Hyper Chase For The Ruins
Notes On "Hyper Chase For The Ruins"
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Track Data
Composition tool: MuseScore, Studio One 4 ProfessionalRecording tool (DAW): Studio One 4 Professional
Number of tracks: 97
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Mai-Tai, Mojito (All built-in sound sources of Studio One), TAL-NoiseMaker
Composition and recording period: 7 November 2019 - 29 November 2019
Concept: Ancient And Digital
The central concept of this work is “what if ancient people came to today's world, were influenced by modern, digitalised music, and played new music back home?” Or, in other words, what music with computerised, complexly designed tanglement of a traditional instrument lineup is like?
The vital parts include such acoustic instruments as guitars, pianos, strings and primitive percussion, all of which were computerised / programmed and have hyper and complex chase structures. That’s what we wanted the title to imply.
(As it was composed originally for a trio consisting of a guitar, piano and cello, its tentative title was “Trinity.”)
(TI adds:) I used to express the feeling of walking in ancient Japanese ruins (such as Kyoto and Nara) directly before the title was decided. The title remained as it had been. I was surprised that it coincided with the musical concept by chance. In particular, the “Shoegazer” noisy and sweet dissonance parts in the middle & ending sections reflect exactly the image of the “morning haze ancient ruins”.
Chases
There appear chases in the introduction and some other sections. That is why the word “chase” is in the title. Let us explain a little bit about the structure.
Each of them is divided into two segments: a statement in the first half and development in the second half. The statement is an atonal chase like this.
If you treat this as just one phrase and redistribute it into three parts in completely a different way, that’s the development in the second half. For example, the first four notes the piano plays in the statement are F#, D#, low D# and E, whereas in the development the piano plays F#, the guitar D#, piano again low D#, and the cello E.
It’s exactly the same phrase except for the lengths of the notes.
In the way like this each part (except for the guitars) is basically monophonic or few-polyphonic throughout the track.
A similar structure was used in our past work "Life In Hanno."
https://youtu.be/fKnh2hR8OyU
Motif Pattern
In composition we first created this motif pattern.
It sounds like 3 + 3 + 2 meters or 6/8 + 2/8 meters and the phrase varies as it goes on. (The same phrase does not appear at all.)
“Hyper Chase For The Ruins” has a lot of polyrhythm structures but its meters are mostly 4/4. So the main sections here that might look a pattern of 6/8 and 2/8 are actually two bars of 4/4. Most of the other sections are 4/4 as well.
So, in other words, we have put a different-quality (6/8-and-2/8-like) rhythm into 4/4. That must cause a strange, illusionary, fun feeling when back from the breaks. That’s one of our intentions.
The guitar is relatively central here. We designed the phrase as something between a real guitar and unrealistic, programmed guitar(-sound). As the sounds gradually become agitato, a chase structure was adopted as well, with the guitars and pianos. Furthermore, the guitars and pianos are treated as percussion in a sense.
(Thus, the piano sounds first before the guitar in the Chase section, so that the guitar be not “too” central.)
Anyway, writing guitar phrases on the notation is quite difficult but so fun, as the technological evolution has enabled us to make guitar real to some extent, compared to some decades ago. Despite the finding that it should be easier if we divide it into six separate notation lines for each string, it would be very annoying because just one guitar would occupy the upper half of all the pages.
For your interests, later in the track, six different guitars are used in total while the piano sounds are modified with effectors and equalisers one note by one. For the arrangement, we have been influenced by Michael Atherton's wonderful album "Ankh: the sound of ancient Egypt" and legendary guitar plays by Arto Lindsay, Andy Partridge, Tadashi Kumihara and Pat Metheny etc.
Deep Bass Sounds
So, under the theme of ancient-digital music, we thought deep bass sounds were vital in this track. There are many sounds of around the lowest limit of the audibility.
We did not assume a specific instrument sound, but we added from 20 to 50 Hz, which is considered to be a heavy bass, and removed the sound in 10 Hz units with Sine Wave. All of these bands were created with Sine Wave, and all other instruments and effect sounds were cut off.
Conversely, for Sine Wave in this band, effects and equalizing were adjusted so that overtones do not occur, and the band beyond that was strictly cut. As a result, we think that we managed to create a clear sound image with a heavy bass.
Percussion & Egypt
As for the percussion, even though we didn’t have a plan to bring percussion in at first, we were somewhat inspired by the ancient Egyptian music (though it might be totally different from what most people today think is very Egyptian) and so on. Without such instruments it could be something “nice” like chamber music or background music, but they have made it difficult to find out what this is or what genre this belongs to.
But at the same time we didn’t intend to adopt any musical feature of the ancient Egyptian music. It’s none among contemporary music, modern electronic, jazz, classical, ancient and dance music, either, though some characteristics of them were mixed. Nothing like this should exist. If we played music of a particular genre the work could be more short-sighted, which would be something we really hope to avoid.
Tempo Changes
There are a lot of tempo changes in this track in order for the track to unset the general recognition of the digital music and sway the rhythm. The beat-per-minute starts at 109 and slows down to 80 or 74, goes up to 114, and so forth.
We hope you to have fun!!