Tag Archives: Original Music

The art of the concept album

A concept albumI love concept albums. They’re self-indulgent and pompous… two of the best traits a musician can have! (And anyone who thinks punk’s ascension in the late ’70s killed off pomposity in rock music is deluding themselves. Punk is as pompous as it can get!)

Anyway… the topic of concept albums came up in the RPM forums today, and I wrote such a self-indulgent and pompous post on the matter that I just felt I had to cross-post it here. To wit:

I don’t think I’m capable of making an album that’s not a concept album… although the nature of what constitutes a concept album can vary a lot. Let’s see… here’s a complete chronology of my solo albums and EPs since I really got into doing this in 2001.

THE DEWEY ‘JONE’ McNUKKLE STORY: SOUNDTRACK TO AN UNMADE FILM (September 2001)
Concept: All track titles are nicknames a particular friend of mine has had at some point in his life; music on each track corresponds to characteristics of the nickname.

TAI CHI AND CHAI TEA (October 2003)
Concept: Not so much, really, although I did structure the CD as if it were two sides, with a “Tai Chi” side and a “Chai Tea” side, and the track sequence was designed around that. Oh, and there’s a 13-minute, 5-“movement” suite about the Iraq war, to make up for the lack of an overall concept.

LIMITATIONS OF THE SYSTEM (EP, August 2004)
Concept: Atari. All of the tracks have Atari 2600 sounds incorporated in them.

INFLATIONARY COSMOLOGY (May 2005)
Concept: Can it get any more grandiose? The album represents the entire arc of the existence of the universe, from Big Bang to Heat Death. A suite in the middle also represents the entire arc of human existence from cavemen to the present day, in case it wasn’t pretentious enough already. I was so spent by the concept on this album that I went two years without recording anything after it was completed.

HIGHWAY 34 REVISITED (May 2007)
Concept: Probably the only thing I’ve ever done without a real concept, but I guess I was trying to capture the essence of all of my musical influences, right down to the second-hand nature of the album’s title.

DIVISION BY ZERO [VOL. I] (EP, August 2007)
Concept: The beginning of an extended autobiographical project. Each track has a year in the title and corresponds to some significant event in my life from that year. This 3-song EP features events from 1973 (my conception), 1976 (not sure, but it involves a new bed, vomit and hospitalization) and 1978 (pizza).

UNNATURAL DISASTERS (February 2008)
Concept: This was my RPM submission last year. The concept is strange places, or more accurately, places made strange by human activity. Each track is a sonic representation of some of my favorite made-weird-by-people places on earth.

TECHNETIUM (EP, February 2008)
Concept: A one-track, 38-minute “EP”; the characteristics of this minimalist techno track were determined based on properties of the technetium atom. Yeah… I forgot to mention “nerd alert.”

MELLOTRONIC (EP, July 2008)
Concept: The Mellotron. Oh, how I love it.

THE BEE LP! (October 2008)
Concept: Bees. All tracks represent something about bees and their behavior.

ANAGRAMMATIC PSEUDONYMS (February 2009)
Concept: This is going to be my RPM submission for this year. Each track title is an anagram of my name. The first letters of each of the 13 tracks, in order, spell out my name. How’s that for establishing some parameters for yourself.

Anyway… my reason for going on at such length here (besides extreme narcissism) is to perhaps give some ideas as to how broad the idea of a “concept album” can be — and how inspiring it can be to dive into a project like this with a specific concept in mind. I find I can be most creative when I have a set of parameters to work within. It gives me a starting point… and a destination.

RPM 2009 is coming…

I’m getting fired up for RPM 2009. This will be my second year participating, and once again I’ve got my concept all ready to go.

Recording (and, ideally, composition) is not to begin before the clock strikes midnight on February 1, so I’ve been devoting my attention to designing my cover art. At this point I have the front cover ready to go (pending the inevitable tinkering between now and February 28). Here it is!

Anagrammatic Pseudonyms cover

Bonus points for anyone who knows what city’s transit system this design is patterned after. And extra double secret points for anyone who can correctly determine why I chose the Interstate numbers that I did. (Welcome, road geeks! And yes, I know there’s no logical reason for an I-176 spur off of I-99. No points for that.)

A Room 34 Christmas — Updated

This is my official submission for the RPM Holiday Challenge. Same idea, completely different recording. I didn’t quite like the direction my first version of “Greensleeves” was taking, so I started over from scratch, mixing up the rhythms a little (changing it from 6/8 to 9/8) and going for more of a straightforward jazz waltz vibe.

This recording features me on tenor sax, keyboards (electric piano and Mellotron), 5-string electric bass and drum programming.

Apologies to Miles Davis. You’ll know it when you hear it. And if not, so what?

[audio:http://blog.room34.com/wp-content/uploads/underdog/room34_greensleeves.mp3]

Download the MP3
(Right-click and choose the appropriate menu option to save the file.)

A Room 34 Christmas

No, I will not be donning my Santa hat whilst crooning over a cup of eggnog by the hearthside. For one thing, I hate eggnog. For another, anyone within earshot would hate my crooning even more than I hate eggnog.

That said, when Jw threw down the gauntlet for an RPM Holiday Challenge, I knew I was on board, and I knew almost as quickly which song I would butcher lovingly render in my own inimitable style. “Greensleeves” has been a standard of jazz musicians for decades (my favorite renditions being John Coltrane’s classic take along with Vince Guaraldi’s treatment for A Charlie Brown Christmas), and perfectly bridges the gap between a straight-ahead jazz treatment and holiday schmaltz. Since my solo music has been drifting in a jazz-ward direction lately anyway, it seemed a perfect fit.

It’s still in an extremely embryonic stage right now, but since I’ve made some progress despite the overwhelming odds of my “lifeload” (“workload” doesn’t cut it) in November in general and this November in particular, I just wanted there to be publicly documented evidence that I’ve made it this far, just in case I fail to stagger across the finish line.

So, here you go…

[audio:http://blog.room34.com/wp-content/uploads/underdog/greensleeves-02.mp3]

Drive slowly! Children playing

I believe that’s the correct translation from Swedish. Lekande Barn is also a new compilation CD I’ve just produced featuring the music of Bassius-O-Phelius, an improvisatory music duo I participated in with Mark Bergen from 1994 to 1997. Our first album was entitled Swedish Children at Play, so when it came time to title this compilation, it was a no-brainer. (Well, OK, it did take the brain power of tracking down the Swedish translation of “Children at Play” and locate a photo of a sign bearing that message.)

I’ve remastered 14 of our old tracks through the wonders of modern technology. It’s truly amazing how far things have advanced in the last decade, because I don’t really consider 1998 to be that long ago. (I was already married and working as a professional web designer, for crying out loud!) You can listen to the entire album via a streaming playlist, or buy your own copy on CD, by visiting the Bassius-O-Phelius page.