The closing track on Painting Music is Outro. So Outro is the outro. Sorry for that pun. Couldn’t resist. I was stuck for a name, much like Deadmau5 said he sometimes is, and then he resorts to calling his tracks things like Some Chords and Lack of a Better Name.
Outro is the track in which everything that I learned during the making of “Painting Music” comes together.
It started with me going back to the “This Exquisite Forest” platform, which is the web audio generation platform that had been the least satisfying to work with, because the resulting sounds are so saccharine. I set all the parameters down to the least melodious and most low-key – saddest tone, maximum synths, maximum ambience, etc. What came out was a sort of low drone with a barely audible melody.
What did this peculiar snippet sound like?
Yes, that is a lot of noise.
There is a melody in there though, if you use your imagination.
So I wrote a score based on what I heard in the clip. I was determined that this app, This Exquisite Forest, will not defeat my attempts to make a beautiful song out of it.
The final result, many weeks later, is a Rondo: six variations of the theme, with the bridge providing a break and contrast. As a result, the melody seems to go round and round, like it’s going away, but then it comes back again.
The composition includes the oud, bouzouki and tanpura, but the defining instrument that I used in Logic, is the Eastern Storm Voice. I picked it because I had often watched the video of Canadian artist Peter Pringle performing an ancient Egyptian love song on an instrument called the “djedjet”, and it sent chills down my spine. (The video is at the end of this post.) His voice, when he sings the phrase, “Sister! Sister without rival!” is just amazing. What raw emotion and passion. It’s like something primal. Because the basic melody is quite dark-sounding, I had a vocals like Pringle’s in mind when I was writing, and this loop fitted perfectly.
It is a fitting finale to the album, I think: that very human, expressive voice, which is the complementary opposite of the machine-generated sounds from which the songs on the album were created.
Chris Perry gave the track a subtly pulsating remix with a similar sound balance as Exquisite Machine, the track before Outro.
Outro (Painting Music) Lyrical Video
What’s next?
My next album, called Time Shift, is currently being given the finishing touches at Banana Llama Studios. I think it will be ready early in 2023. For this year, I’m all written out.
Peter Pringle performing an Ancient Egyptian Love song
