This ended up being rushed at the end because people don't respect my time and boundaries, but I think I got everything in there I was hoping for.
‹ Excessive production notes verging on pretentious
Well maybe not too excessive.
This is still chasing a sound - "post-rock space-ambient with a decidedly country twang" - and a follow up to a couple of my other albums, most notably The Message and The Pulsar Suite. Chasing the sound on its own wasn't getting me where I needed to be, and I came back to narrative as a solution, which kinda boils down this this:
"Bedroom songwriter/producer/musician, but in space."
Lonely space cowboy, big empty ship, guitar, amp, and just the massive cisterns and cargo holds and tunnels to provide reverb, and the pipes and metal walls for percussion. I wanted to explore the idea of "transmission" and "echo" as well, which this sketch started a bit but sorta ran out of time for that exploration this week.
There's also an element of sending this song out into the cosmos, and hearing the cosmos singing back - again, an echo, a call and response.
So I used my semi-hollowbody guitar, my little katana amp, my mic I use for vocals, and started recording stuff in weird ways, capturing some of the essence of the room via live mic recording, getting some direct input stuff, and then throwing everything into some convolution reverb to create that sense of space. So there's a little "method acting" going on, and a little pure fantasy.
Everything you hear - apart from the percussion - derives from the guitar recordings in some ways, there's no synths, no additional instruments. The main 'riff' is transformed into long drones and echoes, stretched and reversed and reflected like it's being sent out into space and echoed back by cosmic dust and black holes and the stellar winds. I feel like that's kinda making the soul of the track as a result.
I got a few things more to explore but I think I found a workflow and a story and a method and space for this album, and that's exciting.