a quiet end

look at what’s past when the future is near

Several days ago marked one year since the debut EP was released. As with any somewhat-milestone, it’s a good time to look at how far things have come; give the figurative pat-on-the-back while putting up the telescope a little as well.

In the months that followed its release, the EP found its way into a number of hands and more than a few hearts. There was no big splash, but none was needed. Its being welcomed by even a small number of folks and met with enthusiasm in quiet-ish corners was success enough, and an indication that the project has both legs and life. 

BlogTO’s The Neighbourhood Mixtape on ‘Birthplace St.’, the lead track on the EP: “The song unfolds with gleaming chords, vocal fades, and a final-minute flourish that feels as endless as those childhood nights when you wished you could stay up till dawn.”

The EP is still available as a free download over at bandcamp, and can be streamed over there too.

Past Fragments was released this past January and was largely something done as a sort of an experiment/exercise; a series of minimal, atmospheric, instrumental piano pieces, mostly improvised and recorded haphazardly in short bursts over several days. Releasing it was decided after the fact and intended to be a kind of musical footnote more than anything else - very much following the same unplanned logic as its creation. Despite its much less direct nature, it more than quadrupled the first few week’s success of the EP, and has since it has found its way quite literally around the world to hundreds of new listeners in a fairly short amount of time. Past Fragments can be found here.

The instrumental song ‘Whale Bones’ was selected to be featured on the international post-rock/shoegaze/ambient compilation Deploy Your Senses Vol. 1 which was released just this last week. It’s flattering to have been included with so many talented artists from such a multitude of diverse places; it is excellent company to be in.

Deploy Your Senses Vol. 1 is also available for free digitally. Check it out, there are many nuggets to be found. 

Lately it has mostly been on to development for what’s going to come later, but there will be a few new things in the months ahead.

All told it has been a good year. And everything’s grown.

Past Fragments is now available to stream over at CBC Radio 3 & along with the EP, can now be found on Last.fm as well.

The Past Fragments EP is a collection of semi-improvised minimal piano works. Tiny pieces that were conceived around loose melodic ideas or vague notions of ‘character’ and then captured immediately as they were written with little attention paid to production or perfection, in some cases fully extemporized as they were laid down. Recorded over the course of a few days, they imbibed the essence of the moments they emerged from, and are presented here - lo-fi and sparkling - with all of their inherent fragility, ephemera and imperfections intact.

Download it here.

the EP is now free!

Hi everyone,

The ‘A Quiet End’ EP that was released a few months back is now free.

Get it here.

More soon…

the shaping of things to come

It has been some weeks since the EP was released, and as expected the focus in now shifting to what happens next. Recent weeks have consisted of striking a balance between the ongoing work of trying to get the music around to people and places, rehearsing and general planning. In that time the possibilities as to what I’d like to see happen here and with the project over the coming months (and year) have been gestating, and as a bit of an update I thought I’d share some of them.

There might be a couple of videos for songs from EP; exciting, as it would be a collaborative effort with some folks who I think do really good work. It’s something I’d like very much like to happen, but don’t know for sure yet, and it may take some time.

Rehearsing has inevitably led to working up some new songs, and in some cases having even newer songs occur, as well as development of what the shape of the eventual long form LP will look like. There are two in particular that I’ve known for the past several weeks are somewhat in between in terms of where they belong. They didn’t fit at the time with the EP, though have some things in common with it, and they don’t seem to place with the eventual LP either. They could be recorded with the same resources, location etc, that was used for the EP. They’re decent songs, and a little different so I’m going to record them as sort of ‘one-offs’ and release them when they’re done, or as a sort of free A/B side digital single, with no real A-Side. They head off in a different direction a little bit, and I’m excited to get working on them in more detail.

There is a moderate pile of old/unreleased stuff kicking around. Not all of it is light-of-day-worthy, but if there’s enough interest some odd things might find their way out in some fashion. There is a plan in place to remaster a series of semi-improvised piano works from a while back, and make a shortened free release of them, initially doing so one at a time as an interdisciplinary and collaborative music/photography/writing series. 

Another bit of work at the moment involves looking and applying for funding and support to help the project go forward. In an effort to expand its scope, any help, however small, goes a long way.

Shows? Hopefully. Working on it, or towards translating the songs suitably. They’ll have to be stripped down at first, but I’m hoping a larger-scale format will emerge soon. 

For anyone who hasn’t heard it, you can listen to and purchase the EP over here. Also, If anyone wants to help in circulating it, that would be most welcome — please pass it on to anyone at all who might be interested, and if you have any ideas or suggestions as to how to reach more ears, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. There are a limited number of CD’s available, and if you’d like a copy, know someone who might, or where one should be sent, please write to: aquietend@intimatehistory.com. 

What would you like to see here in the coming months? Please post any suggestions, notions, or questions in the comments, and I’ll answer them directly or in a future post.

—

Trying still to burn more, and brighter.

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A Quiet End: the EP - info roundup

Several weeks ago the moody and texturally rich debut EP from A Quiet End was released. It’s six tracks in length, and is available here via bandcamp for only 2$. You can click on the titles below to listen to the individual songs and read posts on their process and history

 Birthplace St.

(all things always)

Resumption

(…)

Allies

An Intimate History

If you’d like a complementary digital copy please send an email to: aquietend@intimatehistory.com

And of course, please feel free to write the above address if you’d like any information, have a question, or just want to get in touch.  

To the right you can find links to connect via twitter, facebook, and various other networks where a variety different things can be found.

 Much thanks to all for reading/listening. More is on the horizon.   

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The artwork for the digital version of the EP.

denouement

The EP and everything that has gone along with it has been one of the more interesting experiences of my recent life, if not the most defining. Not just because of the music itself or the project finding its feet, but because its development mirrored a lot of other changes or ran in tandem with them. The whole experience of it has been wrapped up in so many other moments and life processes, through all of which it has been there as a kind of constant, whether at the centre or circling around the fringes somewhere. So much so that part of me maybe thought that in getting it finished other things would fall more firmly into place, if only because the surrounding times have been so transitory. So far that hasn’t happened so neatly, although through everything that has gone on much has become more grounded, or better understood, even if not all the way settled.

Writing posts about the songs was meant to be a way of opening up the process of making them in greater detail. I’d originally thought to do this while the work was actually underway, but found it too difficult to write about something in detail that I was already spending so much time on and thinking about constantly. I was too close to it then. In doing it lately, I didn’t want to have a set agenda with what to write about. Instead just look at different things and follow whatever thread happened to appear. So some entries ended up focusing on technical details, or songwriting, and others on subject matter, context or even related bits of personal history. There’s probably much more I could have mined in terms of particulars with some of it, but I didn’t want them to turn in to essays. A friend of mine told me the other day she felt like the posts were ‘introspective’, and maybe that’s true, but I hadn’t really thought of them in such a way. I had wanted to peel things back and look behind them certainly, getting into the how’s and what’s with it all in an honest way, but I’d figured on it ending up more clinical than actually introspective. She’s right though – doing it has granted a lot of insight into the project as a whole, what it is, where it came from, and where it might go.

In the end writing the entries been more than just a useful exercise in better grasping meaning and connection. It’s allowed me to better understand much more than that, what they and the process of getting there has meant outside of the scope of the project; which is something that I didn’t have access to while I was working on them. Truthfully, I spent a lot of time bogged down in it all along with the sometimes uncertain circumstances of life, and there were many times where it seemed like there was no purpose to be found, connections vague at best, notions mostly confused. Now though, I’ve discovered that there was far more at work there than I was conscious of, and hard as it often is, that it’s really the smaller/quieter moments of certainty that are more worthy of attention, even if what they might mean is beyond immediate awareness.

So with that, I’d like to give a sincere and heartfelt thank you to the people who have supported me during this and have helped in doing it. It didn’t happen overnight, and there are some folks without whom it wouldn’t have been possible. Thanks as well to those who were a big presence while it was all happening, to the people who have been enthusiastic to see it finished and who have helped put it out there or passed it along. And of course, thank you to everyone who’s listened, bought, and taken an interest. It means the world.

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birthplace st.

Early on it was decided that ‘Birthplace St.’ would lead off the EP, mostly because it had slightly more immediacy than the others. Despite knowing this, it was referred to simply as ‘three’ for the longest time and spent much of its life without a proper title. The biggest reason for this was that the lyrics were the last to be completed. They didn’t come easily for some reason, and were only fragments for the longest time, none of which I’m completely sure made the final or not. The initial ‘complete’ draft was quite a rushed effort stemming from the need to have finished lyrics to sing when I was pulling together the songs on relatively short notice for a show last summer. ‘Birthplace’ was one I wasn’t so sure about playing, if for no other reason than I felt like I had to force the lyrics to some degree, but with effort I managed to hammer something out I felt serviceable.

Revisiting it later in an effort finalize the lyrics and vocal parts for recording, I ran into the same problem. I didn’t particularly like what was already there, it really seemed forced to me, but it did have something of a theme running through it; something I’d had loosely in my head when rushing out those first words.  It took me a lot of time, rewrites and rewording to get something I was somewhat satisfied with, but even then I wasn’t sure how I felt about the end result, and yet again it’s getting finished had more to do with the imperative of needing to have it done rather than it’s feeling like it was ready. Running with what was already in place, I ended up keeping more of it than I thought I would, even though the slight dissatisfaction hung around the whole time. I said before that there were moments where I would have liked to have spent more time on lyrics in general, but had someone asked me at a certain point, I’d have said these were the ones I was least satisfied with, which is kind of funny considering they were also the ones I spent the most time on.

Looking at them now, it fits, or at least is fitting. ‘Birthplace’ had the intention behind it of pointing forward musically in some fashion, but also ended up thematically touching on the idea of new times generally. In this way it sits alongside ‘An Intimate History’ – which while being the last song considers different times ahead while surveying what has come before – as more future-oriented in its content, and is removed from the more recent past considerings of ‘Allies’ and ‘Resumption’. The first/song last song bookending and how it lines up with the subject matter of each was a fitting synchronistic accident. 

‘Birthplace’ wasn’t so much glancing forward at the rest of the EP that followed, but taking a longer view of what might come later. In this way too, it’s probably the song that most actively pushed the limits of the resources at hand. I’d originally intended it to be a much fuzzier affair overall, but it just didn’t end up that way for whatever reason. The early demos testify to this idea, with piles of overdriven guitars as an early stand-in for what I’d thought to make a gauze-wall of distortion. There was no active decision to not do this, only a sense of it sounding and working better with a different kind of wash. A rising minor scale, more obvious, guitar solo was the only major alteration when further into the recording process, replaced by something I felt was more texturally and compositionally interesting.

Another interesting thing is that ‘Birthplace’ ended up being the only song on the EP that is not in an atypical time signature or alternate tuning. I’m not sure to what degree this helps create the song’s immediacy that sets it apart slightly from the others, but it seems to be the one most people latch onto first, and not because of its position in the running order of the EP. The rest too, wasn’t consciously intended to be ‘less immediate’, or different to force some kind of diversity upon the songs as a group. It was always a question of what worked best, and which things best fit with certain tones and moods. Maybe it is these very differences, and the fact that there are quite a few, that help the whole to function as well as it does. 

A Quiet End - Birthplace St. by aquietend

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allies

This song follows ‘Resumption’ as being the second that was culled from that initial writing push long before the EP was planned or the reality of A Quiet End as a musical project seemed like something that would happen. Like its partner from that time, ‘Allies’ started as a fairly simple acoustic tune, though one more understated and slightly darker than ‘Resumption’.  Its development for the EP was interesting as well. It was originally intended to have a sort swampy country-like stomp hovering beneath the surface, and maintain a fairly sparse arrangement otherwise, but instead it became a vessel for a more beat-oriented atmospheric affair. This happened somewhat accidentally, and did far more for the slightly-haunted sound of it than any stripped down more folk-style arrangement could have. ‘Resumption’ had a similar trajectory in this regard, its bright-yet-slightly-ragged initial feel gave way to one that was atmospheric in places, and far more broad overall; and like ‘Allies’, the song ended up being that much better for it. The relationship between the two songs, also adds another dimension to the various sets of relatedness generally, and like with the instrumentals, they work in a sort of tandem with each other, as well as enhance the overall context of the EP as a unified work.

It seemed that there were periods during recording where each song would at some point take over the mantle of being the problem one. ‘Allies’ held that position at least twice, once requiring a rerecording of the acoustic guitar part due to too much room noise that was unfortunately discovered too late. The second time came when despite having an arrangement I was relatively satisfied with, I added some late overdubs to the end third. It was nothing tremendous, just the feedback laden swelling guitar and some echoing guitar textures, but for whatever reason it seemed overwhelm everything that was in the mix. It may be that I kind of went overboard in piling on more parts to something that was fine without them, as it it ended up requiring a complete rejigging of all the pre-existing parts all the way back to the beginning of the song in order to balance it out. The most obvious remnant of having to do this is that the piano part, which I always enjoyed, ended up having to be more buried than I would have liked.

There was also a decision to be made in terms of whether or not to maintain the overall dynamic range of the song, and to what degree. In this way, it was similar to ‘…’, as bringing up the much quieter earlier section would either sit awkwardly against the much thicker and louder ending, lacking the ‘rise’ up to that peak in the song, or having compression push the end section too far actually causing it to crunch unpleasantly in places. Admittedly, having the access of a proper mastering studio would have made this easier, but I enjoy that the overly quiet start of the song has a kind of patience in reaching its more thick-sounding final third. 

The subject matter in most of those early songs was similar, all reflecting the mechanics of what seemed like a perpetual uncertainty machine. Understandable in their coming from the same short writing period, but while ‘Allies’ alludes to the same circularity that much of what ‘Resumption’ is about, it tends to more of a weariness in the immediate smaller picture events that make up a portion of the colure. 

A Quiet End - Allies by aquietend

And of course, the EP can be found here.

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(…)

Following ‘all things always’ as the second instrumental track on the EP (click the link to read that entry), ‘…’ was written shortly after and both came together arrangement-wise within a couple days of each other. I’d hoped to create a stark difference between the two, while rooting them in a similar style and aesthetic that kept them separate from the more song-oriented tracks on the EP. While sharing the same dna, in terms of what they evoke, one is filled up with possibility, the threads of time winding together, while the other is at a loss in a sort of downtrodden acceptance of not knowing anything. In this way they end up representing the different ends of the darkness/light dichotomy to some degree, a theme I’ve found to often be unconsciously reoccurring. It’s in this way as well, that the instrumentals flesh out the overall contextual arc of the EP while maintaining a relationship with each other, one that has a dynamic of its own but also sees them stand independently as their own unique pieces.

In wanting to fill the EP out more, it would have been easy to pull another already written song from somewhere and add it in. In expanding it though, I wanted to add something totally new, something written just for this purpose and not added haphazardly just for the sake of having more. At first, I didn’t know if the instrumentals would be included it all, it was a kind of experiment in that way, and there was even a moment in the last month of finishing where I considered taking them out completely.

For whatever reason ‘…’ was far easier than ‘all things always’ to mix and master. There was still a little bit of trouble with the piano sound, thought not nearly as much, and then it took some time to balance out all of the elements texturally to get the proper amount of space while maintaining a full sounding mix. There is also a lot of dynamic range between the first minute, and the end of the song where it fills out more, and maintaining clarity so that it could have a sense of sweeping upward, and not crunch when it all really starts to swirl around at the end took some extra effort as well. There was also a bit of an issue in trying to get the violin to sound ‘natural’ for some reason, or at least when it was placed against everything else.

When I’d decided not to refer to the instrumentals as ‘Segues’ any longer, I had so much trouble trying to think of what to call this one. Everything I’d come up with seemed to try too hard to capture the tone of the music and sounded forced and silly. What I found though, is that I’d sit around asking myself what the music made me think of, and where it had come from for me, and what it meant. The answer I always seemed to get was always ‘dot dot dot’, something that seemed wholly appropriate for what the song represented, or at least where it sat in my mind. 

A Quiet End - (…) by aquietend

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