Episode 186: Needles's Jam

This one started at Radio Poets rehearsal. I'd been messing with a set of chord progressions there that never quite belonged to whatever we were working on, so they came home with me and turned into the psytrance section — the progressions finally doing the work they were actually built for rather than the work the band needed. 150 in C, which is squarely where psy wants to sit.

Then this Cat I know jumped on the keys and howled at me to make some Bitches Brew type IDM. And how could I ignore that. So the back half turns: the four-on-the-floor gives way to something broken and electric, that loose modal drift Miles got by putting a room full of players in one space and letting them circle each other — except run through a machine instead of a band.

The palette underneath is mostly texture and weather. Hoover pipes — six of them — foundation bass growls, jagged and raw, water bubbles, a drying machine, and a soundcheck guitar that never quite becomes a guitar. Glass xylophone and a Christmas piano for the bright edges, a single staccato vocal syllable for the human sound. Reverbs doing a lot of the spatial work: a big cave, a castle lobby, a room next door, and a couple of bent speaker cabinets for the things that need to sound like they're coming through equipment rather than air. Everything with a hand on it is mine — the amp takes, the Doppelganger passes, the played parts across Retro Synth, Sculpture and Alchemy.

Two pieces, then, and the seam between them is the point: one built from something I carried home from a rehearsal, the other from a cat with opinions. Named for the one who interrupted, which is only fair. He was right.

--- *Part of the toolchain lineage — see Architectural Evolution, the #2 mass in The Gravitational Spacetime Graph.*