Different drums (and a different bass)

As I hoped, the drum take I ended up with for "Modern Art" has a nice, retro relaxed feel to it.  (In the sheet music I'd prepared, I marked it "Think Beatles".)  I decided to lean into this by mixing the drums slightly differently from normal, at least for the non-Goof Attack mix!  Rather than have every stem at a different pan position, I divided them strictly into three groups, panning one 50% left, one centre and one 50% right - the effect does indeed hearken back to the late 1960s when producers were just starting to fully explore the possibilities of stereo.

The interlude between verses 3 and 4 has undergone another significant revision, as if it wasn't already different enough from the five-sawtooth-synthesizer freak-out in the Escapade version.  I'd long felt that the sequence of piano chords that replaces it in the Escapade 2 version (as well as the informal solo-piano version before it) also needed a bass part underneath it that isn't just one repeated note.  But I wasn't sure how it might play out, other than vaguely wanting something funky.

So I had the drummer improvise something funky there.  I then transcribed what he came up with back into the score, and with that, the right bass line came to me, clear as day.  So although the track in progress sounds a little strange, I think it'll ultimately come together quite nicely.

I almost had another goof attack

Naturally, after mentioning it in my last post, I ended up putting on Asia's Phoenix that evening.  I found it strangely instructive to revisit, largely by way of an accident.

They fly now?!

In track 6 of 12, "I Will Remember You" (which is probably the album's weakest track anyway), I couldn't help noticing that John Wetton's vocal part comes within a stone's throw of quoting ABBA's "I Wonder (Departure)" at one point.  I was so startled by this, I couldn't resist pausing the Asia album and pulling out the liner notes to my copy of ABBA: The Album, to see if the lyric was actually the same.  For the record, one word of the lyrics is different but the melodies are identical for 2 whole bars!

I then took a bathroom break before resuming the Asia album.  And I was surprised, after having taken a break, at how enjoyable I found the second half.  I'd always thought of Phoenix as one of those "front-loaded" albums where the most gripping material is crammed into the first 40% or so of the track listing, but it turns out that impression was largely due to the album's exhausting, relentlessly dense production.  Simply approaching the second half refreshed allowed me to appreciate its highlights a whole lot more.

If it'd been up to me, the cover of "Orchard of Mines" would be track 6 or 7 instead of track 10, as it's the closest any track on Phoenix gets to being sparse enough to function as a mid-album breather.  As it is, the album basically doesn't have one.

(Don't worry.  I do not plan on seeking out a hard copy of any other Asia album.)

Anyway, when I first began pondering the possibility of a third Escapade last year, I initially planned on leaving out "Modern Art" altogether, due to the piece's particularly embarrassing history.  I now realize that would have been a mistake.  The presence of a relaxing, refreshing, but not too jarring, interlude is a good thing in this kind of music.

The other option, of course, is to have "breather" passages within long pieces.  "I Get Up, I Get Down" from Yes' Close to the Edge is one of the most masterful examples, and interestingly I'm reminded of it every time I reach the slow section of the first movement in Mahler's Symphony No. 6.  That was completed in 1906, by the way: I'm sure that retaining audiences' attention has always been a subtle art.

I'd say the "dedicated breather track" option is the safer option to take.  And, well, the Chronicles of a Dead End version of "Modern Art" just happens to have been conceived as such from the start!

The only slightly difficult thing about turning "Modern Art" into an instrumental is that it has 5 verses, a consequence of the original poem's length, and thus could get boring if done too slavishly.  The solution I hit upon was for verses 1, 3 and 5 to mimic the original Escapade vocal as closely as possible, but for verses 2 and 4 to be improvised variations on it.  What I ended up with does not disappoint.  And no, I did not subject a professional guitarist to my misguided attempt at a falsetto vocal.  I transcribed it myself.

Drums are coming next.

Modern Art and more

Chronicles of a Dead End is a prog album.  I wasn't 100% sure of that going in, but the fact that the bassist and the guitarist both commented (approvingly) on the prog feel detectable in "Days to Midnight" left me in no doubt.

It would be an exaggeration to say that you can't have a prog album without an acoustic guitar instrumental serving as a relaxed intermezzo of sorts.  Nonetheless, there's a reason why it's a common choice, either as a pure acoustic guitar track or a band instrumental with acoustic guitar as the lead instrument.  Furthermore, "Modern Art" seems almost tailored to be adapted into the latter, as there's no guitar at all in the backing instruments - just piano, bass, drums and (in the Escapade version) various goofy synthesizer effects.

Needless to say, the version on the main album will not feature those!  It turned out to be surprisingly straightforward to transcribe the basic accompaniment of the Escapade version and adapt it to the calmer structure of the Escapade 2 version.  Accordingly, the Chronicles version will restore the piece to its original key of E minor.  This also opens the intriguing possibility of making two separate mixes of this track: the "normal" version on the main album, and a special "Goof Attack Remix" restoring the weird synthesizer passages as a bonus track.

Another possibility for a bonus track is a new version of "March for the Age".  I know I said before that it's not a very substantial composition, and it certainly made for a poor opener on both Escapades.  But during some "Faraway Island"-related downtime, I experimented a bit, and I ended up feeling that taken on its own terms it works quite well as a synthesizer showcase.  (I recreated the rumbling fade-in by slowing down the roar of an industrial-grade dehumidifier, and was amused to notice that you can't spell "dehumidifier" without "MIDI".)  No, I wouldn't say that "March for the Age" or the original "Modern Art" is conventionally good music, but they're essentially harmless, and I'd say they're both part of the Escapade mythos.

I also considered a version of "After the Party", but decided against it.  There is salvageable material in the song (its chord changes are conveniently similar to the "Escapes"), but as an entity in itself, it's too deeply rooted in crushing futility for comfort.  Moreover, I knew for sure I'd goofed up with that song when I ended up making another Asia-related comparison in my head: "Nothing's Forever" is a track on their (shockingly good) 2008 reunion album Phoenix, and makes my basic point (which is exactly what the Asia song title suggests) in a way that is neither depressing nor dull.  So, um, I'm going to stick with my first idea of cannibalizing elements of "After the Party" to flesh out the "Escapes".

So take the train

The beast that is "Faraway Island" has officially been tamed!  With that, I feel we may already have overcome Chronicles of a Dead End's biggest technical hurdle.  Again I've included, in this video, brief snippets of the previous versions; the Escapade version in particular shows most clearly just how badly I was overreaching, attempting to make this kind of music on my own.

Besides the line-up already introduced, we have Lynsey Tibbs (via Musiversal) on vocals.  She has a 3-octave range, but isn't one to rub it in the listener's face, instead simply using it to make heady heights seem completely effortless.  I'm also impressed by her stylish vibrato, which she doesn't overuse but treats as just another vocal effect.

The landscape on the planned album cover, by the way, is based on a photo I took during a 2018 visit to the actual place that inspired this particular song.  The colour filter I put it through is a sly cross-reference to the (ridiculous) original Escapade artwork, in which I was attempting to apply some sort of trippy psychedelic effect to my 18-year-old face.

Who needs Roger Dean?

Next up is... the piece of music that started the whole Escapade saga: "Modern Art".

Welcome to prog...

"It's a bit of a long song," commented the vocalist during the recording session for "Faraway Island".  In fact the sections with vocals only account for 79 of the song's 211 bars (that comes to 3 minutes out of nearly 9) but it's true that the part somehow feels longer than that.  Its classical-like complexity also makes it challenging to sing, which is why I struggled so much with it in previous iterations, and also why I chose to bring in another vocalist this time.

Nonetheless, there are some beautiful moments in the end result.  Section "B" in particular soars to exactly the kind of heights that I might have ill-advisedly attempted to pull off myself on the original.  There's a very brief bit of harmony in a certain spot corresponding to where I added harmony in the (omitted this time) "B" reprise section in the Escapade version.

Before the vocals were recorded but after I sent the work in progress to our vocalist, though, I got the bass recorded and mixed in.  It turned out that a real electric bass guitar has a less penetrating timbre than the MIDI bass that I used as a placeholder, so I had to have the synthesizers a fraction quieter than before, allowing the bass to cut through the mix as more than just a background presence.  It's a very active bass part that needs to be heard and not merely felt, particularly in the "B" and "C" sections.

I did in fact end up having to use volume-envelope trickery on the acoustic guitar part.  It turned out that in the later "A" sections, having the guitar at full blast combined with all the other instruments piled in basically swamped the vocals.  I think what makes this such a difficult song to mix is the sheer diversity of its arrangement: it juxtaposes some of the densest textures and some of the sparsest ones in the entire set.

It's such a densely layered song, in fact, that its project file comes to a staggering 1.71GB of waveforms, and that's with one crucial part still missing.  That would be the lead guitar, which this time will (hopefully) include an improvised solo to enhance the "C" section's build-up as well as (revised versions of) the familiar written lines.

The island appears on the skyline

No, I can't say I knew this day would come, in that I couldn't be sure that the acoustic guitar part for "Faraway Island" would turn out as well as it did!  I'm particularly impressed with the guitarist's attention to detail in the dynamics, which as a bonus means I should be able to get away with using little volume-envelope trickery (maybe even none at all?) in the mixing of this part.

Speaking of, I noticed during the session that a few synthesizer tones were more penetrating than I thought, so I mixed those parts a bit quieter while I was at it.

In the coda, I'm particularly struck by how the bright, clean sound of the steel-string acoustic guitar means that the switch to the Phrygian mode here doesn't (to me, anyway) have the sinister connotations this scale often does.  Instead it's more of a sudden rush of exotic warmth, contrasting the contemplative mood of the rest of the piece.  At the same time, the fact that it's the same instrument means that it doesn't sound out of place as a conclusion.

Anyway, as with the drums in "Days to Midnight" I felt that this was the part that unlocked the emotions in this song.  I was actually moved to tears, at one point, while mixing the guitar in - and that's with the "vocal" still being a placeholder MIDI flute.  It's very telling that, even as of the 2020s, MIDI instruments are still (at best) a mixed bag.