http://shanecarey.net/nm/

I’m proud to announce the release of Greatest Hits and Misses, a 2-disc compilation of the best of Nascent Music.

http://nascentmusic.com/mp3/2007/10/InC.mp3
If you’re not familiar with Terry Riley’s “In C,” you might be interested to read about the process (here’s Wikipedia’s take). Although each segment is composed, not improvised, performing it requires the improvisation of some elements, and the listening, responding, and happenstance of the piece are very familiar to me from Nascent Music.

Riley’s performance instructions say that an ensemble of 35 is ideal. I, of course, am but one dude. Fortunately, there’s such a thing as multitracking. For the first track, I went through it segment by segment, punching in if necessary, to establish a baseline (and to learn the piece, which I had never even heard before taking it on this weekend). Obviously, that was the least dynamic of the takes. I then went through several more takes, each time putting more emphasis on hearing my relationship to the previous tracks. I also added multiple copies of each take, offset by fractions of a measure to add to the rhythmic offsets (which makes it sound like I played more than I did); that may have reduced the integrity of a particular take, but gave me more to listen and respond to in later takes, and anyway, it fills out the mix in a way that sounds good to me.

http://shanecarey.net/mp3/Metaboloid.mp3
This song appeared during a live improvisation at Borders in August 2004. I loved it so much that I had to re-record it as a finished song. Obviously, going back gave me the chance to fix flubbed notes, and to beef up the accompaniment that I heard in my head while improvising (most notably during the heavy middle section), but the basic tracks are identical to what I played at Borders. Whether or not you care for the song, maybe you can appreciate how happy I was to have a complete song spontaneously appear like that.

The title evolved. My style back then consisted of what I called “Evil Bolero,” which was to start with a small basic track, build dynamics on top of them, and then pull it back and start again; so I shortened “Evil Bolero” to “Ebola” for the name of this song. Then I realized that the pulsing bass was strongly influenced by The Minibosses‘ cover of the theme from the Nintendo game “Metroid,” so I added that to “Ebola” to come up with “Metaboloid.”

I love this track. My wife envisions it in a movie, maybe during a zombie holocaust or something. I hope you like it too.

A new Nascent Music is coming, any day now, I swear!

http://shanecarey.net/mp3/CantYouTell.mp3
A work in progress from some current writing/recording sessions. I plan to add a vocal track, so the title is extremely tentative until I know what the song is really about.

Nascent Music Extras is a new category for material that isn’t part of the Nascent Music podcast, but that has enough in common to be associated. In this case, the tune was composed, not improvised, but clearly a lot about the style of it came from the same place, wherever that is.