Early Winters Spires
By onezero on May 24, 2026 11:27 pm
For the last two or three years or so, I've been limiting pieces to shorter than four minutes, as a way of enforcing focus. This one, though, seemed to need to exceed five minutes, so I'm gradually letting myself free from some constraints.
The first themes I recorded Friday night were the second and third themes in the finished piece. I wanted to do something that formed out of more sparsity, thinking of Slowdive's "Rutti." While I recorded something in that direction, it didn't quite fit with the rest. In a second session Saturday night, I recorded the two themes with harmonizing melodies, followed by the long first theme in the finished piece, which fit much better than the earlier one. This one seemed to work best as a long build, and inspired by the example of jwh's week 20 piece, I gave myself license to include the whole thing as a unified, mood-creating intro.
The first several things I recorded seemed to start on the 4 of the first measure, beginning with a rest, so getting this to fit together required a few shifts in relation to the expected start of the measure. The harmonized lines needed a little shifting as well: I'd gone for intuitive timing, but they worked better when tightened up.
The signal chain: three tracks of home-built Res-O-Glas Belmont with Lace Alumitones. The left and right channels went straight into the UA Volt, but the center-panned channel went through a JHS Colourbox 10, with the lows boosted and mids attenuated. This time, I kind of embraced overdriving the input, another change from the stay-clean approach.
There's a moodiness and determination about this that I kind of like. The title comes from the prominence of the Early Winters Spires, at 647 m.
Audio works licensed by author under:
Copyright All rights reserved
