Almost done here. Just gotta change the theme and we’re ready to roll.

-n

I’m going to try to incorporate this into the WordPress MU installation I have going on at the main domain, nicopolitan.com.

This may be down for a bit.

BRB.

This is the first time I’ve actually had a more difficult time writing a shorter track than trying to make a song longer.

This one is a work in progress that’s going to be submitted to an audio companion for a children’s book my friend is publishing. The lyrics I (or the robot version of me) am reading are the words from the page in the book for which I was supposed to write the background music. The words on the page are weird gibberish, so it was difficult to think of a melody for them.

I like it okay, but I can’t help but feel music for a children’s book needs to be… I dunno, simpler? Let me know where you all think I should take this.

Like I (might) have said before, you can only jam as well as you know how your fellow musicians.

“So,” you might say, “how to jazz musicians do it? It seems like they can jam whenever they want to.”

To this, I’m going to equate band-mate-ship to romantic relationships since that is the closest universal equivalent I’ve got on hand.

Jazz sessionists, you might notice, are usually hired guns.  In the same way, you can hire a lover for a night.  And the more you pay this person, and the better the reputation, the better the results.  You can pay cheap for a mediocre lover, but it’s the reassurance you get from dropping big money that your night will be a resounding success.  After all, they’re pros.

This isn’t to say jazz musicians can’t be of the other variety: the kind of relationship in which you put in time and effort instead of money.  The parties must be in mutual agreement, and the only way for it to work is to communicate.

And, yes, just like real life relationships, the band that jams can have false starts.  You can hear some notes slip that weren’t meant to happen.  But you don’t stop dead in your tracks if this happens.  If you trip, you get back up and keep moving.

Because just like the relationship isn’t about the little disagreements, improvising with a band isn’t about sour notes.  It’s about the big picture.

And then, when you can feel it in your gut that there’s something beautiful between you, you’ve found your match.

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• Completely improvised, so really there aren’t any liner notes to speak of.
• At the end, you can hear our drummer say, “I had to stop because I’m sweaty.”

Following the theme of “writing-music-for-the-hell-of-it” without being too conscious of the artistic integrity, I also sometimes like to write dance songs.

But I also can’t get away from playing guitar, so a lot of those oddly textured parts you’ll find in this track are all guitar tracks that have been put through some serious genetic modification.

I’m not sure if there’s more to this than that.

…yeah that’s about it.

Here you go:

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• “A Shit Ton Of Angry Bees”
• A friend of mine named this track after she heard what the first guitar noise was.

Every once in a while I write music that doesn’t sound like it would fit into any of my projects.  Though I might have asked others before if it’s a good idea to just use an umbrella artist name for a bunch disparate music, I realize I’d probably not pursue writing too many songs like these.  But they’re kind of fun, so there’s no point in throwing them out completely.

I don’t know why I do this when I could be spending time getting better at a sound I’d like to call my own but what-the-fuck-ever, right?

Call it an exercise in style imitation, maybe. Especially if that style is bass, drums, and guitar; all of which I happen to know how to play.  And sometimes, it’s healthy (and let’s not forget fun!) to just slap together “a rock song” instead of always straining myself to try and create something that lives up to my ridiculous standards for decent.

Besides, writing simple rock songs was how I got here in the first place, isn’t it?

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• “Dream In Kilowatts”
  • Named after some random Twitter I saw one night, I forget who said it.
  • There’s only one lyric: “We are the ones who run at night / we won’t be stopped until we die / we are the ones who run at night / we keep these dreams electrified”.
  • It kind of sounds like the mid-90’s.
  • Except for the crazy guitar effect.  I’ll leave you to figure out what I’m talking about.
  • Actually follows the standard pop format: intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus

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• “No More Nightmares” excerpt
  • Well, it’s not really an excerpt if I haven’t finished the song, now is it?  Obviously not a full song.  Probably won’t even get that far with it so here’s what I have anyway.
  • More themes on sleep.
  • My best impression of Paul Banks from Interpol.  Turns out that’s a vocal style I enjoy singing.
  • Same key and probably tempo of the other song.
  • More crazy-ass guitars!

When I was in college, I was in a college band.

I stumbled upon some of the MP3’s while I was organizing my file folders involving musicianship, which contain not only things I’ve written, bands I’ve been in, but also files passed to me from colleagues.  Buried in the “Colleagues” folder I found one called “Live at KXLU”.  I thought, “who do I know played on KXLU?”

I opened up the folder and opened up “audio_03.mp3″.

Then it came rushing back to me like a flood.

HOLY SHIT, I thought, I PLAYED AT KXLU! And with this band, no less.

And after a couple of listens, I realized that as frenetic and tangled all the instruments sounded (we were a band of 6 members), that a lot of my writing these days is significantly rooted in a lot of principles A Patch of Black (in a riot of color) used to move song structures forward.

Yes, we had a long band name.  I was in one of those bands.

“Complete & Constructed” live at KXLU

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I don’t know what it is about writing songs for singing solo, but when for so long you are trained in the art of guitar karate it’s actually very awkward to learn vocal tai chi.

Fortunately for me, the internet is full of accessible musicians who are not necessarily famous even though the quality of their musicianship would lead you to think otherwise.

Among many others, I’ve taken some cues from Chelsea, Mixtapes & Meltdowns, and Courtney.  NO I’m not ripping them off!  I can’t sing as well as any of them so we won’t be having any trouble with that kind of flattery.  Besides, these three are actually too disparate from each other for me to imitate them all.

The point is, I am learning a shit ton from listening to them and getting to know them as people by reading what they write in text.

What are the thoughts of a singer-songwriter?  Well, they’re human.

Holy crap, I’ve forgotten about being human!  And listening to the aforementioned three has reminded me exactly to do just that.

Maybe I’m setting my goals too high, or am making inaccurate conjectures; but I’m trying to emulate them in the sense that I believe their writing is an indication of the thought that goes into their music.  So I hope this method of thinking works.  I mean, nobody can really learn how to be a singer-songwriter, it just has to come from your gut.  Right…?

And as Courtney reminds me, lyrics are very important.  Lyrics!  I am so inexperienced with this!  And moreover, it’s hard to write lyrics like how I… blog, I guess.  I feel like my style of writing does not lend itself to being poetic.

But as a human, I’m going to use my real name to denote songs that sound like the following.  Because the awkward growing pains in learning how to sing — I have to own them.  And after a bajillion drafts of these songs, I feel like these songs might be done.

Here goes nothing.

“debt”

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“no reception”

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“the dustpanic” is a name I’ve used a lot of the time as a moniker for just about everything I’ve written, but it’s probably about time I picked out what does and does not necessarily sound like “the dustpanic”.

I’ve been told this kind of stuff sounds like M83 and Smashing Pumpkins, which I quite enjoy since I do like those groups; but in the future, when I write things that do not fall under this shoegaze/effects-driven/melody-based style, I will name them separately.

“almost”

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“airplanes”

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“connectivity”

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“dirty shoelaces”

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Hi there.

My name is Nico.

These are the music projects I have a hand in.

This blog will be used to organize all of that.

I hope this goes well…