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Index > Souls In Darkness > MCMLXXXIV  This is music I wrote years ago with Todd Nelson. We were the tender age of around 15-16 years old. When we started neither of us really knew anything about writing music - let alone recording it. This had benefits as we didn't have any rules to follow. This project continued for a couple years and later involved Martha Weiss on violin and vocals. The recordings of these tracks are fairly rough. Back then I couldn't afford a 4-track or anything better then a couple of cassette decks. I had a small 6 channel mono PA head, a Moog Rogue, a Yamaha MR10 drum machine, a cheap guitar, a handful of various drums and a few effects. Martha brought in a Juno 6 (which was a dream at the time) and her violin. We also had a handful of cheap mics. The recording process was labourious and took some planning. I would record the first "track" to Cassette 1. Normally this was a drum beat and perhaps a bass line for the entire song. I would take Cassette 1 out of the recording deck and play it into the PA. I would put Cassette 2 into the recording deck and record the next layer. Once that was done I'd swap cassettes - playing Cassette 2 and recording on Cassette 1. This would continue until the track was finished. Of course there are inherent problems with this method. Firstly, each layer steps on the fidelity of the previous layers. After putting 3-4 layers down the first layer would get pretty muddy and most the high end would be gone. Some of this was due tot he nature of my PA head and some because of how cassettes are. The second problem is there is no changing things half way through a track. I would have to return to step one again if I wanted to add another part to the structure of the song. Several years back I was asked about these old songs and I went through some old cassettes and dug these songs out. I ran them through a bit of restoration (IE; EQ, noise reduction, and a little stereo enhancement) but I could only do so much with them. Keep this in mind as you listen to the songs. The process of writing normally started with a lyric. Todd was a proficient writer and often had piles of poems and lyrics sitting around the studio. He'd hand me something, I'd read it, and then try to come up with what the music would sound like for the words. Most of Todd's (and my) writings were fairly dark and gloomy at the time. What can I say? We were teenagers. Being gloomy and mopey comes natural for a teenageer. This was also at the height of the Reagan years where most of us felt the Soviet ICBM's were going to arrive at any minute - a return volley from Reagan's first strike (Reagan might have been joking with his "We begin bombing in 5 minutes" joke, but it scared the crap out of us). I think we embraced our underlying fear of turning to nuclear ash in our songs. Therapy perhaps? Other times we would think of a song concept. We'd sit and have gallons of coffee and discuss an idea for a song. We'd return to the studio later and I'd begin work on it. Sometimes we'd venture to a remote location with mallets and hammers and beat the crap out of machines and structures - recording it for future rhythm or effect tracks. Todd Nelson: Vocals, Words, Guitar. |
# |
Song title (time) |
Lyrics / Notes |
Download |
01 |
The Fog |
| MP3 |
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02 |
The Unknown |
| MP3 |
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03 |
A Western Love |
| MP3 |
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04 |
Crisis Line |
| MP3 |
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05 |
The Sun Went Out Today |
| MP3 |
|
06 |
Storm |
| MP3 |
|
07 |
Silence of The Dead |
| MP3 |
|
08 |
Lost |
| MP3 |
|
09 |
The Moments Dead |
| MP3 |
|
10 |
Bedtime Story |
| MP3 |
|
11 |
Theme to Dark Ages |
| MP3 |
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12 |
Dark Reflections |
| MP3 |
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13 |
Scavengers |
| MP3 |
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Availability: CD out of print. Licensing: By special permission. |