 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
The Audio Pornography Diaries.
I have decided to keep a record of the thought processes that have gone into making this album, as a nice piece of nostalgia for me to look back on in the future. And for anybody interested in this sort of thing to find out why the hell I've done things the way I have. Unfortunately, I've been working on it for over a year now already, so a lot of this is written with hindsight, and thus wildly inaccurate. Another reason for writing this is to show just why it is that it takes me so long to put together an album, and just how much procrastination I have indulged in. So here it is, enjoy, and watch for updates, which I will procrastinate about making, despite this whole piece just being procrastination itself. As I am indeed writing this just so I can justify not working on Audio Pornography itself.
March 2002 - Whilst working on Time to go Meet Elvis, I have become increasingly bored with writing and recording 4 minute pop songs. I have found that they sound tedious and uninteresting, while the medium is massively constraining. What with having found new enthusiasm for the music of the Residents and the White Noise, my mind is currently full of ideas for newer and more interesting noises and sounds. I have a whole bucket load of interesting ideas for recording techniques and sound painting, but I cannot use them yet. I've found that I'm trying to put odd things into the Time to go Meet Elvis material, but it doesn't work in context, and the finished material is sounding lifeless because my heart just isn't in it.
So I have taken a short break from it and recorded a piece entitled Shitphony, which is basically just me messing around with a cheap old keyboard through an effects box. All the various parts of it are in the wrong key and the wrong rhythm, but they seem to fit together, this is a good thing, as I only had a drum pattern to work with when I first thought of it. For the vocal my microphone test seemed to suffice, consisting of me saying "Shit" and "Fuck it" and occasionally making clicking noises and coughing. A nice drowning in delay, reverb and assorted other effects has produced a pleasing sound. Amusingly enough, what with average recording time for a Time to go Meet Elvis track being about a week, this track took less than 2 hours from first thoughts to the final mix. I can't wait to finish this damn album so I can get on to doing something a little more worth while, and fun.
April/May/June 2002 - Finish off Time to go Meet Elvis and think of many more ideas, am toying with the title Gargling with Phlegm for the next ambitious project. Hoping it will work and that I can pull off avant-garde without becoming pretentious about it. This time I will not bother with concepts and the like, I'm just going to record music as and when I feel inspired to, and when I have enough I will release them as an album, nice one. Also, there will be no fucking deadlines this time, as I nearly went crazy in June when I announced Time to go Meet Elvis's June 15th release date, and struggled to meet it.
July 2002 - Time to go Meet Elvis is over, and I have now completed the second track for Gargling with Phlegm. It is called either Temple of Fuck or Naked Again, I haven't decided which. The whole thing is based around a huge, fat guitar riff, and some over distorted shouting vocals. I have declined the use of traditional Bass in this and used some very subby moog sounds instead. After the first day of recording, I rethought it a bit, and added a huge pile of samples from porn movies over the top. Most notably, a young girl being fucked senseless by a Russian wolfhound, and a baby-sitter being banged up the arse by her employer on a kitchen counter. With some judicious use of delay these samples fit in very nicely with the whole theme. It is a love song, in my mind, well, a lust song anyway, and it was inspired by my girlfriend, who will probably kill me for telling anybody else that. But I think the line "You are my goddess and I worship at your temple of fuck" is possibly the most romantic thing I've ever written. And I've written some proper love songs in my time as well, but I don't think I ever meant what I said in them, at least now I'm being honest.
August 2002 - Have begun work on a new track featuring some horrific organ work. I plugged my old Yamaha keyboard into my guitar effects rig, and ran it through a load of flange, distortion, reverb, a little compression and finished it off with some excessive wah-wah abuse, it sounds nice. There's a top line, a drone bass, and I used it's on board drums (through the same effects) for the erm... rhythm for want of a better word. I have no idea how I'm going to put something together with this.
September 2002 - Have added some big meaty guitar riffs over the top of the organ song, and made a nice intro out of some whammy pedal abused motifs. This one might just work yet. Will leave it a while as I'm kind of busy sorting out some musical activities that might bring some much needed cash to this operation.
October 2002 - Had a flash of inspiration, I've always wanted to sample my trademark phlegm gargling and was going to anyway on one track or another, so I've decided to do it on this one. I have a variety of phlegmy, hacky noises I'm using, the main one has been set up to play the Everley Brothers "All I have to do is Dream" but you wouldn't know to listen to it. This will be Gargling with Phlegm itself, the title track. I'm already about 21 audio parts in and it still needs something else. HELP ME!!!!!!
November 2002 - Found the something it needed, twin guitar solos, one in each speaker, one clean and chorused, the other dirty and horrible. They do battle beautifully, and I ended up with something like 26 audio tracks to mix, but I did it, finishing off with samples of my friends from my answering machine, wonder if they'll notice?
December 2002 - Christmas, too much real work to do, no time to work on music, but the ideas are still floating about in my head. I really want to do a bit of music five minutes long, and then digitally squish it into 1 minute, and vice versa. I think they should of course be called 1 in 5 and 5 in 1 respectively, but I can't think of anything to do with it. Oh and at some point around here I decided to call the album Audio Pornography instead of Gargling with Phlegm, after extensive research from plasticsquirrel.co.uk's users. There was a poll, as I couldn't decide between Gargling with Phlegm, Audio Pornography and Music to Fuck Girls by, I have no idea which one won the poll, but after the excessive use of porn samples on Temple of Fuck I thought it only appropriate. Put the first 3 tracks up on the mp3.com site as a preview as well, met with no response whatsoever, other than, erm... very interesting, I think... from people who were pressured into giving me their opinion.
January 2003 - Still not getting anything done, however, it has become a concept album. This always happens to me, all I want to so is write a little music now and then, and when I have enough there, release it as an album. And then at some point in the process, bits pull together; I see a pattern emerging and build some huge stupid fucking concept around it. This time I'm taking the dictionary definition of Pornography (that which is found to be obscene or offensive) and writing all my songs around that. So far we've covered sex, swearing and bodily function noises. Of course, the next track I'm working on is about religion, and is called 10. Now with a name like 10 it just has to be track 10 on the album, meaning I need enough songs to cover at least 10 tracks now, and what if it isn't strong enough to be a closer? Then I need at least 11. I have the themes though; here's a list
So now I at least have some sort of template to work towards. I did a sort of Acapella piece for a project called The Chairmen of the Bored that I'm supposed to be working on with my friend Tom, however, it's taking so long to send it to him, that I'm keeping it for this album. It's called Hooray, and is about Heroin. The basic idea I had to start with was that when you are working on a song, you invariably end up humming the tunes you will be playing before transferring them to instruments. I bypassed the working out stage and hummed and la-la-la-ed all the parts before attacking them with a pitch shifter, panning them all over the place and overdubbing a distorted, delayed humming solo. I think it's fantastic, and it only took me two days. So that's four tracks done and dusted now.
February 2003 - Begun work on 10, it has a drum pattern that ponders along with a bass riff consisting of one note and a run, which was the starting point anyway. A repeated vocal phrase (we all know god was created by man to explain all the things that he couldn't understand) provides much of the rhythm, and was the inspiration behind the whole piece. On top of the whole thing is a conversation, so it is kind of like a play rather than a song, between god and his followers, reiterating the 10 commandments, and trying to pick as many holes as possible in the logic (just being my usual antagonistic self again). Of course under this I have added as much musical fun as I can. This includes a deliberately out of tune guitar being played ham-fistedly, some lovely marimba runs, the obligatory moog squeals, and some gentle synth noises to fill out the holes. Oh, you have to hear the badly played intro riff from Black Sabbath's Paranoid every time the word Sabbath is mentioned, very funny I thought. Extra holes have of course been added, and a second rhythmic vocal motif of "I'm gonna be the only man you ever wanna fuck" has gone over the top. It's nice, and I will mix it while I'm on holiday at my girlfriend's, as she has a PC now, and I can install all my software, and take a data CD of all the tracks (so far about 24) with me. Oh yeah, and I used chunks of gargling with phlegm as a test for the 5 in 1, 1 in 5 concept, it works, it really does.
March 2003 - Okay so the idea of working on stuff at Netty's didn't quite work out, fucking windows XP won't let me install anything so I couldn't do a damn thing for the whole week, bugger. So anyway, while I was away, the whole war in Iraq thing started, I'm not gonna go into that now, but it brought to mind a project that's been in the back of my mind for ages now. I always wanted to do a track with about 5 minutes of a radio broadcast as a starting point, and then another radio broadcast fading in and out over the top of it. So what I've done is recorded 5 minutes of the BBC's constant news coverage from the TV, then faded a Radio 4 news bulletin over the left hand side, and an advert break from ITV on the right side. Okay, so it's a bit conceptual and poncey highlighting the idea of "sponsoring" the war, but it works and sounds great. It's gonna be track 11 and finish everything up nicely. Right on top is a nice guitar riff, with a little bass and some analogue synths providing a little melody. I've put in some of the recurring themes that are proving necessary to link the whole album together conceptually, as the concept is now becoming larger than I originally imagined, more later on this. Whole thing all done in 2 days, that's a bit quick for me, maybe I'm getting enthusiastic again?
I also finished off 10, I had to triple up the vocal tracks and pitchshift them into scaryland, but it works, and took two mixes to get right. First I had to mix all the music (which I'm keeping as an instrumental for the limited edition version of the CD) and then use that track as a basis to mix the vocal parts over (there's about 12 vocal parts alone). All this is because of my shitty old processor that can't handle that many audio parts at once, must upgrade, must upgrade...
Now, as to the concept overhaul, here we go, there's a lot happening now. I was thinking it might be nice to have each song as a separate character, so all the titles will be names of characters. Then I thought it might be nice to have them all be part of one big family of sick weirdos, as that would tie it up nicely. Finally I decided to use one central character that all this shit happens to, I don't quite know what he's going to be called, but the layout is thus: First off he lives with his mother who is a little too fond of him, shall we say, and ends up having his brother/son. Then he goes off to find his Dad, who lives with a pretty young wife and all they do is fuck. After this he will either go and live with some weird Christian types, or go and stay with a guy who turns out to be a serial killer. Both will happen, I just don't know what order they will happen in. There will then be a period of drugs and gang violence culminating in his being gang raped by the guys he thought were his friends. After this he will go off to war and die in a huge finale of recurring themes and motifs, and end with the dead calm of the end song. All of this will be punctuated by bursts of Shakespearean narrative verse put to folk music (in a Jethro Tull style). Of course I may change my mind again, but this has the ring of goodness to me. It might also necessitate a change of title, but I can't think about that shit too much now.
April 2003 - Well, I've finally started on the 5 in 1, 1 in 5 thing, though I now have musical ideas for every track on the album, and it's just a case of recording them now, this was the one that has been giving me most trouble musically. I've got all the music down for the base tracks (and they're both squished and stretched like they should be) so now I just need lyrics. I had a lot of fun with the music, using discordant pianos, a 2 string ukulele, a drum track done with the things on my desk being hit with Biros and a cardboard box with a mic inside it, a terribly played tin whistle and a western ballad style harmonica. There may have been more dumb ideas but I can't remember. Oh yeah, there's some thoroughly dumb bass playing on it as well. Its all been a lot of fun, and I used the same basic audio parts for both of them.
Again, I'm keeping the unsquished versions of them for the limited edition CD. The 1 in 5 track sounds real good and scary and will be the serial killer theme for the album, I'm gonna sing something with a nice catchy tune over the top of it, to add a sense of menace. I wrote some lyrics, but I'm not sure about them (and I wrote them on a bus, so I can't actually read them). The 5 in 1 track will be the gang rape sequence, and I'm thinking of overdubbing the rape scene from "Scum" onto it, if that doesn't work I'm gonna have to practise screaming myself. There's gonna be a nice bit of whammy pedal guitar work on it too.
Will get to finishing them soon, but I have another load of projects to work on for a bit now. I have to do some music for one of Net's installations (using the End song as a basis, so it's not too hard) and I'm doing some vocals and noises for a guy in New Zealand, which should hopefully lead to a collaboration. I'm a little worried about myself as I have no idea what I'm going to work on next after Audio Pornography is finished, and I'm usually champing at the bit to get to my next project by this stage. Like I say, it's just the recording process left, the ideas are all in now. I may go for a June release again, but the one thing I didn't want to do with this album was give myself a deadline again, as it drove me nuts last year. But then it might make me get off my arse and get some of this shit done.
May 2003 - Hooray! I have ideas for what I'm going to do next. I'm going to take this strange avant-gardist mentality I've been using for this album and apply it to normal 4- minute tune ideas. Bit of blues, rock, soul etc. etc. but unlike anything you heard before, and utilising my unique style of singing (like I do in the shower, not like I do on tape or stage). It's going to be fun, and I feel a little better about everything now I know I still have more ideas, I was a bit worried I'd burned out already.
May 13th - Okay, so I recorded the vocals to 1 in 5, using the lyrics I wrote on the bus. They're alright really, and I cannot be arsed to write any new ones. I doubled up the vocal track (panned one either side as always) and reversed the second track, so it sounds like there's a guy on the right singing in Russian. Will do the final mix later, as I'm not sure whether to add anything else into it or not.
May 14th - Finished off 1 in 5 (probably) by hacking up some vocals from my friend Vikki that she did last year. It's from the end of her version of "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue" by Crystal Gayle. I cut out all the bits and threw them in at random with some lovely delay added over the top. I noticed the effect when I was first mixing the original track for her and wanted to use it, so now I have. I think her voice sort of adds the ghost of the murdered girls into the song a bit, and adds to the chilling effect of it all. After that the mix was kind of easy. Though saying that, I haven't listened to it back yet, as I prefer to wait a few days so it's fresh and not still going round and round in my head and making me sick of it.
I also did the second version of End today, for Netty's art thing in June. It has the same music all the way through as it doesn't need the final section to tie it in with the rest of the album. It works a lot better like this on it's own, but the original will still go on Audio Pornography, as it works better with the concept. Been remembering another project I meant to do ages ago today. It was called Disco for the Dismal, and was going to be a load of cheerful songs from the 70s and 80s, re-imagined by me with just vocals and one or two instruments underneath. Might do that next rather than going straight to my next project, which I'm thinking of calling "Laughing at Dogs", though I'm not sure about that.
May 20 somethingth - finished off 5 in 1, I ripped out the rape scene from Scum in the end, it lasted just about long enough, in fact it needed squishing a bit to make it fit. It worked so nicely without any extra bits (well a little delay over it, but that's all) that I didn't bother with the guitars and vocals I was gonna put over the top. Not much more to go now.
June 2003 - Meant to keep up with writing these diaries as I worked, failed dismally, it's June the 11th now, and I've done loads in the last 11 days, and not written a damn thing down. However, looking up, it seems I have put in the stuff about 5 in 1, which I thought was more recent, hooray, not so bad then perhaps.
So anyway, last week, I put together what I can only call the motherfucker song, as I cannot think of another way of putting it. It's beautiful, I put the descending xylophone line I had in my head down, backed up with 2 clean, slightly chorused guitars, and a backward distorted faded up guitar bit to finish it. I ripped it straight out of "So Many Pretty Girls pt. 3" from "Time to go Meet Elvis" and it fits lovely. Then I put in some 303 style bass stuff and a sampled drum loop from a CD of loops I've got, and we had a basis. Then came the middle section, this is basically meant to be a representation of hefty violent sex, so there's some of my trademark throbbing organ (heh heh) and a rather more difficult bit. I took the end of "Nobody but Me" by the Human Beinz (backing vocal "Nobody, Nobody" bit) and added a lot of crackle while one voice screams "BUT MEEEEE!" after each nobody. Then underneath that, I had to fake a record scratch as if the record was playing and being knocked by the couple, so I did it with a guitar. I clicked the top string with my hand over it on the fretboard, and then did a pickscrape down the bottom E with a clean chorused guitar again. Then I had to pitchshift it down about a 5th, and add crackle again, it worked, it really did.
Then there were the vocals, this was always going to be a bit sick and controversial, and I'm very sorry for the lyrics (like fuck am I) but it was what I needed to do. As I may have already mentioned, it's about a mother who is so overprotective of her son that she thinks nobody but her should love him, so rather than let somebody else have him, she fucks him herself (after a little sucking a few years earlier). Yes, I know, it's revolting, but I wanted to do something about child molesting, and the dirty old man after little girls thing is a bit obvious, and I'm sure this must happen somewhere, it can't only be little girls that get molested. Anyhow, at the end of the song, Ma finds out she's up the stick, and we're off to the next part of the album.
This was a tricky sod of a track to do, cos it's supposed to be the opener, so it had to be good, and it had to match what I had in my head. I think it did, it's got everything it needs, fat guitar riffs, a throbbing organ, and very disturbing subject matter, so it sets the scene for the rest of this album. Which is what an opener is meant to do, I think. Once again, I worked a lot quicker than I have in ages, 2 days, really, only 2 days this one took me. For some reason I seem to speed up as the end gets closer.
Of course, with the end being in sight, I started thinking about cover art, and I had an idea. Never before have I tried to draw my own covers, but this time, I'm going to have a crack at it. I want to draw all the characters from the songs crowded around the now legendary Squirrel himself, and leering. Then, and this is the good bit, I'm going to do the lettering and labels in the exact same format as an old Marvel comic. Calling it something like "The Quite Interesting Plastic Squirrel" and using big crackly blobs for the title, good eh? Then I thought I might extend this theme, and use comic strips for the credits and track listings inside, we'll see if my drawing's up to it shall we? Anyhow, problem is, CD cases are square, wrong damn shape, I thought about releasing it in a special edition DVD box (better shape for a comic cover see?). Or maybe a box set with a full length Plastic Squirrel comic inside, but I think I've gone off on one a bit with the whole idea. Too excited about finding out whether or not I can draw, it's always been pretty much the only thing I suck at.
Anyhow, last night I sat down and started my gang violence song, I took a kind of Police like drum pattern (did it myself on my Dr Rhythm again) and a Ska bass line to start with. Then I put in a skanking guitar line, got bored of it and reversed it, much better. But we needed more, so a marching band style bass line came in on the Moog, and a harmonised Moog line, vaguely reminiscent of a military tune, only with more of an Indian flavour to the scales. Of course, I played both parts individually rather than cheating and using my harmonisers, good for me. Then I added the vocal line (3 part harmony singing chants like "You're gonna get your fuckin' 'ead kicked in", no pitchshifting again, done it properly) and spread it about liberally to the pertinent parts. After that I did a big ugly guitar solo with a whammy pedal and a ton of distortion, and some more trademark crackle (still fond of it from the 4-track days) and reversed it. There's something about a backward pitched harmonic dive-bomb that makes me grin like a pillock. I hacked off a bit of it to fade up for the intro, and thought, damn, I'm nearly done.
So I spent the morning deciding whether or not to sample some proper beatings from a movie, and ended up deciding not to. This was because I felt that when you beat the hell out of somebody, and you win, you don't remember the blood and the pain and the sweat and the reality of it, you remember it like music, a flowing fantastical thing that you did. So I left the ugly guitar solo to symbolise the actual kicking bit, and the marching moogs for the pride of the gang before and after the fight itself. Anyhow, I fiddled about with it a bit more this afternoon, and called it a done thing, and that's another one done in 2 days. All that's now left to do is the war song (which has a huge finale of samples from everything else in it as well) and the interludes (remember the narratives I mentioned earlier? No? Oh well...) However, I'm away for the next 2 weeks, so it's looking like a July release this year, or maybe not until August, however, it's not much more work, unless you count the cover art, which I may be able to do while I'm away.
July 4th 2003 - Okay, so while I was away I managed to write the words for the bits inbetween songs, and get the track listing together, not bad, really. Since I got back however, I've been procrastinating. I've nearly synced up the samples for the war song, but they're not quite there yet. Hoping to do it today, and do most of the song as well (will have to leave the overture at the end for later though). However, this week I have acquired two new toys which will help with "Laughing at Dogs". I got a new sampler, which I will use as an Emulator, cos I can do loops easier with the PC. And I got me a new bass, it's a big fat Yamaha with a fuck-off huge bar pickup in it, lovely. So that will be fun.
Also started on the artwork, I've done basic concept drawings for each of the characters (they suck by the way). However, I've decided to change all that, and cheat. I'm going to find pictures of people in the right poses from old magazines, and trace the bastards. Not exactly of course, just to get the form right, then I'll add the details in myself, go over the lines in black ink, scan them in and add the colour. Should be interesting, and hopefully it won't take too damn long. For your reading pleasure, here is the track listing for now... it will probably change, and I haven't come up with titles for all of them yet.
Well, I think that's it for now, hopefully this will get updated soon, when I'll have finished the whole damn thing, which hopefully will happen next week, if I can get going again.
July 14th 2003 - I finished it. It's done. What more can I say, all the music is finished, ripped out the War song and it's ending overture of all the themes from the album in a couple of days, featuring a drum line using sampled nuclear explosions instead of drums. Had to get my new toy in somewhere. It's great, twin guitars (same riff different speakers, you'll understand when you hear it) big fat analogue synth for the bass, a couple of riffs from a metal song I wrote years ago for the Dagobah System came back to light when I realised they'd fit. Ummm... oh yeah, I put a harmonica solo in as well, very soldiery isn't it? And once again my sore throat and coughing problems came to the fore when I wanted to do the vocal tracks, so I just screamed through them, it sounds nothing like me, and I haven't processed it at all for once.
So, then I just had to do the interludes, guitar, mandolin, bass and vocals, that's it. Different Mandolin bits on each one, different words on each one, same guitar and bass, differing lengths. 9 separate bits, it links the whole thing nicely. See I was worried that it would sound like I was patronising the listener by telling the whole story inbetween the songs. But then I realised that it's not that easy to work it all out without some help, and having no images to work with, it was all I could do. It worked though. Of course then there was the inevitable few days of listening to it all the way through on 8 million different stereos to check it sounds alright, and a whole load of remixes to get it right. But eventually I decided it wasn't that bad, and it's good enough o go out now. So there you have it 1 year and 3 months since I thought of it, I've done the bastard, just artwork left to do, expect release in the next couple of weeks or so.
BACK TO TOP