Newfangled Hotel Ambience 7: The Quaint Dream / Dream Interpretation
Notes On "NHA 7: The Quaint Dream" / "Dream Interpretation"
Newfangled Hotel Ambience 7: The Quaint Dream
TRACK DATA
Composition tool: MuseScore3, Studio One 5 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional
Number of tracks: 66
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Mai-Tai, Mojito (All built-in sound sources of Studio One), TAL-NOIZEMAKER
Composition and Recording period: 26 Sep 2021 - 29 Sep 2021
Although I was having fun with creating the tracks of the Newfangled Hotel Ambience Series, creativity suddenly disappeared after having composed "NHA 8: 3:20 am." It was the summer of 2021.
Needless to say, I tried some compositions but did not think those were interesting enough at that time, which now impress me a lot, funnily. Anyhow, since I felt the need to add one more piece to the Series but the lack of my capability, I asked TI to compose some motif.
What he created then is close to what has now been completed as "Dream Interpretation" and I made arrangement to make it fit to the Series. I wanted some chill-out atmosphere with a little bit of oriental and tropical flavour, intending to bring out the feeling when you zoned out just after dreaming about something wonderful and waking up at around one or two o'clock am, perhaps after you had drunk much. You cannot sleep again for a while and you get out to the reception hall for no purpose at 3:20 am (meaning, Track 8 of the Series).
In my view the harmonies tend to be central in TI's composition; whereas I rarely do, he sometimes uses major/minor thirds in so dissonant manners that we cannot name the chords. I arranged them for the context of the NHA Series. And more often than I do, he makes unambiguous phrases, which I omitted in this track (but left in "Dream Interpretation").
In order to make differences between these two works I did almost nothing for Dream Interpretation, which might not have been very interesting if I had done a lot.
(TI writes:)
Composition
The Quaint Dream is different from the rest of the NHA series in that I wrote the basic music for it. And The Quaint Dream is a different arrangement of the same motif as Dream Interpretation.
The original motif was a song I wrote for a band I was involved with when I was 17, inspired by artists on the Les Disques Du Crépuscule label (such as MIKADO), with a clear melody and chords.
Also, at the time, I was composing while playing the piano and keyboards, which gave the song an extremely prosaic element, and the song itself is not FMT-like, it's the type of song that can be written in chords and played physically, similar to the previously released "A Girl From The Music". That atmosphere is still present in Dream Interpretation.
As for the chord progression, when I wrote this song, it was a more obvious cliché progression (Am7-Aaug-GM7-C9), but for this song, I shifted the inner voice, delayed it, etc., making it difficult to describe as a chord progression. This is the original score for The Quaint Dream and Dream Interpretation.
For The Quaint Dream, TM took the basic score and arranged it. He takes the melodic melody away and twists it even further with rhythmic, non-harmonic refrains and chopped up phrases in the lower register.
Mixing
As for the mix, we have put it on the same format as the previous NHAs and mixed it in the same way as the rest of the NHA series, with a live atmosphere.
However, like Me And My Shadow (NHA5), The Quaint Dream is also different from the previous NHAs in that the bass is a synth, but the synth bass is also played by hand. The timing of the notes has been shifted forward a little, so as not to spoil the original notes.
The metal percussion and distortion guitars that appear in the middle of the track give it a bit of an industrial feel.
I was working on this song at the same time as Dream Interpretation, but the concept was to imitate a band performance, and I was working on a common format for NHA, so when I was working on it, I thought it took a certain amount of time and effort, but when I looked at the record But the record shows that it took only 4 days to make and not much time to mix.
Dream Interpretation
TRACK DATA
Composition tool: MuseScore3, Studio One 5 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional
Number of tracks: 101 (1st) 18（2nd)
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Mai-Tai, Mojito (All built-in sound sources of Studio One), TAL-NOIZEMAKER
Composition and Recording period: Sep 20 2021 - Oct 27 2021,Jan 8 2022 - Feb 22 2022
(TI writes:)Composition
As mentioned above, this track is based on the same motif as The Quaint Dream, so it's kind of the original of The Quaint Dream.
The first half of the rhythm track is written by TM, but after 4 minutes I wrote the rhythm track, which is rare in FMT tracks.
I used Studio One and sampled rhythm parts from various tracks. I think it's the same way hip hop artists do it. I'm trying to create the kind of dangling notes that are common in Lo-Fi hip-hop these days, but it's not the same thing at all.
The uniqueness of FMT is a mixture of conscious creation and the fact that "I'm just not good at imitation".
Mixing
The mix is very elaborate. Each part is mixed individually in the basic Studio One mix file, then cut up and edited in multiple Studio One files to create the final 2Mix.
The basic file is 101 tracks, but I also created a Studio One project file for reverse playback only, and three Studio One files divided by noise type, and extracted WAV files of various sound qualities and playback styles from these files, which were then integrated into the Studio One project file for the final mix, and mixed.
At the end of the four minutes, when the track had changed its development, the playback speed of each track was changed at various speeds, so that each part of the phrase sounded on a different time axis.
The result is an image of a world in which time moves in different ways within the same time, mixed and running simultaneously.
I also added feedback delays to each track, and mixed files that were rotated backwards, creating chaos. It's a chaotic progress of time and feeling in dreaming.
So it sounds like the tempo is getting faster and slower, but the tempo of the file itself is constant. It is the speed at which each tone is played that is different.
It's as if you slept for only 5 minutes while in your dream it was days, and vice versa, if in your dream it was a moment, in real time it was a whole night.
I mix the tracks as if I'm putting marks on the timeline.
I also saturated the master track directly with saturation effects and increased the sound pressure, something I rarely do on other tracks.
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