(all things always)
A Quiet End - (all things always) by aquietend
The first of two smaller instrumentals pieces on the EP that were initially referred to only as Segue I & II — preliminary namesakes that make reference to what the original intent was behind them. At first the EP was only going to be three songs, less material meant it would take less time to make, and also that in being more concise it would lend an immediacy to people hearing something for the first time from what was essentially a new project. Easily digestible and simple to share, centering the focus on a small number of songs might draw listeners in more easily than something with some sprawl. It seemed like a good idea, but, and this is the point where my friends laugh, I’ve always been more inclined towards more widescreen notions, grand narratives, and overarching flow or purpose that falls on the more detailed side of things. Also, to me three songs felt more like a single than an EP, and in launching a project more widely for the first time, and calling it such, it felt like it needed to be slightly more extensive. Even a six song EP, which at the time was only five, is limited in how far it can extend itself as far as vastness goes.
It’s not that the instrumentals were included as filler; they seemed like an appropriate way of both fleshing out the music as a set of songs, and extending the scope of the whole. Acting as a counterpoint to more traditionally song-oriented bits of work, and trying to find the large in the smaller moments; they sprung more directly out of my own background with classical and contemporary music. Over the last few years as well I’d done some small film score work, and even a series of semi-improvised minimal piano works – things that remain largely unreleased – which probably influenced the urge to add something somewhat different to the group of songs, and also to represent another mode of interest. I thought that working up something in that vein could help add cohesion, and also draw out more dimension over the entirety of the EP. So I began with a vague notion of a couple of interludes of some kind (hence the parentheses), and working with the piano as a starting point, and even having them modulate keys from the preceding song to the one that would follow.
The piano part to ‘all things always’ came rather quickly, and the once that part was written, the arrangement did too. I thought recording would be a fairly simple affair, and happen faster because it was less dense arrangement-wise than the other songs. It did record quickly, but would become somewhat problematic upon reaching the mixing and mastering stage. Something about the piano was always difficult, it never wanted to sound right somehow, and even re-recording it didn’t seem to help. Then the whole thing together didn’t quite blend as well as I’d hoped, or quite how I had in mind anyway, and seemed to trip over itself often when it was all threaded together. In the end, it was probably the song I really had to settle the most with at a certain point, and I was tweaking the mix and master right up until the end.
I’m not sure at what point I’d decided on proper titles instead of just calling calling them ‘Segues’, but ‘all things always’ was fairly easy to name. When the piano part was first written, it came along with a kind of mental picture; one of looking at memories through a haze of saturated light, like that emitted from a setting sun seen through a wide window. It made me think of that feeling of being on a train, or riding in car for some extended period of time, and watching the horizon as the sun dips while you’re carried away by your thoughts. And the sense that occurs in such moments that the present, future, and what came before, all exist at once.
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