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Listening Party: Birds of Avalon

June 22, 2009 by Libby

Cheetie Kumar and David Mueller gave us this write up:

SIDE 2

This is the first “real song” on “Uncanny Valley” (after a little sound collage intro). We had wanted to do something in 5/4 time for a while and this song quickly grew out of some improvisations on a riff Paul had. Originally, his “face-melter” guitar solo in the middle of the song (all the wrong notes in the right places) was envisioned as lasting several minutes, leading to a series of improvisations that would take up an entire album side (see Love’s Revelations), hence the title. When we actually cut the song, however, we opted for a much more concise approach (under 2 minutes). We have been stretching this one out a bit live, though not anywhere near full album-side length. Scott’s drum break is a nod to Joe Morello (phase notwithstanding). The lyrics are a “cry for help” from someone in the middle of a psychotic break- natural or, er, induced….

I NEVER KNEW

This could be our bid for an update of the COPS theme (god knows “Bad Boys” needs to be locked up for good). The guy in the song (vocals by David) is in the unenviable situation of being an overly relaxed fugitive in the digital age with all the e-hellhounds alongside good-old-fashioned map-marking detectives on his trail.
We really went for a stripped down, Buffalo-Springfield inspired, ambient-heavy sound on this one. T-shirt-covered drums played with mallets for that “dusty” sound, lots of reverbed-out tremolo guitar, and random swells created by a borrowed Yamaha/Sequential Circuits Six-Track analog synth-recorded in the middle of the night.

This is a song about a boy and his doppelganger. Although the concept of the doppelganger often comes up in discussions about “The Uncanny”, I have to admit we never considered this until after the fact. It’s just a nice uncanny coincidence. Scott moved all his cymbals away from the kit when we recorded this so he wouldn’t be tempted to hit them. This allowed us to push the levels of the drums pretty hard onto the tape without worrying about the clang-clang of the cymbals obscuring the rhythm! The very natural sound of the drums and bass contrasts with how heavily effected everything else is. The “gun-shots” were made on a reverbed out cheap drum machine and vocals through a delay pedal.

MICROINFINITY

One of the cool things about recording at home is that you can draw inspiration from books and records around the house. The title of this song comes from a chapter of a 1966 book called The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience. It’s basically a collection of LSD case studies, where the subjects took the drug in a lab setting and described their experiences to researchers. In this case the subject had a delusion that he had shrunk down to sub-nuclear size and was ruling the universe from there. We imagined he never quite recovered from this episode and was destined to a life of pan-handling while clinging to his “master of the universe” status. Really a sad story.

The intro and outro treat the same guitar and bass line differently; in the drum-free intro, the bass was run through a harmonizer (thank you Delta Lab!) giving it a Pizzicato sound, a window-fan and distorted breathing loop runs underneath everything while the guitar sound is inspired by Robert Fripp, master of the snake guitar. The outro is more natural.

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