a quiet end

I Break Horses - Winter Beats

Gorgeous video. & from a great album too.

There’s been a slight delay in the Past Fragments EP release, but the music is done and it should be out very soon…

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molting over

Wishing so much that we had done something better sometimes that occasionally we wondered our silent moments further and further away. And then end up waiting, lost in sight of the all-together smug and smiling face of what once was, and what still may be. Those glorious other places are always just that: other places. Ones that shine maybe more, maybe slightly brighter than we are able to now. Someone else might remember those days. Moments when I might have known better but didn’t. There are danker days I could live in, just holding on. Or I could love the better ones, those that resonate further and deeper than my formerly small efforts at joy ever could. Those stomping colours that weren’t just neon and gold, they loved me back. Those moments seemed glorious, and we might be glorious still. Those days, the ones that make me think of when I was a child, and I can remember the possibility seemed dashing enough; that for one split second, I might forget all my betrayals and launch myself into the sky.  

Molting Over by A Quiet End

A slight delay, but look for the the full release of these semi-improvised piano works in a small collection sometime in the first part of September. 

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Bon Iver - Holocene

would love to visit someday…

whale bones

Grey dreaming on an windy coast. The sky pulls against itself, clouds creating small vortex’s for as far as can be seen, shifting and churning in counterpoint with the crashing waves. They stretch out tall and long, like the ocean’s own thoughts…but they are not like mine, which always crash back to earth. Plummeting soundlessly and lying in heaps upon an empty beach.

The first track from a forthcoming small collection of semi-improvised piano works. They were conceived loosely as concepts set in a particular key, rhythm, tonal structure or quality, and in some cases just a ‘feeling’, then recorded immediately with little preparation.  

The recordings predate the EP, but have never been released. They are being given slight gloss up and a rearranged running order. It looks like there’ll be at least six pieces included of an original thirteen, possibly more, enough to make up another tiny EP which should be available some time over the next couple of weeks.  

Whale Bones by A Quiet End

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Holly Miranda - Waves

I love things like this. And to hear a song as dense as the album version of ‘Waves’ is stripped back to mostly-bare essentials always lends it a secondary character. The violin part and second vocal add punctuation just enough to cause it’s seeming fragility to soar far past what could end up as somewhat brittle simplicity. Amplified by the room sound, one of the most wonderful things is hearing the difference in their leaving the reverb-laden interior for the streets, complete with incidental noises, and where the sound has nothing contained to bounce off, but the song keeps it’s gorgeously minimal grandness intact. 

Currently I’m working out how to do this better with some of the more involved songs from the EP, it’s always a bit of a challenge to see if it will fly, but a fun one. Tossing all of the ornamentation and seeing what lies underneath. Even revaluating how a song can feel when it’s a little more naked, and whether that can also add new angles and layers to what it means.

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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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Papercranes - Blue Jean

In love with this. Always thought this song would lend itself well to a slightly haunted reworking. Even considered giving it a try, but this is too perfect.

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Radiohead - Lotus Flower

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Jónsi - Kolniður (live)

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Benoît Pioulard - Lasted

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