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About this "practice":
Present: Abhay Singh, Kaitlyn Flanagan, Karna Ray
Barely Close
How are we to go (walk along)
TA Teenage Afterglow
No technical fuckups to report—third time’s a charm, etc.
In my introduction to these, I mentioned wanting these practices to have variation not just among musicians, but what those musicians play. This was the first time that aspiration was acted on, and I couldn’t have asked for it to go much better. We did a couple of songs with Karna drumming, Abhay on Keys, me on Guitar, Kaitlyn on effects—I.e. pretty much what we usually do. Then Karna switched to guitar, then Abhay got on drums, then I got on Keyboard. At one point Abhay was even playing guitar (the results of which are shared above). I don’t think we played any of the songs I’d suggested at the outset.
I can play keyboard well enough to write some simple songs, or to get a (simple) overdub right given enough tries, but I’ve never really played with people on keyboard before. Which meant that, beyond showing Karna the song we were working on, it felt more like I was trying to follow along than it usually does, which was an interesting change of pace.
We did a straightforward version of this piano song “Barely Close” (I keep calling it “Barely Strong,” even though that isn’t the line). “How are we to go,” is an alternate version of that song, where Karna’s really taking the lead on guitar, and I’m trying to do my parts without hitting any egregiously bad notes. It kind of evolves into a post-rock thing at the end, with some cool samples and textures coming in from Kaitlyn throughout.
We got Abhay to start messing around on guitar and they started playing this riff that we improvised over, something between kraut-rock and post-punk? It's not a song per se, but I'm sharing it as "TA Teenage Afterglow." It was a lot of fun; I could listen to Karna play drums for hours.
Recording as you go tends to lead songs towards the longer side, and these excerpts are particularly so. I would normally try to find shorter sections, but honestly I think these capture what was going on in the room (and obviously I think what was going on in the room was interesting!). One thing that was fun was that once a song was established, we didn’t really stop or talk about it, we were just going through different iterations, trying different tones.
There’s a quote in Peter Dimock’s George Anderson that goes something like “history happens only once, and in only one way.” A lot of music is that way, and those happenings are mostly lost or forgotten. What remains is misremembered. That can be a blessing, an amnesia that gets you through 100 bad repetitions until a song is actually good. But you can also lose a lot along the way. One thing I like about this project is that it’s a way to capture some of those things that happen only once, only one way, and appreciate them.
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