Attraversando La Rotta Del Canale
Notes on "Attraversando La Rotta Del Canale"
(TM wrote:)
When the Team was working on the track, "Attraversando La Rotta Del Canale", the pace was a lot faster than many other tracks of ours, I guess.
Creating the rhythm parts, I tried to make variations of the four-on-the-floor.
In the disco, house or Electronic Dance Music, the four-on-the-floor has virtually completely the same form of the kick drum, ie, "Dot, Dot, Dot, Dot," very limited developments.
At the same time the four-on-the-floor MUST be primitive and instinctive.
We experimented adopting Italian, Brazilian, Medieval Mediterranean, African and of course genuine soul rhythms into this.
(TI)
The first motif of this track (the first four bars containing the rhythm) is a fragment I created when a university student.
Also, I arranged like a Claus Ogerman. It was so sad that I couldn't hear such an arrangement, and it seemed like there were fewer people to make it.
So I did not know if I could create it, but I wanted to just try.
(TM)
This is the first motif that TI made when student.
This sounds very Latin and TI referred to Italo House Music, which reflects essentially Latin despite its House aspects. To develop it I listened to many Italo House tracks as well as Hungarian, Brazilian and Indian House. I felt Italo, Brazilian and Indian had somewhat common. (It was so fun to discover various House music from the world.)
In the early phase of composition, we apposed them sequentially, basically not coming back again to the sections that had already appeared. It’s like an ancient journey by ship and is one of FURICO’s features. I have a philosophical thought that time doesn’t repeat and what looks repetition of time is just a human illusion. This is more symbolised in the next track, “Things Are Unstable.”
I hypothesised that the common aspect among the three countries’ music is the medieval Mediterranean music, so I added what reminded us of the medieval Italian music to the introduction, using a Lute-like sound and so on.
I added one more to the Brazilian section. As a symbol of the medieval Mediterranean music, I used the Phrygian scale, which was used at the ancient times.
I also struggled to make the Indian melody. I tried some Indian phrases but it did neither fit to this track nor sound Indian. Eventually, starting with a semitones phrase did.
In this way, TI made the first motif and I added developments to it, which TI further developed very elaborately.
(TI)
After mixing down, I cut and pasted two mixed masters, created several breaks, applied delay and reverb processing to the breaks, and made them in a dub mix style.
This is because it seemed more enjoyable to us to stop and interrupt the rhythm in some places than music that always flows at the same tempo. I did not want to create just dance music.
Also, as a result of this all manual mixing, this track ends up with two different versions: one uploaded to Youtube and the other to Soundcloud.
(TM)
The title “Attraversando La Rotta Del Canale” is Italian and means crossing over the canal route. Interestingly, “Canale” means canal and channel as well. From the Mediterranean Sea (and its sided seas) via Suez Canal you go to India, while heading to Brazil via Gibraltar. I researched a little bit on the histories of Suez and Gibraltar. It was very fun.
In addition crossover is a vital concept of FURICO.