Day 9 — In-betweens
October 15, 2019
How to explain the kind of music I’m creating when there’s not a label that defines it? This is something I’ve asked myself many times these last months. On one hand, I’m very happy to be able to do the music that I feel like doing, without worrying about a standard or genre. But on the other hand, I always struggle to explain in one sentence what my music sounds like and I fear this will get me in trouble when I start marketing strategies, or if I want to enter a songwriting contest, or answering the distributor’s ‘who do you sound like’ question. Even preparing an elevator pitch for future collaborators is proving to be a pain. The people that are working with me right now went through the process of me explaining ‘it’s like rock with strings, but without the rock band, it’s cinematic but not super orchestral, kind of industrial, but not that industrial, it’s probably pop but with gothic hints’. Once they gave me the look of ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about’, I would just play one of my mockups so the music could speak for itself. Only then they could understand me. This isn’t coming from a place where I would think my music is so unique and wonderful. It’s more of a ‘maybe I’m only half-decent at all of those genres and this is the result’ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. All of this is an introduction to day #9 at Psicofonia Studio , where we spent a lot of time trying to figure out the arrangement for ‘Rebirth’, one of my most cinematic songs.
‘Rebirth’ started out as a group of images. It started with me observing my arms, and noticing how a couple of moles I have looked like constellations. I first thought ‘what if our birthmarks and moles are really a star map indicating our soul’s journey through many reincarnations?’. Later I observed a scar I had at the moment, and thought of our body and its withering throughout our lives. This led me to think about emotional scars. Then I pictured myself in a vast desert, with my body turning into sand, and regenerating, and dissolving again, endlessly til the end of times. And so on and on and on went the spiraling. So with the music, I wanted to create the illusion of perpetual motion. I wanted the song to look like that vast desert I imagined (yes, I’m aware of how surreal that statement was; and no, I don’t mean ‘sound like’, I do mean ‘look like’). I wanted to give the feeling of an epic journey, because you know, that’s life. I want this song to feel like it’s always moving forward. Today at the studio we were struggling a bit finding the right colors for the percussions. It’s a tough challenge because this song is half smooth/ethereal and half Hans Zimmer. Maybe the answer lies in those ‘in-betweens’ I was talking about earlier. Maybe we need something organic, but not a 100% organic, with maybe some hints of industrial, or electronic. Somewhere between the expected and unexpected, I hope we’ll find the right combination.
Other than that, we finished the song ‘Numb’ :) It sounds insane, both literal and figuratively, and that’s exactly how it should sound like. Numb is the third degree of madness in the spiral. It’s where all sense of stability is thrown out the window. Feeling nothing was good; feeling nothing as a state where I could stop stumbling around and regain balance. The new drum parts came out SO WELL, I said it once and I’ll say it again: I can’t wait to play this live!
So that’s all for the moment. Thank you very much for reading and remember you can write comments on the section below!
Cheers!
Monica Lyrae