Greetings

This will be my first time participating in Record Time, and I am super pumped! I've listened to most of the submissions from the past couple years and have always been impressed but I never had enough time to actually do anything due to all of my projects for school or the various recording and composition jobs I had at Ball State. Now that I'm out of school and unemployed (for the time being...) I have plenty of time to devote my full creative attention to Record Time VI.

I've never been very comfortable with the writing popular music like rock/pop/country. I feel like it always comes out sounding cliché. So, I'm going to attempt to fuse my usual avant-garde electro-acoustic style with something... pop-ish...

My goal is to create 30-40 minutes of music in the vein of John Adams, Terry Riley, Phillip Glass, and maybe some Stockhausen, then fuse it with some of the style of artists like Justice, BT, Blockhead, Little People, RJD2... etc. I'll probably wind up using a combination of synthesis, music concrete techniques, live instrument and voice through Max/MSP, and recording voice, violin, and electric guitar. The guitar stuff will probably just be chordal and texture stuff, definitely not my forte.

I've always enjoyed music that either tells a story or has some kind of metaphysical point to it but I've never been very good at writing lyrics. So, I spent the majority of last week either scouring the internet and the Nashville public library for some sort of inspiration. My journey took me from the Tao Te Ching to the Bhagavad gita, from Ovid's Metamorphoses to Goethe's Faust. Needless to say, I had a very full week of reading last week. However, I didn't quite find what I wanted. I was beginning to think that I might have to sit down and write my own poetry to accomplish what I'm after (which I am probably going to wind up doing anyway) until I stumbled upon Tolkien's poetry. It's exactly what I was looking for (and I had forgotten he had written poetry for the LotR books until I stumbled upon a Nordic poetry site.) However, I feel that it might be too well known. I mean, most everyone has heard of some of the cities and people in the poems (whether through the books or by watching the movies).

I might draw on Tolkien for some inspiration while I write my poetry/lyrics. It will most likely be about a journey through a post-apocalyptic world to reach some type of goal. The heroine will be the narrator and the music/soundscape will provide the scenery and action which the heroine must react to.

Wow, this was a lot longer than I planned on it being. I hope everyone has as much fun as I plan on having!

Paul Marquissee