Mutation
Notes On "Mutation"
TRACK DATA
Composition tool: MuseScore 3, Studio One 5 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional
Number of tracks: 89(1st)
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Mai-Tai, Mojito (All built-in sound sources of Studio One), TAL-NOIZEMAKER
Composition and Recording period: Apr 28 2022 - June 20 2022
Concept: Mutated from "North At Defining Moments"
(TM writes:)
This track called "Mutation" is a sort of bridge between our previous album "The Anomalous Folk" and the newer album titled "Auditory Art For Visual Arts."
In terms of the background, in short, through making "The Anomalous Folk" we found so intriguing one music style of what we call "minimal on basso continuo" in our work named as "North At Defining Moments." That was developed from another work in the album "Equatorial Deliverance", which is an alternative rhythm style, so to speak.
This track can be regarded as "North"'s younger sister, which is the reason why the title is "Mutation", or in other words, the concept of minimal on basso continuo has mutated from "North" into this work and propagated into the "Auditory Art" album. It's, thus, the first piece we created in the album and shouldn't have taken too long. (The tentative title during production was "New Experiment From North."*)
As I wrote in the notes on "North",
"The bass has, quite uniquely, many notes and dyads. I would call it "a very low sequencer phrase", rather than the bass. It does not aim to show the key notes, which accelerate erratic (or beautiful in a sense) atonality. ...
"I don't remember I have heard such minimal music with minimal phrase on the bass yet. ... This is an experiment like that. Through the process of production, we were so astonished at the newness that we decided to do another series ("Auditory Art For Visual Arts"). I feel like moving this track to the next series but then one of the five directions would be missing. So I haven't moved."
And I composed this instead.
If there were nothing new to me, I would be bored soon and that's why it has an interlude -- I don't think that's an interlude -- or a big change-up, which starts from 1:58 and lasts until 5:07. So, more than 3 minutes out of the total length for 5:39 is the change-up, while the exposition and resolution (well, sorts of...) takes only for the rest, 2 minutes. Have I heard something that has a structure like that? Unlikely.
It tells that something different or mutated begins and the minimal on basso continuo is applied in various ways throughout the album. Just after composing this piece, I worked on two minimal-on-basso-continuo platforms by applying what I did for this, which mutated into the tracks called "This Life Is Just A State Of Mind (featuring STONERJAZZ)" and "Artless (featuring The Windscale Blues Experiment)."
* I composed another sister, "New Experiment From North 2" as well, and I wish I could release it.
Composition: "Extension Method" & "Unkind Arrangement"
(TM writes:)
In Page 1 of the notation I left a note in Japanese that says "I'm not sure if I can make difference from North (At Defining Moments). I set 6-8 in order to make it anyway."
Then, a sine wave solo introduces with another note reading "Start without thinking." On my composition of this work I pursued what I call “Extension Method” like I did to create "Mad Disco" and "Here I Am."
The introduction is the process of what I came up with. After that, an organ joins. I seem to have had interests in the slight groove that is being generated around there. So the drums join. The tempo is gradually slowed down from 109 beats per minute (BPM) to 108 and then 107. Strings combined with a harp converge, where I wrote that the phrase was what I had made for Newfangled Hotel Ambience but hadn't used. Afterwards, claps and guitar cutting follow at 106 BPM.
This tempo change is one of the styles that I like a lot and apply very often, which is to change a little after the beginning of the bar. This particular change is made at Beat 3. Similar tempo changes are embedded everywhere in FMT's works.
After it turns to 105, slow triad strings emerge in the way like "Here it comes." I just love the phrase. I also love how it's arranged there, which I have named "unkind arrangement." In our music having the concept of minimal on basso continuo all that sound continually are low tones and thus a phrase like this walks alone without accompaniments. It becomes like a monolith in a vast plain field. It feels weirdly dramatic, doesn't it? Later on mixing, TI developed it even more so.
This here-it-comes motif starts with the emphatic cymbal, which appears in this track several times. The cymbal isn't very ordinary because it's not one as a part of the drum kit but an orchestral cymbal is used. That's another one of my favourites in this piece.
Then, we arrive at an unseen place, or in other words, a sudden change in the scenary. The power that has been maximised is cooled down at 73 BPM. The time stays the same in 6-8, but the rhythm turns out to be something like swing, meaning it treats 6-8 as 4 beats. A change-up like this was made in our track called "The Drama In The Elevator" in the "Newfangled Hotel Ambience" series, which I designed on that 4 swing beats in a 6-8 notation. A little while later, swinging is presented with a high-hat-like percussive noise. Oh, my goodness, that's another of what I love so much in this track. A note on there says: "With a noise like North [At Defining Moments]"; quite a similar noise, which TI created, joins to make different groove. Super.
In this section (of extremely long interlude) harmonies are added onto the minimal basso continuo, which I think now is a little bit similar to Talking Heads' work "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)" in terms of the structure and harmonies. It was not intentional at all, but it's quite natural because the song is one that I've been loving for decades.
Towards the ending we return to the first section from the long, long interlude. It's much slower at 95 BPM. It begins at 109, suddenly gets down to 73 and (after various slight shifts around 73) turns up to 95. The gap between 109 and 95 is not too small but it feels like it has come back.
That could be a sort of auditory illusion, but it's just the beginning; there are a lot of bigger things than that in this album... That's how "Mutation" is.
(TI writes:)
This way of making the basso continuo is 'the opposite way of making it' to the basso continuo in the baroque. We can only imagine the detailed compositional processes of the ancient composers, but I believe that they probably harmonised the basso continuo, which was originally written as a monophonic melody.
Also, the concept of harmony was not very common in Baroque music, and although some rules for the layering of notes in the bass register were written down in the score, it was left up to the performers. In fact, many baroque basso continuo scores contain only monophonic melodies (and that's the way they should have been, since the basso continuo is not a solo instrument). Those with all the notes of the basso continuo clearly marked on the score have been made note-specific to make it easier for later performers to understand. The original basso continuo, so to speak, works in the same way as the 'auto backing function' (a function that automatically plays harmonised chords when you play a bass line) on modern family keyboards).
In contrast, our basso continuo is created through a process of breaking down the originally written compound melody into monophonic melodies and assigning a harmonic role to each note.
It is also important to note that the rhythm is funk (bounce) in this piece. In general, rhythms that are considered minimal music are a combination of flat rhythms. In addition, the musical genre Funk is basically minimal music (repetition of individual elements), but as a rule it involves harmony. In contrast, our music often does not involve harmony, and this song is no different. So, if you listen to the instrumental part alone, it sounds minimalist, but with the addition of funk rhythms, I think it will create an atmosphere that you have not heard before.
Mixing: Attention to compressor settings
(TI continues:)
As for the basso continuo part, as mentioned earlier, if the parts written by TM in MuseScore are treated as one part as they are, the bandwidth is too wide and they do not fit together well, so they are broken up into single melodies and the timbre and EQ are adjusted according to their respective roles.
For the drums, except for the bass drum, I output directly from MuseScore and use it as it is.
The cymbals, which TM considered 'good sounding', are also freely distributed (probably from the 1990s) GM sound sources, and the sound sources themselves are not of high quality nowadays. Only the bass drum was created by layering sounds created with the synthesiser included with Studio One on top of the Studio One playback sampler.
This song also has a wide sound range and a large number of sounds, so if all the sounds were played in the same way, it would be difficult to get a clear sound.
In general, the pitch of the instrumental parts is also slightly shifted.
In this song, as in the previous releases 'North At Defining Moments' and 'Destination', I was most conscious of the compressor settings.
The large number of parts, the many fine notes and the large number of sounds contained within a certain amount of time meant that it was necessary to create a distinction and perspective between the sounds that needed to be set up with an emphasis on attack and a good sense of grain and rhythm, and the sounds that supported the atmosphere in the background.
To achieve this, I paid close attention to the compressor settings (mainly the balance between attack, release and threshold). The cymbal sound in the case in question can be heard clearly thanks to the compressor's attack time (set the attack late so that only that part can be heard clearly) and release time (set it slightly longer so that it sounds subdued).
Comments