Orion's Belt 77 - Seventh Signal
Bio Notes. Foreword
The Newest Sensation........All the world is abuzz.........The Music world turned upside down.....The Greatest thing since sliced bread......blah, blah, blah.
Every artist here at CD Baby has a bio notes page and from what is written upon it we are to educate ourselves as to the nature of the artist and his/her musical interpretations.
We are riveted to each and every word about nuances, ambience, lush layerings of interspersed, intersecting, intertwining fashionings and assemblies of notes, chords, instruments, voices, whether analog, digital, human, animal, vegetable, mineral......of earth, wind, fire or extraterrestrial in origin. Space sounds..........ah, excuse me but has anyone ever heard energy transmitted through light years of space, received by radio telescope to be transformed into analog, to then be conveyed to the human ear via conventional speaker systems? As hard as I try, I just cannot seem to find the groove, and the melodies and harmonies leave much to be desired.
Seen any Radio Telescope's greatest hits albums anywhere on the shelves at your friendly neighborhood cd store lately? Me neither. Given the mentality of some of the people I have met in this life, who frequently buy absolutely everything simply because it is available, I may have just given away a million dollar idea.........well, haven't we all done just that at least once? Haven't we all thought of some type of device or gadget or method of doing something not yet being done and then simply thinking to ourselves....Nah, no one would go for something like that. Just look at the Pet Rock and who could forget the Chia Pet and the Pocket Fisherman......So we drink...or smoke....or ingest anything and everything to enhance our hours of freedom from the daily grind we all face in this veil of tears. Or not. As musicians, we move through beats and measures and sounds to evoke memories, emotions, and imaginations and thus create not gadgets or machines, but though our music, we turn the wheels in the mind of the listener. Fortunately, not everyone has the same size or style of wheel in their heads.
Chapter One
With the advent of the computer and the internet and CD Baby, a regular ordinary guy like me can sell the fruits of endless hours of labor performed in the wee hours of countless mornings of months and years. The internet is the new frontier of commerce worldwide and all one needs do is move a mouse and click to sample wares from anywhere one chooses. Who would have thought it. Well someone did and it was not me, but I do think about music and its creation and while doing so, I manage to tinker songs together through the never ending process of trial and error. Though it is nothing short of astounding, the fact that there are only so many notes and chords and sounds to work with and yet we as musicians are given the task of arranging them all in such a way as to present them in neat little packages as being new and different and danged if we actually do it.
Seventh Signal is my seventh and latest album. It is also my first cd here at CD Baby.
Second guessing one's self is among the many demons one faces when attempting to choose the best compositions for public consumption. It is impossible to know what most of the people will find favor with most of the time. Since my music is categorized as New Age/Instrumental, only those interested in such music will happen to see this cd. I certainly realize that the audience is smaller than say pop, but I believe whoever makes up the New Age audience is going to be more discerning, more contemplative, more introspective, more introverted than most, and it is those people who my music will reach out to.
I have decided to make samples of all songs on this cd accessible. As I mentioned earlier, it is impossible to know who is going to like what.
Americana is the last song on the cd and the most bizarre work I have done. It was also a difficult choice to place this song on this particular cd. Work on it began in August of 2001. It contains a montage of sounds that can be heard in everyday America. It also contains the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance, which I thought putting to melody a novel idea. I did so and then added three additional voices in harmony. I know that the addition of this song in light of what has happened since 9/11 may be construed as climbing aboard the patriotic band wagon, but I assure you that this is more coincidence than design. If I had set out to create a strictly patriotic piece of music, I hope I would have done a better job of it than this. This song was also harder to construct and consumed so much time at mix down, where I thought I would find the task at hand easier had I been a contortionist, that I refused to simply shelve it, so here it is.
My music is played one note at a time, one instrument or voice at a time, one track at a time, in real time from beginning to end. There is no cutting and pasting, no loops and real acoustic drums....a departure from my earlier albums, where I played the drum parts in real time in sections to create an entire drum kit, but of electronic origin.
Great music, plus a really cool photo of Orion's Belt, and when you examine it closely, Where's Waldo?
Paul R. DuCharme/OB77
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