A journey through the sonic underground, guided by an underworld of dark riffs.
superb minimal noise mixture with powerful guitar, great work
Wow, what a poem. Cool title and nice atmosphere too.
such an appealing flute of a solo flight.
- the scalloped fretboard makes your left had touch down the strings very lightly and barely, as if you were fingering a flute!
very nice developments here, beginning with that slashing chord and it's sequelae.
: new word alert! very apt - Definition of sequela plural sequelae 1 :an aftereffect of a disease, condition, or injury 2 :a secondary result. I know you meant 2, but 1 is in there too as those slashing chords are infected by faux tonebender fuzz. That whole nasty guitar part went right through, and then I edited it, using it where it sounded best [I usually keep things where they are though so they have a logic and pulse]. That crashed chord jumped out, so I emphasised it and then played the lead break in its wake and all the other squalling sequelae!
I actually meant it in both senses, confident that you would appreciate the first.
I like how you have dealt with the mid-tempo pulse of this.
- as so often I added the drums much later - the pulse is in the original guitar improv
You, Sir, are relentlessly on your game, reminding me I must get back upon mine.
Can I jump in your game ...
All rise for that sound at 1:35.
: I strove for a lead sound which can sit at the very peak above the slow moving layers, and shine like golden refracted sunlight
Restraint and achitecture, that's what I say.
: definite build here - finding one riff and then extending it to use as a foundation - the upper floors are created by sculpting various higher layers
very inviting beginning. There is a bossa nova hiding in here, one from Hell.
: I made two different drum tracks go with each other, kind of!
Another lovely whizzy line back there!
: It is the swan song of the living who have toured Hades. We make it back to tell the tale, even though we are weighed down by its weight of Knowing.
birdsong? Surely we're not going to make it out alive?
: The track began with a bed of bird song, and I improvised to that - can get more ideas from that than a harmonic/rhythmic base sometimes. So this track grew from the sound made by the various natural life forms that even inhabit the underground rivers of Hades - even there ... even there there is life ... even there ...
There's a thin, cruel single coil sound in there somewhere. . like a knife attack on the brain
There's another track of the scalloped guitar much further down through a faux Tonebender [nastiest fuzz] but backed off, giving that thin, rusty sound - it reppears later higher up in the mix for some nasty crashed chords
oh yeah..what an epic descent!
: the light is sucked right down into the dark steaming regions of hells cauldron - as it descends it trips over the frets of a scalloped neck landing luckily on the root note. Indeed, the root is all that can be held onto here; all else is slipping and sliding away in a southerly direction
: I love your descriptions of the musical creation process..fantastic in every sense
all the right notes here..perfect
: rays of sunlight penetrate the underworld in kind prismatic shafts - they're quite golden and have adorned the helms of gods in the past
that background squall is intensely unnerving
: That was two slide guitars - the Indie guitar with P90 pick ups double tracked and with contact mics on the headstocks. The two guitars are locked into an intensely messy blues duel. Then they were dipped in the waters of the Styx [well actually it was very wet and very trebly reverb]. Has a kind of Hitchcockian effect. It helps to be paranoid to do this stuff
: The contact mics..I'm intrigued. .what do they do?
: all I do is put a contact mic with a clip somewhere on the guitar body or sometimes even on the neck so it picks up those twangy nasty sounds and noises. Mix that with the pickup sound. Essentially you are getting the acoustic sound of your electric. You can put the mic signal through fuzz or reverb etc. and bring the sound in and out with a volume pedal etc. It works well with slide because you gets lots of extraneous sounds with slide which are mostly lost on a standard electric. But put a contact mic on and you can get them all. Got the idea from Zappa who said he often added the sound of the string behind the fret by putting a mic there and then mixed it in. Jaguars are great guitars for doing this.
: Sounds intriguing. .might give that a go with my Ibanez jazzer..plenty of places it could go and lots of resonance.
Ever unique. Nice work.
Good show, sir. I needed to clear my head, and this did it!
: we returned from Hades intact ... this time
: Sometimes that is a good thing, or else the masses will be denied their next round of Hell on Tap.
That's not an evil arpegiator, I see it now, it's a whirlpool drawing us to our doom!
: No arpeggiators used on this track - definite use of whirlpools though!
: Whirlpools are better than arpeggiators any day!
That is an uncanny arpeggiator of evil flying about.
: not an actaul arpeggiator 'cos they only give heavenly notes; just evil scalloped fretboard perversity
: Well, Gangway does lead to perversity, shipburning, and Vikings!
Spin the wheel to discover that the whirling pit just drops out, like a funhouse gone wrong.
: Take the click of a selector switch, the accidental scrape of strings, and then make it into the devil's trapdoor
Can almost imagine that sustained guitar going on forever in a broken verb somehow.
: guitar there was my scalloped neck Yngwie type stratty thing - it has just two pick ups [Malmsteen Di Marzios], no tone controls so the pick ups go straight out - proved very useful on this track - I used the Rangemaster clone Tatooed Lady treble booster too, so this axe was really putting out
: Yea, right treble boost is a glorious, glorious thing.
So the underground has been percolating through my lungs lately as the sinuses kick up? I KNEW I'd heard that sound before!
: Boat rocks regularly and hacks up pieces of itself, so beware spouts!
lyrics
Passing Hades
Upon Charon’s boat we sail, while
Through the deadly waters, his punt pole
Pokes the infested shallows, where
Dead men float, pale faces turned up,
To gloat at the living, who too shall soon
Be in this hole, forgotten.
Then, why visit I this Hel?
Why? I want only its sounds, to tell.
credits
from Fountains of the Deep,
released December 27, 2017
Bill Boethius, guitars, bass, drum machine.
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