unravel

amarevois

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Making ‘Unravel’ – notes by amarevois

To all those who are involved in making on of those ‘endless’ albums…

The earliest song from Unravel, ‘State of Grace’, was composed in 1987 when I was just seventeen and probably only the third song I’d ever written up until that point that I’d liked and therefore kept. The other one was Shine it On, which also eventually made it onto the record and the third was a Vangelis style synth orchestration that was extremely kitsch, even back then. Thus armed with two songs I thought were not kitsch, I set myself the goal of making an album and becoming a ‘real recording artist’. I was seventeen.

Almost twenty years later and about 50 different titles on, I was still working on this ‘debut’ album. Along the way I’d amassed over 180 pieces of music, written for either ‘The Album’, or for various filmscores, or for fun or simply by mistake. There was about 20 albums worth of material spanning almost a dozen distinct genres (and some quite indistinct!). I was well and truly stuck. Concept after concept, and blurb after blurb, I moved the pieces around in lists, in alphabetical order, in order of length, in order of key signature, grouped in genres, grouped in instrumentation, in short – grouped a zillion different ways. Along the road (yes, that’s the ‘Ashen Road’ to you!) I was spurred on by my belief in the music itself, in my passions and skills, and by sheer dogged determination and that epic Virgoan will.

In between paying rent and trying to survive in a mad world, I spent all my ‘spare’ hours working on pieces, and on my playing, and on my production techniques, with one eye always on the target - no matter how far I’d strayed from it for whatever reason  – ‘The Album’ was my Everest and I was going to plant my flag there, by hook or by crook!

So, when I used to read that such-and-such a band took a whole three months to nut out their latest album from scratch in a massive AV complex with a name like Megatech Studios and a cast of thousands with a budget to match, I tended to get a bit itchy. A bit cynical. They say the first one is the hardest, but I swear that if I had have known when I was seventeen that I would still be trying to release that first record at the ripe young age of 38, I think I would have just lay down in the dirt then and there and cried. I’m glad I didn’t know. Because I would have missed the journey that comes with quietly sticking to your aims, cultivating humility and patience, exploring your emotional buttons and generally growing and changing and measuring your life by your passions and energies within your perceived reality. What? Oh yeah, and having some hair brained scheme like The Album to keep you intrigued.

The Ashen Road sessions…

The first demos of the songs were done on four track cassette that I got when  I was about 21, and although I got some really good results considering the medium’s limitations, as my skills and experience in the world of audio grew, so it became clear that these recordings were far from ‘professional’ sounding and I had a long, long way to go. Perhaps further than I sensed. Apparently, what the ‘normal’ person did was to get signed to a record label and then let them pay for the recording, or you went into the studio and paid for it out of your own pocket. The only record executive that I’d ever spoken to gave me several pieces of advice. One, that I shouldn’t get my hopes up because I didn’t live in Los Angles and therefore wasn’t in the right city; secondly, that I was too old (at 21!) and thridly, that I really needed to get some sexy pictures taken if I was to ‘catch the eye’ of a producer of a manager. The record company thing didn’t sound like it was really up my alley, though I clearly had no money and no one to loan money from to pay for a studio myself. And even if I went into the studio with my savings (read: ‘slavings’), what was I to do and how would I get it all done as I spent my three whole days (!) checking the clock?

What to do? I took the tried and trusted ‘do-it-your-Zen-self’ approach, which meant going off for a few years and inducting myself into the art of audio engineering. At the same time, refining my song writing and my playing on what had become by then a veritable gaggle of instruments. I didn’t perform at that stage because I used to get really sick in the stomach just thinking of getting up there and so I avoided it like the plague. Instead, I immersed myself in the wonderfully nerdy world of audio, gaining vast tracts of experience working and getting grubby in a PA hire company for few years before moving on into the supposedly more refined (and much cleaner, I’m pleased to report) world of the recording studio, under the watchful eye of folk guitarist/engineer and studio owner Bruce Jacques.

It was there, at his Cloudburstz Studio that I discovered the wonders of professional tape recorders, and the slightly more baffling wonders of computer recording which was still very new at the time. As I had the keys to the studio, I would go into scheduled sessions very early and put down my own ideas on the spare unused minutes of tape at the end of client’s reels, which was probably playing with fire in hindsight, but I wasn’t thinking of that at the time, believe me. They became the first real session for the tracks that eventually came to be Unravel, though few if any of the parts I’d recorded up until then have actually made it into the final mixes. But each time I recorded a version of a song, the musical and production energy got closer and closer to what I had long heard in my head.

A few months after I started working at the studio, Bruce upgraded his Pro Tools system and sold me the 16 track 1/2” tape machine and when I got it home, I compared the sound of it to my little four track cassette machine and thought that I’d finally arrived in the world of true audio fidelity. I am still to this day, laughing at this, though I am still in love with this machine and almost every part recorded from unravel has passed through those tape heads at some point.

Adue to the end of the era of studios in general (with the advent of ‘affordable’ home recording equipment, the studio folded, like so many of it’s counterparts across the country. I landed a job at a prestigious music store in my city, which specialised in pro audio and hi-tech recording equipment and suddenly there was a zillion new things to learn, as well as for the first time having a peer group from which to learn about the music industry, which up until then had remained a complete mystery to me. It wasn’t like it is now, where there are a thousand courses and books available. It was more that if you were lucky enough to know someone who knew someone in the music industry, they just might share some important information with you if they were drunk enough. Honestly, it was worse than a secret cult or clique and I soon got fed up with the idea of chasing record companies and decided that I would release my mythical and epic album myself. Why not? I’d managed to do everything else myself thus far. So I started a label/studio business. Apparently, all you need was a business name and a bank accoubt to start a label, so I did.

It was at the music store that I discovered the miracles of MIDI and computer music, which opened up a whole new world (almost drowning me!) and was responsible for a spate of new writing, especially in what was simply known then as ‘the electronic vein’. Many of the guys that worked at the shop also had Endless Albums on the go, so I felt that I was in good company. A few years later I got my own small Pro Tools system on a pizza–box Macintosh with the brain equivalent of a modern clock radio and the second round of Unravel sessions began, a mere ten years after starting out on this path to album-oriented bliss.

After about seven years, I switched jobs and started working at an arts college, and I suddenly had access to a large number of orchestral instruments and even more importantly, places to practise loudly, which allowed me to practise drums which I had recently taken up in order to finish ‘The Album’. To me, being able to play and record the drum parts was the last piece in the eternal puzzle and and so I took up the study in earnest, as well as dabbling with orchestral percussion such as timpani and vibes etc.

All along, I’d been adding instruments to my repertoire and writing pieces and learning and performing (I’d long lost my fear of performing) and running a freelance business as an audio engineer and producer and music technology tutor. By 2005 I was pretty desperate to get a record out. I felt like I’d been pregnant for a thousand years and it was growing ever more uncomfortable to sit, to stand, to show my face. I had a lot of good ‘career prospects’ that I just wasn’t able to convert because I didn’t have any product in the market place. It was difficult for me to even think in that way, about a marketplace, because I’m not competitive or aggressive in the slightest, so I virtually had no chance in the mainstream music industry, which seemed to be all about competition and talking yourself up and networking, which really wasn’t on my list of things to spend time getting good at.

Consider me unravelled…

So, after a million hours, several hundred album titles and concept diagrams later and a string of epiphanies about how to start unravelling the pieces of my personal artistic puzzle, it came to me. I realised that the first album should be about the more innocent ‘early’ pieces and should be based around the sound of my piano, which had inspired so many of what I considered to be amongst my best early compositions. Innocent in that they weren’t tired or tainted with cynicism, which had begun to grow with the dogged saga of making this record. Thus, Unravel – Whispers from the Ashen Road was born. I’d finally made it, and I’d done it almost completely on my own. I was like a person who’s crossed the desert on a horse with no name and collapsed in front of the well before the bucket’s even been raised.

So many sessions, so many re-recordings of versions upon versions and alternate versions folding back in on themselves and making me dizzy with confusion. Imagine being pregnant for 20 years. I was. I can’ tell you how good it feels to get it out. They say that the first album is always the hardest. And they’re right. But keep going and don’t stop. To all you artists out there struggling to finish your finest or your first work – I raise my glass. Bon Voyage and most importantly – enjoy it. Whether you ‘make it’ according to the world, or more importantly according to your self, the best part is in the doing and in creating your own worlds out of nothing at all.

Luckily for me, I don’t have the luxury of feeling empty in the wake of achieving my long-held goal, because I’ve got to get cracking putting out the next one. There are five more lined up. I hope I get quicker at this, otherwise I’ll have to live until I’m 246, even if I never write another piece of music! Now I’ve got a lot of faith in myself, but really, I think that that is beyond even me!