and ideas, and in the process we are consumed. Meanwhile, we leave a story behind us, like a book, of experiences, emotions, successes, failures, dramas, etc. I hoped that this title would reflect these ideas, as well as pay homage to the Jorge Luis Borges collection of short stories, The Book of Sand, which has had a big influence on me. I hoped that The Book of Flame might be a kind of a collection of audio short stories that somehow tied together all of the thoughts and experiences I was having. The Fire Sermon This piece is named after both a canto from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and the sermon by the Buddha in which he taught “…[all] forms are on fire, eye-consciousness is on fire, impressions received by the eye are on fire; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant or indifferent, originates from impressions received by the eye, that is also on fire.” Eliot described this sermon as being analogous to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in importance to the Buddhist religious tradition. The Buddha’s words seemed to most clearly exemplify the metaphor of fire that I was interested in. I also liked the idea of referring to Eliot—in particular this poem which is so full of its own kind of transcendental references. I had been interested in the concept of using audio references—what happens to us when we hear something familiar? And then what if that is combined with something else that it isn’t normally associated with? In a sense, of course, this is what all composing is, since no combination of notes in music is really “new.” But I wanted to be more conscious of the ways in which I was applying this idea. References in a work to itself can also help to establish a thematic coherence to the message. I can think of no more masterful use of creative references than Eliot’s, “The Waste Land” and the subject matter of the poem, the decay of our society and culture, is also in line with the nature of what I was hoping to communicate in this album. “The Fire Sermon” is a solo for the 10-string bass. I thought that keeping this a solo piece would help underscore the “sermon” aspect of the title. A few people have asked about the swirling effect that occurs off and on throughout the piece. It comes from a patch I made on my Digitech RP-10. I like interactive effects—stuff that you don’t necessarily just turn on and off, but that you can control to suit the changes in the music. I controlled the RP-10 live with a foot pedal while I was recording. Adult Content, Brief Nudity I wanted to contrast the “The Fire Sermon” with a piece that had a much earthier tone. The phrase, “adult content, brief nudity” comes from encapsulated descriptions of cable TV programs. I thought about the people who spend their time trying to rate these programs and wondered what they thought about and believed in. I also thought about the people to whom these descriptions were important. It always seemed kind of funny to me to ignore the subject matter of a show and distill its content to such a simple phrase. I wondered what a piece of music would sound like that might earn that particular distinction and so that’s how this tune came about. At the end of the piece, I processed two of my basses through the filters in my sampler to try to make them resemble a dialog between a man and a woman in a B movie. The Book of Lies This title, of course, refers to the “book” in the album title and also had a kind of religious connotation. All the great religions have sacred books of truths. I wondered what kind of messages a book of lies might have. In a sense, every written or spoken message is to some degree untrue because of the limitations of language, but at the same time there is something heroic in the attempt to express truth through language. In this piece I wanted to refer to different musical styles in a big kaleidoscopic jumble. I think that’s how our culture might seem from a different time-frame perspective. I played a lot of my kitchen utensils on this one. As I’m making dinner every night I like to listen to the sounds that all the different utensils make. I think it was Satie who said that music should mingle with the sounds of forks and knives at dinner. I’m not sure about that, but I liked the idea of putting something of my “real” life into my music. I especially like the sound of a great big steamer pot I have and I used its ominous ringing several times in this piece to mark changes of section or mood. La Sagrada Familia
I had nearly completed the piece and thought it fit in with the nature of this album, but I didn’t have a title for it. While on tour with Suzanne Ciani in Spain we played in Barcelona. It was kind of a rushed tour and we didn’t have much time to sightsee…or sleep, for that matter! After the Barcelona show, we had a kind offer from our Spanish host to take us quickly around the city and show us the famous buildings designed by the visionary architect, Antoni Gaudí. A few of us decided to go, even though it meant getting even more sleep deprived than we already were. We visited Gaudi’s masterpiece, the cathedral, La Sagrada Familia, last. Maybe it was giddiness from lack of sleep, but standing in front of that building, I felt that it expressed so masterfully everything I was trying to say in my little bass solo—and so much more. I thought if I gave my piece a more majestic title than it deserved, maybe it would grow to live up to it! Gaudí’s La Sagrada Familia is an immense and enormously complex structure. It still hasn’t been completed even though work has been going on for something like 80 years. Some residents of Barcelona wonder if it will ever be completed and one hears in their voices the possibility that perhaps it should never really be finished. I wonder if they think of it as a kind of monument to their ambitions, lifestyles and beliefs. “La Sagrada Familia” means “The Holy Family”, but can also be translated as “the sacred family” and, of course, all families are sacred. They, like Gaudi’s building, are complex and beautiful and difficult and never quite finished. In appreciation of this idea I decided to keep sections of my piece open for improvisation so that it also might never quite be finished. We’ll see what happens! Theseus in the Rains I wrote this piece during the seemingly endless storms we had in
California during El Niño. After awhile it felt like there was no way
out of the rain, as if it were a gigantic labyrinth (one of Borges
favorite symbols, by the way). I kept thinking about the myth of Theseus,
the king of Athens who found his way through a labyrinth to kill a
monstrous Minotaur. It’s such a classic story of heroism, I thought it
would make a nice addition to my references. No Wontons for Elvis I wrote this piece as an exercise in absurdity. Most of the time I work hard to compose music that has a logical internal structure and sense of coherence, but I wanted to step away from that and just write something ridiculous. After all, absurdity is an important part of life! Especially since Werner Heisenberg developed his Uncertainty Principle in particle physics, it seems that if there is anything to believe in it’s that life is largely random and we don’t really know what’s going to happen. While this is often the source of a great deal of modern anxiety, if you don’t take it too seriously, it can actually be kind of funny. I doubt that I managed to communicate much of these ideas in “No Wontons for Elvis”, but I did have a good time writing it! I had been studying a lot of serial music while I was working on The Book of Flame and in the middle section of “No Wontons…” I thought it would be fun to insert some nearly complete tone rows. I juxtaposed these against some rhythms I adapted from “Blue Suede Shoes” and a classic rock’n’roll cliché in the hope to further the cause of absurdity. [In concert, Michael tells the story of an anxiety dream he had in which he was onstage, looked down at the set list, and didn’t recognize any of the titles. When he woke up, the only title he remembered seeing in his dream’s set list was “No Wontons for Elvis”.—M@] Your Ad Here This title obviously comes from those signs you see everywhere selling advertising space. I thought it would be funny to see that phrase on an album cover as if that space were for sale, too! I often hear stories about how music has become more and more commercialized and corporate and wonder what long-term effects this has on our culture. I read somewhere that at some point in the future everything will be an advertisement. I wonder if for some people, capitalism qualifies as a religion? This piece has probably the most “sonically referential” approach of any on the CD. I suppose it could be accused of being programmatic, although I don’t think of it that way because it’s not narrative at all. I just wanted the sounds to be suggestive of a capitalistic and technological society that seems to be on the verge of careening out of control sometimes. I hoped that by dealing with these kinds of sounds in a musical context I could make something that was sarcastic, meaningful and kind of silly and fun all at the same time. Although it may not seem like it, the sound the tune starts with is a loop that I made using a slide on my Hyperbass. I liked this texture because it reminded me of the sort of semi-mechanical whine that is so pervasive everywhere in the industrialized world—from florescent lights, computers, electric circuits, air moving through heating ducts—that sort of thing. At 0:06, I added some Ebow bass loops to provide a kind of ominous drone as a background for the wah-wah Ebow Hyperbass melodies that comes in at 0:11. I wanted these wah melodies to sound almost like an introductory lamentation to contrast with the more ridiculous aspects of the piece. I hoped this might suggest the sadness that living in such a coldly mechanical world can cause, but which always seems to be drowned out by the incessant, maniacally cheerful voice of advertising. I tried to design the little groove that starts at 0:40 to set up a feel that’s kind of a cross between trite and psychotic. The main body of the tune starts at 0:54 with a generic, mechanically repetitive, funky groove and a melody that I hoped would be reminiscent of an ad jingle—simplistic and repetitive, with the “lyrics” saying “put…your ad here…your ad here.” I wanted the Ebow sample that first appears at 1:13 to act like a
repeating ad slogan with a really twisted feel to it, yet at the same
time related to the introductory lamentation. At 1:41 the mechanical
sounds come back, hopefully suggesting something like robots gone
haywire. A lot of these sounds actually came from the bass including the
cheesy flying saucer sound which I made by running the Hyperbass through
an intense pitch vibrato patch. Ephemeris A planetary ephemeris is a book that records positions of the planets at any given time. Astrologers use an ephemeris to make predictions and analyses of events and circumstances. Astronomers like to point out the absurdity of astrology by saying that the planets are so far away, there is no way that they could have any effect on our lives. After all, the objects around us have far more gravitational effect on us than the distant planets. But there is something truly human about trying to divine meaning from the movements of the heavens or the “music of the spheres,” as it is sometimes called. [For a fascinating and related read, check out The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science & the Natural Order of the Universe by Jamie James, ISBN 0387944745.—M@] I wrote this piece several years ago and had planned to incorporate it into a larger piece, but I kept liking it just as it is and decided to leave it alone. It’s a duet for two basses that involves repeated contrary rhythms that cycle around to create changing relationships. It always made me think of planetary motion and I thought that the astrological implication would fit in nicely into this CD. To help underscore this idea in the mix, engineer Tony Mills and I slowly rotated the two basses around in the stereo field—one vertically and one horizontally. If you listen on headphones it sounds kind of cool. [This album was mixed on a Yamaha O2R digital board which has both “horizontal” and “vertical” as panning options, however, Yamaha isn’t telling anyone how this subtle “vertical” effect, which would seem to be impossible, is achieved.—M@] The Adamski Photographs Professor George Adamski was a man who, in the 50’s claimed to have been abducted by aliens and published pictures he had taken of their spacecraft to support his claim. He became something of a minor celebrity for a short time, traveling around the world to spread the messages he had received from the aliens. As it turns out, it was all a hoax and he wasn’t really even a professor, but had served hamburgers to tourists in the cafe at the Mt. Palomar telescope. Nevertheless, there is something so engaging and charming about his story that it has a special significance for me. By today’s standards, his photographs are laughably hokey and you have to wonder how anyone could ever have believed him, but at the same time you can’t fault the human desire to want to believe in something bigger than ourselves and wonder at the heroic things we do to try to find meaning in our lives. I wrote this piece on the piano and at first it reminded me of some kind of twisted version of Thelonius Monk. I gave the music to an old friend of mine, Barry Gurley, who is a brilliant pianist and he was actually able to make sense out of it and turn it into something fun. The Adamski story seemed like the perfect fit to the sound. Dromedary I wrote this piece because of something my friend Michael Masley played. One night I had a group of friends including Mike, over to my studio and we were jamming and recording informally. Mike is kind of a visionary who makes his own instruments out of anything he can find. At one point he played a rhythm on an instrument he calls the “bass vase” that I was really captivated by. We didn’t really manage to come up with much at the moment, but since I had a recording of it I asked Mike if I could work with it on my own. What you hear at the beginning of the piece is what Mike played. Meanwhile, my brother Doug, who is also an amazing musician had been sending me tapes of little bits of percussion rhythms that he said I could use. One of them fit right in for a contrasting section. I liked the sort of unspecified ethnicity of both of these rhythms and they reminded me of how the world is getting smaller and sometimes it’s hard to tell where one culture stops and another one begins. The ungainly yet beautiful image of a dromedary seemed to sum up what this piece was about. The Book of Living and Dying This is a variation on the name of Michael Hedges’ favorite book,
The Tibetan Book of Living & Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche. It contains
information about Tibetan Buddhism and he used to love to refer to it
and quote from it. In the week before he died, Michael’s girlfriend told
me he kept reading and re-reading it. In the book it says that the best
way to die is to go quickly and have no one see your body for three
days. We think that’s exactly how Michael died. It seemed right to me to end the record with this personal statement and it also seemed the best way to pay homage to my friend.
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I
started working on this fretless solo piece when I got home from a plane
flight and took my bass out of the case to discover that being jostled
around in the baggage compartment had put it into a strange tuning, F# G
Bb G. At first I laughed, because, even though I work with many altered
tunings, I couldn’t imagine being able to come up with anything in such
an absurd configuration. As soon as I heard myself laugh, though, I knew
I had a new challenge! I found a few things I liked right away, but I
realized if I used a capo on the bass I could open up more options. I
take the capo off near the end of the piece and if you listen carefully,
you can hear it rake against the strings.
