Easterly Ocean Current
Notes On "EASTERLY OCEAN CURRENT"
TRACK DATA
Composition tool: MuseScore, Studio One 5 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional
Number of tracks: 79
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Mai-Tai, Mojito (All built-in sound sources of Studio One), TAL-NOIZEMAKER
Composition and Recording period: Jan 22 2022 - Apr 02 2022, Apr 25 2022 - Apr 26 2022
Concept: Okinawa second mode
(TM writes:)
The album "The Anomalous Folk" includes five tracks to symbolise five geographic areas: North, South, East, West and Middle. Easterly Ocean Current is the track for East.
This work uses the scale of the folk music in Okinawa, an area in the south-west end of Japan, where its unique culture has been developed since it was an ancient independent kingdom. Most of the Japanese can notice Okinawan music is Okinawan, but it is unlikely that they notice this track is based on Okinawan music since this mainly uses the second mode of the Okinawa scale.
I have never heard any music using the mode. But, at the same time, it is very, very important that the sound is irrelevant to Okinawa or any particular geographic area in that this is "folk music of nowhere."
(The key visual shown on SoundCloud is a motif on the scruptured wall of Angkor Wat in Cambodia.)
Composition: various mode developments
(TM writes:)
While the Okinawa scale is C-E-F-G-B if on C, its second mode is E-F-G-B-C. The main section starts with it for four bars, for the next two bars, adds F# to the mode, and comes back to the mode for two bars. The next development section follows the mode with F# and C#. Later in the track, other notes are supplemented. That is how it goes -- what we call "mode progression" (rather than chord progression).
Nevertheless, there is no meaning related to Okinawa. I just designed it that way because it sounded beautiful. Like the other tracks of this series called "The Anomalous Folk", we just applied very attractive musical aspects of various folk music for unique digital folk music of nowhere.
The rhythm was made unique as well. The drums come and go. This is based on my idea of "minimal but not monotonous." Interestingly enough, this is very different from both continual beats and no beats. To me it sounds more vigorous in a sense.
In the intermediate, the pattern of the Phrygian mode is mixed. In the first bar it pursues the Harmonic Phrygian mode on E for two beats and Phrygian on C#. The next bar uses the Okinawa 2nd mode on G# for two beats and the semi-Harmonic Phrygian mode on A for two beats. The next two bars transpose the two-bars modes up by one whole tone, etc. I thought it would be kind and funny enough if an arpegio-like phrase explained what mode it followed; yes, there is.
I must talk about the last section. Why does it turn to Rock music? After creating all the sections before, I thought it needed the final section, something contrastive. What came to my mind is an idea to create the reverse mode; consisting of notes excluded in Okinawa 2nd Mode on E, ie, C#, D, D#, F#, G#, A, A# (on C#).
It sounds a little bluesy and attractive as well as unique in the sense of no three and seven degrees. The track as a whole uses 12 notes. Funny. I just added a vibraphone melody-like solo. TI later changed the instrument to electric piano and other rock sounds, as well as added the roll-down effect to introduce this final section, all of which were so fantastic. I would rather repeat this section for hours. The fade-out, the first attempt for FMT, reflects my feeling like that.
"Eliminating cultural and musical influences"
[Sound creation and mixing/Studio One phase]
(TI writes:)
For this track, everything was created by TM, I didn't add anything on the musescore. I was in charge of tone creation and mixing.
This piece is inspired by the Okinawan musical scale, but for this piece, and for the series "The Anomalous Folk", I am not interested in the specific cultural or geographical context that the scale evokes, but purely in the interesting sound it creates.
The discourse often associates a particular scale with a particular region or culture, which is partly true, but not the whole story.
In fact, in some cases, not just the Okinawan scale, scales are not necessarily unique to a region or culture, but exist across several areas of the globe (with which there may not have been direct interaction).
For example, the Okinawan scale and the blues scale are very similar, but there seems to be no direct cultural link between them at the time the music was formed. There is also a common (but strictly different) groove between the bouncing rhythms of Funk and Okinawan rhythms. This too probably had no direct influence on each other at the time of its formation.
Therefore, in the creation of tones and mixes, we are conscious of avoiding specific tones and atmospheres that are reminiscent of the geography and culture of Okinawa.
This 'eliminating as much as possible cultural and musical influences that are easily evoked or associated with the musical scale' was somewhat more difficult to achieve than with other tracks in The Anomalous Folk series. This is because, although Okinawan music is not directly part of our culture, songs inspired by Okinawan music are familiar to us, and we have a number of favourite artists and songs amongst them, so it is inevitably difficult to eliminate these influences. So while re-listening, I repeatedly went through the process of noticing such elements, eliminating them, and still making it sound the way I wanted to hear it.
In this track, at TM's request, I switched the sound quality and sound image between the first half and the second half. I also added a little gimmick (like a turntable or tape recorder spin-down) at the transition to make it easier to understand and feel the change.
The reason for this is that I found out how to control the On/Off switching of Vinyl's Spindown, iZotope's plug-in software, directly from Studio One. But that's all.
This is the first time in FMT that the track ends the way it does, with a fade-out.
This suggestion was made by TM, but it was very difficult to coordinate the timing to make it fade out properly. It was surprisingly difficult to express all the sounds present in the track and then fade out like a fade-out.
Come to think of it, there were many songs that ended with a fade-out until around the 1980s - why was that? I remember as a child thinking, "How does this song really end?" I wanted to hear it all the way through."
In a way, it's similar to the feeling of wondering where the end of a train line is, where you always take the train but never ride it to the end of the line.
But for this piece, the moment when the sound disappears is also the end of the piece (score). Beyond that point, it doesn't exist.
Visual
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