Mood Of Three

Notes On "MOOD OF THREE"

TRACK DATA

Composition tool: MuseScore, Studio One 5 Professional

Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional

Number of tracks: 76

Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Mai-Tai, Mojito (All built-in sound sources of Studio One), TAL-NOIZEMAKER

Composition and Recording period: Sep 12 2020 - May 20 2021

The FURICO Music Team · MOOD OF THREE

The FURICO Music Team · Moods

[Background: "Many Drums"]

(TI writes:)

This track was written at the same time as "Particles Behaving Like Waves", which was also very close to completion, but the work on it stopped for some reason (that TM seemed to have forgotten that he had written it).

(TM writes:)

I had a particular intention at the time of composition, and after I felt it was realised, my musical interests shifted and I forgot this track. But it does not mean it's unimportant to me at all.

You might think this track seems to be like jazz, be electronic or be progressive. My intention was to put various elements into this quite neutrally.

Originally, when I heard a voice that FMT’s percussion I made comprises so many sounds, I just thought “Why not maximise them, then?” “Many Drums” uses as many as five drum kits, but they are made neatly aligned just for one groove. The tentative title was “Many Drums.”

[Composition]

(TM writes:)

For FMT I do not make arrangement in a way like making one phrase and then assign it and others to the parts; I just open a blank notation sheet with a lot of lines (meaning parts) and directly write something down to it, even for the orchestral music. Similarly for this track, I prepared a blank sheet with five lines of drums and composed this in parallel from the beginning to the end.

The five drum kits have been somewhat structured. As the diagram shows, the main ones are kits 1 and 4, while kits 2 and 5 are secondary to 1 and 4 respectively and kit 3 is supplemental. Kits 1 and 2 have similar sounds but 1 is strong and 2 weak. More importantly, those two were designed to avoid typical accents that human drummers tend to make. Occasionally it sounds like a delay on the snare drum, but it's all designed on the score.

In summary there are three series of drum kits and that is why it's titled "Mood Of Three." I made this track join the "Mood" series because I think the series symbolises FMT being genre-free and this track is especially very genre-free to me. (In that sense, I did not intend to make this Techno, Funk or another specific style.)

I am just fed up with the zero groove typical in the electronic music as well as the recent human grooves. The rhythms that exist in the current world lack the variety.

Nonetheless, by using the possible range of nuances, it is relatively easy to reproduce human drumming. Instead, what we have done here is to "create something different." At least when I listen to this track, it's different from zero groove as well as different from human simulation. If I would verbalize it, it's about "delicate and mechanical". It feels very similar to a light emitting diode that used to glow only in red and now emits a variety of lights. 

As we have written in more detail in the notes on our recently released "Unphysical" album, one of FMT's identities is something that sounds directly in our heads or in our hearts and the use of the notation as "extended internal memory". I strongly think that this track is a very unphysical work as well.

Anyway, I made the groove first that way and later made the other parts. It's a very percussion-centred piece. This is an influence I received from all folk music, and the structure of this track is, I think, more of folk music than electronic music. Although basically I intended to put various elements in a neutral way, as I wrote above, the folk music element may be the strongest in that sense. That could be a reason why TI thought it might have been suitable for our Planet series. Quite reasonable, I thought.

One more thing to add is that while adding parts other than percussion, all or otherwise most are extensions of monophony. I also use chords, but most of them are dyads (ie, two-notes chords), and I erased tonalities from chords with three or more notes I used sometimes. I did not use modes, but the process of adding a monophonic extension to percussion may be more or less like folk music.

Even so, I made the piano chords and bass lines a little jazz-like in some sections because I wanted to include very contrasting elements. African music could be a symbol of percussion-centred folk music, but jazz with its roots in African music is not necessarily percussion-centred. At least it feels to me that tonality, chords and modes are more central in jazz. it would interest me if there was something called "percussion-centred jazz", and I could say we made that in "Mood Of Two", which had been already released when this was (even though we made "Mood Of Two" later).

It is not jazz at all structurally, nevertheless, because it does not use tonality or tonality-based chords or modes. I can assure you that it's not jazz fusion either. It's a genre that brought rock, funk, and Rhythm & Blues to jazz, whereas in this track the central source of the idea was not jazz, but rather jazz is just attached afterwards.

Is this experimental? I did not intend to experiment as much as other works, but I think it has enough significance.

(TI writes:)

As for the origin of the composition, my memory is fading, so I'll write it down from my notes.

It started with TM's request to have a lot of drums in this song. At first I received a score with only four rhythm parts (including the piano and bass), and he wanted me to add some techno-like refrains to it.

When I think of techno, I think of La Famme Chinoise (Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO)) and Das Model (Kraftwerk), so I wrote a square riff like that (I don't remember the phrase), but I didn't feel comfortable with the rhythm, so I went to bed that day. In the morning, in my bed, I heard the first phrase in my head. However, it has something in common with the melody of La Famme Chinoise in the part of the repeated 4-degree intervals.

The rhythm of the song is more funk than square techno, and I created various phrases modifying the piano phrases he plays, with a Dr John feel in mind.

It was also created with the idea of adding it to the Planet series.

[About tones and mixes].

(TI writes:)

At the time I was working on it, I read an article about the Fairlight CMI that I came across, and when I saw the "PageR" sequencing feature (8 channel multi-timbral, multiple tones per channel), I thought I'd try to simulate it.

We had eight sound sources per track and assigned each note to one of them. We also used this idea on our earlier release "Etude For Samplers". The idea came from this song first.

For the mix, we used Studio One 4, the previous version of Studio One, to mix the song and we were very close to finishing it, so when Studio One was upgraded, we kept using 4. I was already used to Studio One 5, so I had a hard time getting back into the groove.

The rhythms are all based on the Sound Font drums that we use in MuseScore. However, there is a lot of noise and distortion in these sounds, so I had to remove it in detail using the sampler and effects in Studio One.

I think we spent a lot of time on this.

It's a long track and multifaceted, so I'm not sure yet what the right answer is. Maybe I'll sneak in a few changes.