Stormcellar Band Website
Stormcellar Band Website
Calvin just got into Carl's chair and rather than explaining what a trip it was, I re-added the blog in chronological order, over there on the left under the Carls Chair Blog. All the articles are still here in the main blog chronologically but this rounds'em up.
It was a truly special time and a great memory :-)
Howdy Folks.
Rick wrote back to me the other day. I was a bit apprehensive, it'd been two months since I wrote to him to say that I used his poem 'Burning the Meadows' as a metaphor within a new song.
A meta-metaphor if you will.
Ricks creative generosity is such that he approved of being 'sampled'. Thank you Rick. Wow. No really. Thank you. It's a beautiful piece of work and it seemed to say what was in my head.
For me, this is a complex concept. I didn't quote his poem, I condensed my own interpretation / rephrasing of the meaning of the poem into 2 lines. Ouch. Then added my own stuff to it to talk about the subject of the song, for which his poem, or the gist of it, became my new metaphor.
Far out.
It begs the question, at what point is it Sampling, at what point is it influence?
I sent what I'd written and asked if he was cool with it. he was. I'm stoked.
I'm kind of reminded of the two versions of Ozymandias. If Googling serves me correctly, Shelley and his mate Horace Smith had a comp going to work on poems about the same subject. It begat two quite different but similar poems.
Shelley:
IN Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desart knows:—
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,—
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
I like the Shelley version but...anyway. BTW I am totally going to try writing a hard core heavy metal song with that Shelly poem. It's dying for something Bonkers. Just see if I don't :-)
Anyway...Back to...
Thoughts On Band Creative Process.
I had a chorus, I was looking for a way to talk about a very difficult and personal song subject. Yeah I know, we can't write all our songs about space monsters and genetically modified cows. Well...now that I think about it...
Space Cow.
I digress.
So there I was, at a band get together, trying to show the guys this fragment of an idea, grasping at how to approach this song concept.
Mr Wizard very wisely told me to pay attention to even fragmentary ideas.
Bill found something for it and I could fit the Chorus. Mr Wizard found a space in it. Great. Melody? Check. Emotional content versus sonic 'feel'? Check.
Good to go.
Now for the verses. Make wit' da woids, kid.
I had nothing.
So, taking some inspiration from a story about Phillip K Dick using the I-Ching when writing 'man in the high castle' (meta reference, the characters also used the i-ching), I went in search of something to do the same thing with.
Fortunately for me, Ricks book 'Bell 8' was on my worktable. I picked it up, random'ed open a page and blow me down, his poem seemed to say all the stuff I was thinking. or was it?
I'm sure he had some pretty specific stuff in mind when he wrote it, but it seemed amenable to my misinterpretation.
But there are some constraints in Lyric Land that Poets Don't have.
Now don't be down on Rhyming. It's not obligatory but it's Mnemonic.
Also: Space. We don't have much.
This isn't the first run in between poetry and our stuff. 'Country Radio' describes the scene of a long haul trucker reading Robert Frost and ruminating on Country Music (LOL) and 'The Flood' is heavily influenced by the worlds described by Banjo Patterson and Dorothea McKellar. Arguably, that's 'Influence'
In this case, I started by compressing the two stanzas of Rick's poem into 2 lines. Also, during the transliteration process I got the last word wrong and realised I liked it more because it was a freudian slip. It better expressed what I meant. At that point I'd gone way off script. Yikes.
But also, to tie it back into the pre existing chorus, close the loop and make sense of it all, I added More Words. Oh dear. So what is this beast? A quote? an Influence? An interpretation?
I haven't asked yet, whether Rick's intent or concept was the same as mine. I'm curious but afraid to ask. Heh.
I think Rick's right. It is both new and old, it is a 'sample'.
I wonder if he meant what I mean. Maybe I'll pluck up the courage to ask.
The only thing I can do to better allow you to form an opinion is to show both Ricks excellent poem and Teh-Thing-I-Did-With-Ricks-Excellent-Poem and stuff I wanted to say.
|
'Burning the Meadows' (C) Rick Lyons You know these flames the way you know a face and that's the surprise now, not the flames, not the face, but the reappearance. There's a fire on the meadows at the far end of the night, so far that the flames seem like a memory, like something further back, flaring up again, some winter night, some fall night, beyond cove and marsh, in another wind. And then the waves of flame are through.
Maybe there's something wrong with us, some small thing, which might surge up like fire, leaving next to nothing of the life that was - a cleansing fire, sometimes. Maybe there's something we can do to keep it from happening, something we can do once it does. Maybe there's nothing we can do. With us, I mean, my friend, of whom you'd always warned me. |
'Let me go down easy' (Me)
Until it fades like a memory
There's a fire in the memory of the far end of the night Flames across the meadows like a face you can't reprise When vanity at last deserts you find at last that nothing hurts you but I can see it written in your eyes
let me go down easy let me go down free.
Maybe something's wrong with us some immortal kink that surges, cleansing, leaving nothing of the life that's been. But I still feel you walk beside me, skipping over ocean's boundary, Tiny hand, the firm rough hand within.
let me go down easy let me go down free. |
Howdy Folks.
Tech Support Here. Meh.
Other bands have people for this. I am those people for this band.
So anyway. For those that care, we've optimised the site as best we can, added some new social media links to our actual social media, removed the old 'hey tell everyone you know about everything we do ' buttons, and patched, and patched and updated.
I've also noticed a trend amongst the Open Sourcers and i can't blame'em, but many of the widgets we used to get for free now have a small price tag on them. It's worth it, but by the time you add a few widgets, well, Open Source don't mean Free :-)
I baulked at spending on one more widget to better integrate Google Calendar. It's embedded, it should work fine. But it seems slow. Sorry. Still working on that. Maybe I oughta buy that widget.
Oh right I almost forgot. the Marketing Department wants me to remind you that We're On Facebook and Twitter.
Yeah I know. I picked myspace too, but what the heck. Sorry JT
So, I mention it because:
- I mobile blog random stuff when we're on the move to FB because it's easier
- If we don't have your likes on FB we will simply cease to exist. No I mean it, we will just frickin vanish. Poof.
- I am not passively aggressively resisting the marketing department, I am resisting the concept that there should be 1 website that represents the world web experience. Besides which, I AM the Marketing Department
- If you follow us on Twitter you're just gonna see a shorter version of the stuff I post to FB because I Auto Linked them cos I am Lazy/Clever.
I should point out that no matter what daft barmy stuff I might say on this site, we aren't likely to get censored. Although to be fair, Rosie occasionally tweaks some of my more..interesting posts. But that's not the point.
We get that FB is what passes for mass single point communication in this age, but we don't discriminate based on what tribe you belong to on the web, tumblrs, grindrs, snapchatters, whatevs
No matter what tribe you belong to online, we're your friends in the stormcellar. If you hang out with us, then we're part of your tribe too :-)
Meanwhile I have to get back to optimising images and so forth.
Howdy Folks.
With a few weeks off we've been working on various other things, and for me, it's time to once again do a refresh and update on the site.
That makes 8 years of maintaining this site, so 3 cheers for Open Source software & Joomla - they have enabled us to do our stuff online for years, with only the occasional disaster.
I'm going to be tweaking the site for the next few days and may break things a bit. Stand by!
MJEB
Howdy Folks.
This is truly the age of the DIY musician, Also, having your own Tech department helps (hi there). Fortunately since Mr Wizard went Mobile app I am off the hook as I don't Do Android. heh. But yeah. this is a band meeting, complete with enough processing power to microwave a bag of popcorn.
It's an internal band joke that getting to do the music is the reward for all the other stuff that goes into it.
Fundamentally, the system has changed to the point that it no longer supports the Support, so get on with it. there are envelopes to lick.
Mind you we don't do much mail stuff I just like to lick envelopes.
I'm glad we had this talk.
Where was I? Oh. Right here. Ok. So.
We havent said too much about the next stuff that we're up to, other than that we've been getting ready to record Yet Another Bloody Album (YABA!! YABA!!) Ok. No more Irish Breakfast Tea for this one.
Yes. If you've been to a gig recently, you'd have heard us working on the new stuff. Like "julie', which hasn't lyrically settled. That means 'oh this will work' and finding 'oh no that won't' but best of all, doing it LIVE! Yay!
That's when you start to wonder.
Actually, as I stop to look outside of my window into Sydney Winter Sunshine, whilst listening to guide tracks for new work, I am reminded to be cool about it all. We havent said much about the recent spate of Great Artist Departures. They have already formed part of our collective musical DNA. Even the invisible are influential. Im talking to you Gravity.
So maybe the best way we can celebrate their work is to continue in the direction we've been propelled. Forward.
The work continues. that's the best way.
Howdy Folks. We finally have a stretch of downtime. Thank heavens. More time to build my post apocalyptic settlements in F4.
It seems we've been flat out for yonks (parse that one my US mates I dare ya, you'll need a local dialectician) and I have a list of housekeeping-y fixes for the site, let alone the preproduction work for SC9 (don't ask about SC8, we aren't talking about that right now) and of course, I want some more vids up.
So.
Once again, if it's quiet on the screen that's because we're busy working relentlessly behind the scenes...ranking up in some video game somewhere.