Saturday, 2 April 2022

a reflection upon the work of recording and arrangement (shipbuilding)

horsemouth is up slightly later than usual (but it is a saturday) and it is a beautiful sunny morning (though cold). today horsemouth farts and fiddles about. sunday he is probably off up to the cloud forest. howard's easter holiday is here and (with a bit of luck) they will get some recording in. 

soon horsemouth and howard will be shipbuilding again  hopefully - sickness may intervene (rates of coronavirus are galloping), tiredness may intervene. 

howard has a load of singer-songwriter type songs he wants to get recorded. horsemouth wants to do a fake live album of covers. realistically they probably don't have enough time for both (unless they work very quickly). 

yesterday horsemouth's first listen to volume four in a while (maybe at least a week). 

what does he have to say about it? what does it tell us about his thought processes?

he tends to separate out the tunes into howard tunes and horsemouth tunes. howard writes songs at a much faster rate than horsemouth, horsemouth tends to focus his attention on the arrangement of the songs. in the normal course of events there are more howard tunes than horsemouth tunes. 

on three of the songs wonky, I will not go and fallen snow horsemouth does not play (and very good they are too). on sand storm and amárach he contributes only guitar,  and on dark was the day only bass. with broadbury down it began as a howard instrumental and then horsemouth added the lyrics and all the guitars, on blindspot he added bass and guitars,  

only two of the songs on the album didn't begin with a howard songpagodas - the only song on the album on which howard does not sing or play (various parts from a debussy piano piece played on guitars by horsemouth) and am I born to die? (a traditional wesleyan hymn) where horsemouth plays guitars and organ and sang a vocal and then howard sang rival vocals on it as well.

horsemouth tends to appropriate amárach to the list of his tunes (or to a list of songs that is theirs together) because he likes the way it came out. it came together quickly, he's proud of his work there and he suggested a few other things for it that came out well also. 

when they work together sometimes howard will succeed in drawing out something horsemouth didn't know he had - the solo guitars on noah for example (otherwise a rare song that horsemouth feels they wrote together). horsemouth has a tendency to take refuge in improvs not because he is good at it but because they get quick and good results (on the banks of the susquehanna and (S)erpents from the previous album for example). 

horsemouth has a tendency to overthink and overplan things (this is another example of it) and so he's just keeping it loose. 

anyway. first a holiday up in the cloud forest. 

horsemouth needs to remind himself to be careful and to keep it close. the virus is still about (even if it is unlikely to kill you these days). it could be the time to get it (while it's a less fuck off and die variant). 

last night the return of count yorga (on the horror channel) and finishing of knife of ice. yorga has a deaf girl, knife of ice  has a girl who has gone mute as a result of trauma. 



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