Aurora

Aurora is about beginnings, spring, dawn, youth, all things fresh.

The lyrics is voiced to a young woman: moving out from her parents and starting her own new life.  

I composed this song pretty early in my musical life. I guess I was around 14 years. It was never performed to an audience, as it was another song that didn't fit with the rock image, I was pursuing at the time.

However, as most songs, I always had plans for releasing it at some point.  

It is an all acoustic song, and it was fun to make it kind of psychedelic, using only acoustic instruments. 

Yin & Yang

This is two of the earliest songs I'm going to release in this project.
They were made before I started any of the bands I'm talking about in this blog.  Probably needless to say, it was at a time when I was studying classical guitar. Which I did for 7 years. 
I think I was a pain for the teacher.

I always wanted to do things my own way, instead of the traditional classical style. I invented my own techniques that I used to play the classical pieces I was given, in order to prove that it was more versatile and a better solution. 
In many ways I was wrong, as the songs were 100 times simpler to play with the tried and true traditional technique.  But I kept at it for hours and hours, years and years, the journey was the most important thing, and I still like to make things "difficult" for me  in many ways, it expands the palette, and sharpens your perception.  Which I think is the most important thing, for any artist.

My attitude also prefer to use power over logistics in a song, as some kind of rebellion. I want to conquer the song in all ways possible. Though I must admit that I use crazy amounts of time analyzing all ways to play a song. In the end expression always wins. But that's rarely the simplest way. 

With "Yin" for instance, I arranged and played it in five very different techniques. Which is quite common with "rehearsal pieces" especially those for bowed instruments. 

Legato, staccato, with or without pick, polyphonic legato. 
I originally recorded it faster, but it just sounded crazy with vocals. 
Then I recorded it slower, and it felt too slow for guitar. 

I also recorded it with classical guitar, 3 steel string acoustics with heavy medium and light strings, all in ambient and dry rooms, at 3 different tempos and with (the above) 5 different techniques. 

As the song should be free-time at around 180bpm I ended up playing to a beat (170bpm) in order to compare easily all versions with the same vocals, that way I could decide on which one I liked best. 
(I really wanted the guitar "staccato" style, but it didn't work well with vocals) 

I never planned to release any of these type of songs when I made them, as I found it far too taboo to play anything technical like this. So they were just songs that I invented out of boredom and I never took them seriously. In the end nothing is serious, it's just creativity, so why not release it?

They are heavily inspired by piano sonatas and etudes, which I loved to analyze and play at the time. I actually prefer them over most guitar pieces, as I find them more interesting and less limiting. Most guitar pieces I've found, seem to be composed in an oversimplified way, with too little thought around true polyphony, note-release expression etc. I think this is because a classical composer would easily be accused with having "too little experience" with the guitar, if his compositions for the instrument was too radical. This is not so in the piano world, and the guitar has so many ways you can approach tone, much more than notes on the actual instrument.  The same can be said for compositions for cello and violin. Much more expressive usually, and more interesting material in general. 

Obviously, where there's a "Yin" there's a "Yang" 
And both are extremes, you cannot describe one without the other. 
Make sure to listen to them both together for the whole picture. 

I can say that they're both made to be pretty extreme in most ways, lyrical, melodic, even slightly uncomfortable in their own ways. 
Which was hard to live with, as a producer, but I think I succeeded, as I know they are a bit uncomfortable to me. 

Keep Your Arms Open

Much of the arrangement for this song, was based on a live recording I found, with my band Woo, while doing research to this (musical biography) project.

The song was developed and played over many years, and was always in a constant change. With everything from baroque style, references to progressive acid rock. But it always was a positive song. 

I have improvisations over it from my mid teens, and so I thought it was important to include it here in this 5 year long album. 

I ended up recording all the instruments myself, everything is real acoustic instruments as usual. Some of the more peculiar instruments used, was a spring matress and a pile of stuffed cardboard boxes. 

Satan's Brother Miles

The song was composed for my band "Woo", and if I remember correctly, it was performed only once. But played frequently at rehearsals. 

We had a huge repertoire, which I never managed to release, before we broke up. I did the pre-production for the song by listening to old minidisc recordings, so that when drummer Geir Arne Ose, flew in for the recordings, it was done in one take (we did 3, but the first stayed). In fact, the whole song was recorded in about 15 minutes. 

The rest of the production (and mix) was completed in an evening.
This is never the case with any of the other songs in this project, so far.

I use crazy amounts of time on the recordings. Most of the songs have been composed and arranged years before this project. But many of the productions, also take several years to complete. So what I've released here have been a work in progress for many, many years. Actually, up to 15 years, and even more. 

 I'm always working on some material that "drives me nuts" for the 100th time. 

But still,  I'm extremely grateful for being able to do this. And I hope something good comes out of it for someone. 

I Went

"I Went" was recorded live with my band "Ninth", with Bjørn Tore Kronen Taranger on drums. 

The recording is totally raw, and no edits or "studio magic" has been used.
Most of the sound comes from the drum microphones picking up the guitar.
The instrumentation is simple:
Drums, guitar and Rhodes. But, there is an overdubbed acoustic and electric guitar playing through the arrangement along with the original.

The first draft I made for this song was an industrial electronic upbeat arrangement in the key of E major.
This version (F minor, free time) is probably more inspired by my Motown/Stax upbringing. I grew up with all that stuff (in the house, not in the times though;)  and I wanted to keep "production values"  back in the 60's for this song. 

I think people underestimate R&B from the old times.
I can't stand the 80's slap stuff, or the pop/fusion funk stuff. I can't say that I'm particularly fond of modern R&B (pop) either, I find it way too "homogenized". 

But I just love the attitude, creativeness and feel from those early records and use it shamelessly wherever I want, on my tracks.

It was a time when R&B, Funk and Soul music was three sides of the same story. 

On the session with me:
Bjørn Tore Kronen Taranger: Drums  

I Am All That I'm Looking For

I usually write my blog on the bus these days. I need to take two of them to get back home (from the studio).  Both of them take about 15 minutes each, and there's a 10 to 20 minute wait between them. 
I write the blog on the way home, not in the morning (I'm definitely not in the mood for it then). 
I write the Norwegian blog on the first bus, and the English one on the second. 
It makes me write in a fast pace, which kinda suits me. 

I prefer writing in the sun though. 
Actually I prefer doing everything in the sun, (which is unfortunate, if you live in Bergen, Norway).
Earlier in my life, I didn't care much about the sun at all, but it's creeping more and more into my brains pleasure center, as the years go by . 
Sunbathing is out of the question though! I hate that! I need to do something, or I get bored instantly. 

Ok, enough about that.
Let's talk about "I Am All That I'm Looking For"
Do we have all that were looking for, in us?
Do we have anything at all?
"No man is an island" according to poet John Donne
But is this true?

Yes and no, I believe.
All and nothing is true.
All experiences are necessarily illusions.
They are interpretations of our senses and our imagination.
That doesn't mean that they are untrue. 

One truth is that we're traveling on a huge ball at an enormous speed around a black hole. 
But what is a ball,  a black hole, and what is speed? What is their true design, and what were they truly designed for? Probably nothing, at least in our vocabulary, as our words, such as "design" are only designed to explain our human reality. 
Words are descriptions that communicates observations of coherence in the way that we sense them. 
Are the words true? Yes and no. 

After living here (in Bergen) for many years, I recently started to try a new route home every day. After realizing that there's many streets that I've never been to. And my perceived reality of my surroundings have changed drastically, just by doing that.

So in a sense, I really believe that we have all that we're looking for in us. But not in our minds alone, but in our actions. Action comes from choices, that comes from our thoughts. Thoughts come from experiences and imagination. 

So we create our needs from our own observations and fuel them with our imagination. And action is the only way to release these expectations (not the internet, by the way). But that's not the same as living out all of your dreams. Be careful with dreams.  

But enough speedy bus philosophy!
I have finally arrived home, I am finished (with the bus, not in any other way) and don't take my word for it, or believe that anything I've said is totally true or not.

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It's Friday and release day for the song "Assassin" The song was finished after an all-nighter, just hours before release. The picture was taken some hours later, working with the next release "I Am All That I'm Looking For"

Assassin

This song was recorded live, with the band Ninth. 
Part of the instrumentation was composed along with the song "Godsped", and in the beginning, they actually were the same song. But that's a long time ago, and I was barely a teenager. 

As usual, the song evolved over time, and went through several bands and lineups. 

The sound of "Assassin" is based around the fact that it was recorded live, but I try to break my rules as much as I can, from song to song. For example, I love the sound of an indie band just as much as an american rock production. Not that it's anything special about that.

There's obviously a reason why Motown funk sounds different than a punk record (other than the musicians, the agenda and the expression of the song), sonically there is physics behind it too, something that audio engineers and producers use to their advantage. Sound waves has their own good and bad sides that varies with tempo, volume, expression and so on. In music production, this is a language by itself, that is used to communicate to a group of people, with certain values. Or in other words: an audience, or in other words: a market. 

But I can't control myself when it comes to these things, give the funk drums a punk sound, and add lots of real reverberation. Give the hard rock guitar a synth/clean sound. Chop up the drums in the middle and add some crazy analog filters. Give the bass guitar some distortion and lots of treble. Add to that the slow and mellow vocals, to what was once a live recording. 

Personally, I see music genres as dead. All of them! When it becomes defined as a genre it's  already captured and become a part of the museum. That doesn't mean that I don't love the music. It's just not something that I would pursue artistically.

But there's one great thing that all these genres have in common, something I do want to keep alive: The people behind them never gave a shit about how things should be done. 

Drums: Bjørn Tore Kronen Taranger, Geir Satre