Studio Log

12 May 2005

Ghost Particle Project

The Ghost Particle Project is well under way:

December Fireflies - lyrics by Ghost Particle, music written and performed by Daymoon

Anthem of Dust - lyrics by Ghost Particle, music written and performed by Daymoon

Antares - instrumental, written and performed by Mark Mamanta and Logan. I contributed ethnic percussion, flute, recorders, and keyboard.

Daymoon

Completion date for Fabric of Space Divine set for end of June. In July, the album will go to the sound engineer for the final mix and mastering. The album art will go into production at about the same time. We also have a new bass player: Mark Guertin, from Toronto. Mark will perform a large part of the bass parts on the album. New set of songs begun for next Daymoon album: Love Songs!

Miosótis

The showcase presented at the Gouveia Art Rock Festival in April went really well - for the first time in my life, I was not one bit nervous. Rehearsing with the band to extend the showcase to a series of 40-minute shows which co-founder musician Álvaro has secured for FNAC shops in Lisbon and other Portuguese cities for July - September, with other venues to follow.

Mispel Bellyful

Vasco, Paulo and I have begun recording our respective suites! Davis Raborn is already recording the drums for my suite (called 'A Loquat And Then The World'). Paul's found this unbelievably good singer from the UK, who will hopefully do all the vocals on the album!

5 April 2005

Recording a couple of fund-raiser songs with Daymoon for my dear friend Ghost Particle. The results will be up for sale soon. Also rehearsing my pass parts for the Miosótis showcase in Gouveia. Fabric of Space Divine is still taking its time, but it'll get there eventually.

19 December 2004

Daymoon finally has its own voice: Jeff Markham, from San Jose, CA. Jeff also plays mighty good keyboards!!!

21 September 2004

The krummhorn thingy made it into the album and sounds rather hilarious. The whole haphazard contraption withstood about 10 minutes of wild playing, and then came apart. I'm re-recording most acoustic guitars and a lot of bass guitar parts, Davis is working the drums on the first section of the album. I'll send CDs off to Christof and Nick this week, for their vocals. Those CDs will travel a lot: one to far-way Sweden, and the other to even farther-away Tasmania! Apart from that, I've had hardly any time for music over the past weeks - work, work, work.

Listening to Spock's Beard, Guy Manning, the new Flower Kings album, and Discus (mighty fine prog band from Indonesia).

Spent last week in Southern Portugal with the family, and although I had to work on my laptop for most of the time, I got a little time off as well (see pics below). Diary entry, while listening to Joni Mitchell's 'Travelogue':

Almost Africa. Mid-September in southern Portugal. In the dark terracotta shade, a sensual breeze waltzes like hot dervishes around my half-naked skin. In front of my laptop, armies of words to be translated tease and tire my cramping fingertips. The blue-brown smell of sap-bleeding pine groves and salt from the sea. The pair of headphones kills the cicadas. And when no one else is around me, Roine Stolt is so damn right about Travelogue: oppressed wells of tears at nearly every corner of the mind. I wish I had such a story to tell. Some skins are so thin. My laptopped kingdom for a cigarette...

31 August 2004

Davis and Vasco have sent me draft recordings for various parts of Fabric of Space Divine. Can't do anything though at the moment as I'm being plagued by the curse of my profession: tendinitis. Bought a kind of shawm or krummhorn thingy at the medival fair in my village - I wonder whether there's room for it on Fabric of Space Divine? No word yet from any of the singers :( Oh well, as patience is not a virtue of the young, I can't be old yet.

Stunning jazz concert by Oficina Sonora last Friday!!! All Mispels were there, plus all members of my Portuguese rock band SP'AM, as well as the most faithful prog supporter Portugal has ever seen - João Troviscal Costa :-) Photos in the Pictures section.

21 August 2004

Klas Assarsson had to give up on the project, so all the drumming is now at the charge of Davis.

13 August 2004

Done! The last track is down. Pooohf. In the meantime, I've begun recording bass, percussion and woodwinds for two solo projects that Hugo Flores of Sonic Pulsar is working on. Solid sci-fi prog. More of this later...

10 August 2004

I'm leaving the last track for later, as everyone else is now recording their (damn English grammar!) own bits. Mispel Bellyful time! Looks like our second album will be a good deal wilder and stranger than our debut album. Even some teutonic wordings ;-)  Reading Baxter's leaf-tuner Evolution - this man's simply a genius!

5 August 2004

The base track for the second-last song, God vs Zero Kelvin, is ready now. Turned out to be pretty symphonic, as it should :-)

29 July 2004

Dee Long (Canada) is now on board too! The hero of my teenage years, who started me on science fiction music, will sing on my album! Dee will start recording in September, as he's finalising his forthcoming solo DVD (brilliant hard sci-fi rock, trust me!). But that's fine for me as work will be keeping me from recording anyway for the next few weeks. And Nick Storr and Klas Assarsson too will begin recording over the next few weeks. This is damn exciting! So here the new line-up:

22 July 2004

Davis is recording the best drums I could ever have imagined. He's such a perfectionist, and perfect it does sound! Paulo recorded a fantastic sax quartet for the end of Expansion. And I've contacted Dee Long (former Klaatu, still makes unbelievably good sci-fi rock) and asked him if he wants to sing the klaatusian part in Expansion.

7 July 2004

And the main drummer's been found - lost & found, indeed: Davis Raborn III is back!!!! And he's begun recording already. Fucking A, dude! Davis ROCKS!

29 June 2004

Haven't recorded much, but I've finished writing all tracks for the album. A lot has happened though: I've finally found all my guest musicians, and some of my all-time heroes have agreed to work with me! Christoff Jeppsen (Isildurs Bane) and Nick Storr will provide vocals on most tracks. Apart from being an incredibly talented keyboarder, guitarrist and composer, Nick (from Australia) also has an incredible voice!!! But more luck even: Klas Assarsson, also of Isildurs Bane, has agreed to record drums and percussion for some of the tracks! I'm still looking for a main drummer though as I can't imagine that Klas will have all that much time available. For the piano track on Trinity, I've managed to persuade Thomas Nehring. And Inês will make her vocal debut on the Egyptian track! I'm also thinking of adding some trombone to one of the tracks, and that'd be a job for Fernando! So, with Paulo and Vasco from Mispel Bellyful, that's an awesome line-up of people who are so much more talented than I am...

Now all the unnerving file exchanges have started, and I'm dying to hear the results.

So here the basic line-up so far:

Klas Assarsson - drums, percussion
Walter Bäbler - drums
Nick Storr - vocals
Christoff Jeppsen - vocals
Inês Baptista - vocals
Paulo Chagas - reeds & woodwind
Vasco Patrício - guitar
Fernando - trombone, vocals
Thomas Nehring - piano
and me myself on all the rest

Oh, and the cover is basically ready as well:

(click for a lager version)

Sadder news: Mispel Bellyful will be on ice for a few months - I just don't have the time :-(  That won0t keep us from playing live of course, but we simply can't find where places to play!

9 June 2004

Had to scrap the new FoSD piece, despite the nice tapping. It just doesn't fit in.

7 June 2004

How on earth does one deal with an album that's most likely 90 minutes long? I really don't want to stretch it needlessly, nor do I want to cut it down to 74 minutes. Damn damn damn. And still looking for drummers. The very gentlemanly Nuno Lourenço (of Prognosis fame) gave it a shot last week, but he felt very frustrated about my V-Drums, which are good enough, but not easy to get used to. (Hope he didn't feel so frustrated about my food...) I've contacted a few people in the meantime, including two singers, but as they're all celebrities in their own right, I'm not sure they'll want to play a part in my home-brewed little drama. I confess it's frustrating... (should I stick to cooking?) In any case, I had to add a further track, as the jump between the first digital being and the cosmos-wide expansion of beings based on pure information (structured energy) is just too abrupt. And I also thought it was time for an instrumental. A little musical confession: the tapping technique of Trey Gunn and Micheal Hedges has influenced this new piece quite a bit. I've begun recording without any drums at all, which now makes me entirely dependant on a real dummer. Maybe this is just to avoid launching an album once again with programmed drums, out of sheer impatience. After all, I just found out that it took New Eden Orchestra eight years to get their album ready!

Finished my part in a new Mispel Bellyful song. Made it even weirder than it already was. Vasco wrote a great new song that perfectly conveys the feeling of being where he was: a Caribbean island. With this strange lazy and yet melancholy feeling of emptiness, a slight wind, being lost in a mountainless seascape. Not sure what to do with it. Difficult task. For the sake of the band's reputation, I've decided to keep my vocal explorations at a minimum.

23 May 2004

Finally time again to continue recording. The base track for Digital is almost ready, Beyond.Man is ready, and Expansion has just begun. I also started working on a new MB song by Paulo, called Setes. WEIRD stuff, I tell you!

17 May 2004

A little break in-between my professional chores. It's 'too darn hot', and I can't even concentrate. Not even on music. The track 'Digital' is running into deep mud without a drummer! I've tried  João Jacob, but he hasn't probably got the patience to do strange poly-rhythmic stuff. I'll re-record the keyboard parts of Beyond.Nature on a real piano some time this week, as well as the female backing vocals for Ice.Prospector. Paulo's sent me the bass guitar score for a new Mispel tune, and I can't even read it! That'll take a while to figure out!

6 May 2004

The first post-debut meeting will be this evening, accompanied by a long-promised octopus rice stew by Vasco. Fernando Simões is now the fourth Medlar/Nesperado, and will do backing vocals and later maybe lead vocals, apart from his trombone. The agenda for tonight is to see what comes next. It is now indisputable that we will play live, but it looks like this will require a fairly huge stage line-up, and we still haven't got a drummer even. In any case, the stage line-up might be this:

Fernando - trombone, vocals
Vasco - guitar, maybe backing vocals
Paulo - reeds & woodwind, maybe backing vocals & acoustic guitar
Myself - electric & acoustic guitar, vocals, angklung; even though I'd love to, I won't play bass as I simply can't sing and play bass at the same time.
??? - drums
??? - bass
??? - keyboards (maybe Vasco's brother?)
??? - hopefully a percussionist

We're aiming for August for our stage debut, most likely in Peniche, as a support band for Zappanoia. After that, concerts will hopefully follow in Lisbon, I'm dying to play at the Comuna theatre!

27 April 2004

Gouveia Art Rock Festival was great!!! We sold 15 CDs, and if we sell another 9, we can buy ourselves a beer! I missed my presentation appearance on the stage because I was talking to Benjamin from Nil and Syrinx - these guys are my heroes!!!

This week I'll finally continue my Fabric of Space Divine - my wife and daughters will do the backing vocals for Ice Prospector, and I'll redo the acoustic guitars on Middle. And I'll have to find a singer for the Trinity part - I wish I could get Christof from Isildurs Bane... :-(

21 April 2004

More notes on Mispel Bellyful: Getting the final album together was painfully slow - many MP3s didn't align properly with the rest of the song, getting the volumes right was nerve-wrecking, and Paulo and Vasco redid several of their tracks. We lost the full version of Boundary to Nowhere - the album version is quite poor, I think. I also feel that Water could have developed into something much bigger...

But for the first time did we all play together at my studio! Powerful Beauty of Nakedness now has a really cool, jazzy section with Paulo and Vasco improvising together. The track will make a brilliant piece for extending on stage... (yes, plans are being made to perform this live!)

The feedback we've had on TrojanX is very good - just as I suspected it's probably our best track. Does the rest of our album live up to it?

19 April 2004

My other band's first CD Mispel Bellyful is now at the printer's and we're getting ready for our launch at this year's Art Rock Festival. The festival comittee have decided to play our CD during the intermissions, throughout the two-day event. That's pretty cool, especially as there will be people from national radio. I must confess that, after mixing and mastering the album for some two weeks until late hours every day, I'm really exhausted, and I think I'll give the studio and myself a  break for a week or two, before I resume my work on Fabric of Space Divine.

16 March 2004

Fabric of Space Divine is now pretty much past the physical middle of a CD, and while I have only managed to conclude the past and present, there's so much Future to sing about!  It is quite a nuisance when you begin to understand that you have material for more than a CD, but not enough for two.

Getting so far has been much easier than I thought; the leitmotifs - if a small man like I is allowed to mouth such a big word - practically fell into my lap, leading, as their name suggests, with relative ease thought my suite. Natrually, I am trying to avoid over-usage of these motifs though.

Last weekend I completed the centerpiece, this is, the song that sits at the actual centre of the suite, naturally dealing with the present, with Here and Now. Paulo Chagas from Moonrock (and Zappanoia) has suggested that I replace the initial (synth) string section with a (real) quartet of reeds and woodwinds. Sounds like the right job for him to record ;-) This string section, by the way, is my second ridiculous attempt at at least a canon, but alas, even if you had removed Telemann's brain, he would still have produced something more intelligent than I did. I wish I could deny that I have not evolved past the poorest of rennaissance music...

The initial vocals will have to be redone as they're really feable. I guess I'll have to wake up at 5 am to record that bassy voice one has after getting up. Or I could ask Neal Morse... ;-)

For the first piece into the Future section of the suite, I cheated a little: I recycled Rocking Back To Earth from my first album, brushed it up a little, and gave it a very special intro to lead out of the relative gloominess of the Middle piece. But as it is still one of my favourite tunes, and even though it's plain old 60's pop, I would not want it to gain dust.

The follow-up piece to this will be the first-ever human being going entirely digital. This might sound silly, but I truly believe that this will happen, and that indeed most people long for this. After all, as I complain about in the Middle piece, all we ever know is right Here, right Now. The past is stored information, and stored in a far from reliable fashion, and the future is nothing but extrapolation from the stored information. We do have ways to move our Here and Now to other Here and Now's: by reading, watching movies, talking to other people, imagining, dreaming, etc., and most of us willingly resort to such ways of escaping our own Here and Now. Still, there is no way to expand our Here and Now. By hosting all the information that we are on an external IT system, we would no longer be limited to our physical Here and Now.

Musically, the First Digital Being will have multiple time signatures, and will sport a somewhat lengthy intro where the sound of a cricket gradually turns into an electronic sound, and an electronic sound gradually resolves into the voice of the first digital human being.

Extrapolating from the past to the future, I feel naturally concerned about the terrorist attacks in Madrid. Everyone one the family decided last night not to attend any of the Rock in Rio concerts (Peter Gabriel!). This is especially sad for me as I am a great supporter of the Islam, as can easily be noted in my songs of this album. But hopefully, all this will one day be nothing more than a footnote in the history books of mankind.

Problems to be solved: well, first of all, all vocals have to be redone. I read that Neal Morse records all vocals again at the very end - maybe that's a good idea to follow. But first I'll have to solve the problem of Sonar blocking totally and utterly when lots of online effects, e.g., reverb, delay, chorus, are applied.

I hope to be finally able to dedicate some more time to Moonrock next week again - Paulo and Vasco have provided some incredible canvases for me to paint on (just that their canvases are getting more and more complete, which I gguess is a good sign).

Davis (whom we hoped to have as a drummer) hasn't said a single word for a month :-(