Matt Bowen's minutes of music, photography, et cetera
This may be the deepest bass tone I’ve gotten so far — that part I’m very happy with. The guitar parts could use some work, and the mix itself is pretty rough, but I mostly just wanted to get my ideas down; we’re planning to rework this one for vocals over the next week or two. It should be interesting to see how it comes out.
This track is more like my stuff I had been doing in reason and record. It was fun to put together, but I don’t feel like it really gels as a song; several of the parts make me happy, but they just don’t play together correctly. But, maybe I’ll be able to reuse some of the ideas.
It’s a full song! Not just a minute of music, but nearly six minutes of music, with multiple verses and everything.
The lyrics veer surprisingly (if you know me well) close to praise music, but that’s not the intention; they’re inspired by a visionary art installation, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, which is a 180-piece collection of objects made for the second coming by WWII veteran James Hampton. Hampton spent 14 years making the throne room out of old furniture, cardboard, craft paper, and foil; it’s really quite moving — if you’re in DC, go to the American Art museum in Chinatown and give it a look. We wanted to be respectful, so I wrote from what I hope is an empathetic position.
The music was put together in Ableton Live, using Absynth, Battery, and Guitar Rig from Native Instruments’s Komplete 6; AAS’s String Studio; me on guitar and bass; and my regular mystery vocalist. The mix is not perfect, but it’s as close as I’m going to get it any time soon; I figure I’m going to be revisiting several of these later once I have a large collection of songs anyway. I hope people enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed writing it; it has pretty much made my last few weeks to work on it.
