THOUGHTS
March 22, 2012:
Just a song that came to me in a split second. The fingers found their places on the strings and the words came almost at the same time as I sat in front of the livingroom window humming the tune.
March 11, 2012:
I've been inspired by the thought of who lived here before us. Living in these old apartments is like living in a museum diorama with all the explanatory panels removed. There are stories buried in the walls, layers of life painted onto layers of life. So who were they? Why did they paint the walls gray? Why did they run so many coaxial cables all over the place? How many different homes have occupied this house? Did they all enjoy the rainbows of sunlight shining through the stained-glass window as much as we do? Could they with walls painted the colour they were when we moved in? The questions!
February 17, 2012:
Romanticism. Also, video productionism. Done in a very big hurry without too much editing, which means that it counts as a Chumpend Video. It's fun stuff, is videos.
January 8, 2012:
Happy New Year. Happy New Chumpend Volume. Happy Sleepless Night. So between 5 and 6 AM I put this together. An old guitar part severely crushed, and a couple of computer-generated atmospheres. Still not sleepy, though.
December 6, 2011:
A friend posted a link to a Brian Eno song on YouTube. I listened to it. Then I listened to a different Brian Eno song titled "1/1" from his album "Music for Airports." Then I recorded this song. It's long and slow. It's an attempt to create what some people call "furniture music" but I know that the furniture I built here is probably no better than a quickly sewn beanbag chair that will soon loose all its filling. Such is life in the chumpend lane.
October 27, 2011:
I call this a Hymn to our present dwelling. It's nice here.
October 6, 2011:
Here's a song I would have written in March if I had had the time at the time. A lonely walk through the streets of a beautiful college town in California. I wanted something familiar. I wanted something comfortable. I didn't know what was coming. In other news I would comment, looking back on the Chumpend progress, that 2011 has been a banner year for productivity. I won't say anything about quality, but certainly in the quantity department I've been above average - already at 10 recordings, 3 more than the first few years, and 9 more than 2010! We won't ask what happened in July that suddenly caused the burst of creative energy.
September 12, 2011:
Here in Ottawa, and it still hasn't sunk in yet. Finally got around to setting up the computer connections and was able to post a few songs from the back burner. Creative juices running freely these days...
July 15, 2011:
I was sick of the idea of computer-mediated music. I realized that what I love about old science fiction soundtracks is the fact that they were made using analogue equipment. The Barrons used tape. They created electrical circuits, overloaded them, recorded everything, and then spliced all the tapes together to make a "song." What I'm doing is a poor imitation of their creative powers. It's an insult to say that what I'm doing is even inspired by what they did. So I take that back, and say instead that I had certain sounds in my mind, and GarageBand made me do it... And as a sort of apology, I offer this very acoustic song made only with the guitar and banging on the desk. And then adding a bunch of Garageband effects to make it sound how I want it to... And Judith, it's especially for you in St. John's.
July 13, 2011:
Continuing on the journey into outer space, I watched "Silent Running" today. If you weren't absolutely sure that this was the definitive space film for the flower-power generation within the first 5 minutes, your hunch would be quickly confirmed when none other than Joan Baez starts singing about children running in the sun. There's a strange incongruity between watching a man in a space-aged jump suit on an "American Airlines Space Freighter"tending plants in a geodesic dome, and listening to the voice of the 60's folk revival sing about the importance of protecting the environment.
The premise of the film is that there are no plants left on earth, so in some kind of brilliant moment of foresight, the Americans put a bunch of space ships out beyond Saturn with forests on board. The movie begins at the tail end of the mission - or so we find out in the first little while when the ships are ordered to Nuke the forests and report back to earth. One problem: the resident botanist will stop at nothing to save the trees!
Great moments: Eagle lands on botanists arm, he chastizes it for biting him; botanist teaching robots to play poker, and celebrating when they beat him; "Huey! I thought I told you to stay in the forest!" (you'll have to watch the movie to know why that's a funny line).
July 12, 2011:
A certain someone is travelling, and so I turn to dusty (and not so dusty) science fiction cinema to pass the time. And let me tell you, the sountracks are awesome! I know I've posted about the 2010 soundtrack before (October 2, 2009), but I've recently watched Tron:Legacy, which was a better fim than I expected, and a way better soundtrack than the film deserved. Well I shouldn't say that, it went very well with the visuals. The other movie soundtrack worth noting is that of Forbidden Planet (1956), whose claim to fame is being the first movie with an all-electronic soundtrack. They couldn't call it "music" (because the Musician's Union didn't think that what Louis and Bebe Barron were doing would be good for instrumentalist jobs). So they were forced to call it "Electronic Tonalities". The Barrons never did another soundtrack again, but they certainly set the stage for the development of electro-acoustic music, and continued to be active composers until their deaths. Bebe's final composition, Mixed Emotions, was completed in 2000. Here's a link to a youtube clip of the opening titles for Forbidden Planet.
Later that day, March 12, 2011:
Chumpends 4 is cracked - and I'll need to put an album download for Chumpends 3 now that I finished it last night. Very exciting!
March 12, 2011:
The wind is blowing something fierce. Reflecting on the uncertainties of life - there's no use trying to predict where we're heading.
Jan 24, 2011:
It's been a while. Here's a bit of something put together while listening to and thinking about an auction sale Judith and I went to in northern Mexico a few years ago. You hear spanish, low german, and maybe some english if you're lucky. But mostly we just felt like idiots because we couldn't speak either of the official auction languages. It's a nostalgic thing, listening to the sounds of a place. They say the sense of smell sticks in the memory the longest, but perhaps that's because we don't have too many sound recordings of our everyday existance. The sound of the desk rattling and the keyboard clattering as I type this little note. The sound of cars drifting by the window. The sound of the heater clicking on as the room temperature drops. The sound of a small violin playing Manitoba Hotdog. Maybe in 50 years I'd hear all that mixed together and think "Winkler." No doubt.
Mar 31, 2010:
The latest additions are a noodle from last october that I finally got around to posting, and a really old song (10+ years) that I had completely forgotten, and then re-discovered while digging through the accumulated papers in my guitar case. The words brought back the sound of the guitar part, and I quickly shot it all into the computer for posterity. In fact, Fresh Rain Fallen dates back to a time when I drove to Winkler, when the fact that Winkler would be my home was probably the furthest thing from my mind... ah, the 1990s!
Oct 2, 2009:
Winkler don't have a bell tower. It's not that kind o' town. But the way these banjos ring, it made me think of ringing. And my interest in cheesey 80's soundtrack synth sounds continues. Have you heard the soundtrack to 2010? The rather poorly executed non-Kuberician sequel to 2001: Space Odyssey? Whilst the movie left me disappointed, there was a certain something-or-other about the aural atmosphere of the movie that has remained in my mind...
Mar 22, 2009:
The laptop was giving me troubles when I recorded this: it kept stopping the recording in the middle of takes because of a core audio failure or some such error. But in keeping with the chumpend philosophy, I could not do retakes. And so the solution becomes the addition of various effects and computer-based instrument tracks to mask the interruptions. Then, when I added the vocal track, I needed an adequately rough sound to match with the rough nature of the instrumentation. What you hear is the introudction to the etiquette chapter of "All About Weddings and Etiquette" by James Glennon and Chris Arnold, published in 1980 by Coles Publishing Company Limited (Toronto).
Feb 22, 2009:
Instrumental parts seem to be coming to me easier than lyrical parts these days. So I've given up on words for the moment, and decided to treat you to a couple of instrumental pieces. The first, Space..., takes a simple guitar part, layered with a couple of "atmospheric" supplemental guitars, and adds a few "super-atmospheric" ornaments much desired by the "let's go to the planetarium today" part of my personality.
Jan 25, 2009:
I've been tinkering with the built-in instruments of Garage Band. It's pathetic, I know. But I just don't have the patience these days to pull out my guitar and record a real instrumental track. So I piece together a song with the computer machines, and then add a bit of reality in the form of ambient street noises I recorded in Chihuahua, Mexico back in 2006. Now it's a song.
Nov 16, 2008:
A new song. It's inspired by a paragraph in Barnaby Rudge, by Charles Dickens. It goes something like: "From the workshop of the Golden Key, there issued forth a tinkling sound, so merry and good-humoured, that it suggested the idea of some one working blithely, and made quite pleasant music. No man who hammered on at a dull monotonous duty, could have brought such cheerful notes from steel and iron; none but a chirping, healthy, honest-hearted fellow, who made the best of everything, and felt kindly towards everybody, could have done it for an instant. He might have been a coppersmith, and still been musical. If he had sat in a jolting waggon, full of rods of iron, it seemed as if he would have brought some harmony out of it."
Oct 19 2008:
A quick and dirty little ditty about St. John's, written this morning (the text anyway). Judith returns this evening from there... enjoy the song. In other news, this new song is the first in the Chumpends 3 collection. I've reached 21 songs "released"! What a treat. Eventually I'll create another bulk download for volume 2.
June 13 2008:
I've been thinking this website needs some spring cleaning. So to accomplish this task, I've archived a bunch of the older songs (the first 10 to be exact). They are still available by downloading "Chumpends Vol. 1" at the bottom of the list. I'm kind of thinking that this is going to be like the first in a series of "albums" but of course they'll all be free. What could they possibly be worth? And I added a new song - The wires and the habits. This song was recorded at the same time as everything that ended up on The Land's debut CD. But of course, not everything made it on the CD, so this little distorted remnant was left behind. I recently came upon it and decided to remix it and give it life as a chumpend.
March 13 2008:
Nothing much to report other than I have too much time on my hands, or at least have a total inability to adequately rank my priorities. And so you behold this bright shiny new website design. Of course, it didn't take much, just a choice of fonts and colours. But will it help my thesis? No.
February 26 2008:
Cleaning out the vaults today and I found a few stragglers. And because this page is called "The Chumpend Songs" I didn't allow myself to judge whether these three "songs" were fit to post or not. They all went up.
February 2 2008:
New song - Escape from O'Hare, the harrowing tale of my trip home from Louisville, KY. Or actually the calm tale of my feelings after reaching home. That's more like it.
December 11 2007:
The Chumpends Album has been released. You can download all the songs in one go by clicking the "Download collection" link at the bottom of the list. Enjoy!
December 4 2007:
Merry Christmas, with a new song on a rather sad Christmas note. But I'm ready for the Christmas revolution.
August 30 2007:
Here's a new song out of old materials. Used to be a song about taking the bus, now its a different song also about taking the bus. I like this version better. You wouldn't know.
July 7 2007:
Late night reverting to the old layout. I think it works better. Like fans in the window instead of air-conditioners. And why, I ask the multitudes, do cars label the air-conditioning button with an A/C, as though the button will engage either Air or Conditioning. I have seen, in a Volkswagon, the button labeled simply AC, which in my mind is the most appropriate abbreviation. Imagine the latest disagreements at the U/N, or someone being really P/O'ed. I don't know, it just doesn't work for me.
March 20 2007:
Last fall Judith and I traveled to Halifax to visit friends. Clark Richards and I were part of Union Made together. Clark's wife just got a new cello bow. So there was now a bow to use on Clark's electric bass. Fun ensued, and this little clip resulted (though I added several other sounds in "post production" ha ha).
March 16 2007:
About a month or so ago, I watched a great Charlton Hesston film, The Omega Man. Now I've written a song about it. Enjoy.
Jan 20 2007:
Last night Judith and I were at a concert at which Ben Reimer played a concert marimba. It was an amazing sight to say nothing of the sound. Pure delight is all I can say. So I was inspired by the 20th century minimalist music played and decided to try my hand at some serial music. The idea is I set up 5 tracks with a marimba type sound, each set in a slightly different pattern in a slightly different time signature. Then I just set them up to loop for a while (about 2 minutes to be exact). Decided to call it a song. Probably it's just an idea...
Jan 12 2007:
I was reading Luke chapter 3 and the words of John the Baptist cut right through the double speak we're so used to hearing on the radio. Now that Mr. Bush has decided to turn his utter failure in Iraq into an exuse to send more people (Iraqi, American, etc.) to their death, John's words "bear fruits that befit repentance" seem to make so much sense. "Those with two coats, let them share, and those with food let them do likewise." It seems so simple.
Oct 25 2006:
It was only because one man managed to survive a walk back into town without a jacket that the truth of the matter was revealed. It's hard to imagine the depths a person would have to sink to - to make it possible to drive a drunk human being to a dark drift in a field somewhere miles away from warmth, and then drive back into Saskatoon to continue with the evening shift. And to do this many times over the years. How can a person go home and sleep, without some poison seeping into the heart? It is poison in the heart that makes acts like that possible, I suppose. I've been thinking about this story for the last few days, so I put this song together about it.
June 19, 2006: I haven't put any new music on here in a while. The problem is this: while moving from Newfoundland to Manitoba (with 3 months in Mexico in between) I seem to have lost track of a bunch of cables, and both of my microphones. Until I find those, I won't be able to do much in the way of recording new tid bits. I cry myself to sleep every night.