Thursday, October 23, 2008

Tomorrow Never Knows

Today I have been steeping in John Lennon and Brian Wilson. I have listened to Tomorrow Never Knows many times in a row now. The wikipedia page on this song talks about the interesting experimental procedures that were developed in the recording of this song, which apparently was never performed live because of the impossibility of repeating the song. Sounds like 2/3 of every Megachild song. Not that ours approach the greatness of the Beatles. Lyrical ifluences came from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is a really out there piece of literature and also the Leary et al. Psychedelic Experience.



The drum riff of "Tomorrow..." seems also to be repeated in the song "End of Music" by Ontario band Do Make Say Think (the riff converges on the Beatles riff a little after 3 minutes into the song).

I have been playing around with some vocal layering on Stair Bears (Bear Shoulders version). I go way off key and things break down in lots of places, but I think there are some interesting bits in it here and there. Working on my vibrato, but it would be awesome to hook up to a Leslie Cabinet like Lennon did. Plastic Soul, man, plastic soul.

I also recorded some things on my cellphone when I was attempting to fish. Then I chopped up some bits and rearranged and amplified and filtered some of it and added some vocal drone track. The song is called Moan You Snake Oil Salesman, a play off of a Blind Lemon Jefferson's song, "Black Snake Moan" and the anachronistic term for an exaggerator (sort of an abstract jab, I guess). I used a "helium voice" effect on one layer of vocal, which comes across sort of similar to the effect in "Tomorrow Never Knows" and the skipping crunchy static noise is similar to some of the stop that comes out in Do Make Say Think's label-mate Fly Pan Am. Here for example is Jeunesse Sonique.

1 comment:

J. Matt said...

we want an update, you weener!