Eerie Tom (ago)

I challenged myself to write something with the following criteria:

1. It had to be longer than four minutes: most of the electronic music I’ve recorded so far doesn’t even reach the three-minute mark.

2. It could not be stanza-stanza-bridge-stanza, a pattern I follow too often.

3. There had to be some elements not occurring every four or eight measures; for example, they could occur every six or seven measures.

4. There had to be some elements that were, if not acoustic, at least non-electronic sounding.

5. There had to be “audio bonbons” buried deep in the mix, ones that a listener might not notice without headphones.

The result was this:



The inspiration for the third and fourth criteria came from Powder’s New Tribe (2019). The first few times I heard the long version (as opposed to the shorter version in the music video), it seemed like many of the elements were not occurring every four or eight measures, which is usually the case in techno music. Were some of them occurring every five, six, or seven measures? Finally, I sat down with pen and paper and listened intently several times, plotting each element to see exactly when it occurred. As it turned out, everything did happen regularly every four or eight measures. For example, the waka-waka sound occurs every four measures and the gong occurs every eight. I also liked how New Tribe had many acoustic or organic elements: besides the gong, there are jingle bells, various voices—humming, whooping, panting, mumbling, laughing—and the sound of birds. The ending in particular sounds like one is in a rain forest, not a dance club.

The inspiration for the fifth criterion came from songs like Mr. Pips’ Born Yesterday (2008), which contains several barely perceptible elements. One sound is like that of poor AM radio reception (listen very closely starting at 2:04). There is also what sounds like someone tapping his teeth with a toothbrush handle.

I gathered or created about sixty samples. Some were vocal samples, like me making Xhosa click consonant sounds. Some were “happy accidents”: I was moving a can of compressed air out of the way while recording and it made a cool bw-aaang sound when I tapped it. Ultimately, I only used about forty samples.

I set aside 168 measures for the main body (excluding the intro and finale), which could be evenly subdivided by six, seven, or eight. My first idea was to divide the song into three “acts” but that created the illusion of stanzas. It took a considerable amount of trial and error to get the samples to line up and trigger in a pleasing manner. Ultimately, only a handful of samples didn’t occur at every four or eight measures: the man chanting roku (which means six in Japanese) occurs, ironically, every seven measures, as do the moaning woodwinds that occur near the end. A sample of me rubbing the mic and feeding it through a tremolo filter occurs every six.

My only real "disappointment" was not being able to create those “audio bonbons”: there’s just too much going on in SixSeven for there to be room for subtlety! I might eventually do a few remixes of the song, each with just a handful of samples, and not worry about odd-count measures.

Today is Robert Moog's birthday (May 23, 1934 – August 21, 2005); he was an electronic music pioneer and inventor of the Moog synthesizer. My first keyboard was a Realistic Concertmate MG-1, built my Moog Music but sold by Radio Shack under their Realistic brand name. Mine cost around $260 and unfortunately, I no longer have it. The interior insulation was made from polyurethane foam which has turned into a brackish green goo over the years until finally the keyboard would no longer play.

I did quite a bit of recording with it. My other keyboards, while more sophisticated, just can’t make the same fat buzzing synth sound as that MG-1!