'Hostage' is my major work for E-Media this semester. The main focus of this project was to pay homage to our influences etc, therefore the name came about through my 'taking hostage' of musical structures and ideas which belong to others.
Here are my points of reference for this work, in order of appearance;
Hearing The Lotus Eaters' album 'wurmwulv' was one of my first experiences of ambient music. I borrowed it from a friend and fell in love with it pretty quickly. I wish I had my own copy but their albums are extremely hard to come by.
Pelican are an awesome band. Their live DVD is one of the best I've seen. Buy it.
I have quite a few Earth records now, some tracks from their latest album feature quite prominently in the film The Limits of Control, which I suggest you check out.
Tool, what can I say. One of my biggest influences across a lot of different fields. Mind-bending musical structures and unique recording techniques, they basically questioned everything I thought I knew about music. Very excited to see them again next year.
The album I'm listening to the most at the moment is ISIS' Wavering Radiant. It just keeps growing on me. Very powerful and important band.
Probably my favourite band. Russian Circles are an enormous influence on my approach to music. If I can ever play any instrument half as good as any of these guys can, I'll be happy.
I only got into Botch fairly recently, their last album 'We Are the Romans' is relentlessly brilliant. Botch have featured pretty heavily in my study of musical arrangements as they certainly have an aspect of math to their structures. This video is from their live DVD of their last show ever, titled 061502.
The recording process for this work was a little different to usual, it has probably been my most challenging undertaking so far. Aside from having to teach myself some piano basics, one of the harder things about this project was effectively paying homage to musicians/artists without really having the skills to do so - I can't play drums anything like Danny Carey (Tool) or Dave Turncrantz (Russian Circles) for example.
It's been a lot of hard work and a lot more re-takes than usual. I guess it's harder to play something you didn't write. Overall it may be a little rough around the edges at some points but I'm happy with how it's turned out. I feel like it has a sort of, tortured demeanor, which is further emphasised by the title. It doesn't sound to 'scrapbook-y' which was one of my main concerns with trying to work a lot of different points of reference into one final work.
Installation photos to follow.
- rjilynch / 080176
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