Welcome to Blogged by Smaragd!Welcome! This will be the new blog, "Blogged by Smaragd." Great title, eh? I'll try to come up with something less cheesy and retitle it. The blog replaces the old Smaragd news page. Updates on my musical activities will be posted here from now on.
During the last week, I've been working on re-recording "Revealed In Stone," which I think is one of my best songs from my Jawbone days. I've finished the basic marimba and timpani percussion track, and have dubbed the synth-cello bass. It sounds great so far, to my ear. The marimbas and timpani are now in beautiful wide stereo. Yesderday (Monday, 21 October) I played a few seconds of this simple backing track for Rick Anderson, my old bandmate from Jawbone, and then invited him to recreate his old guitar parts. It looks like it's a go! Technically that means the re-recording will not truly be a Smaragd track, but will rather be a sort-of "Jawbone reunion." If I remember correctly, this will be our first recording together since about 1997 when we did a couple Pink Floyd covers for a fan tribute album, and were developing a neo-psychedelic piece which was never finished. Since the new version of "Revealed In Stone" is now going to be a collaboration rather than just me, it will probably take longer to finish up.
As for my main project, the Mythconception album, I recently went through my microcassette full of musical ideas and transcribed them all to paper. One of the ideas seems to be developing into a stand-alone song entirely independent of Mythconception, but some other ideas will likely develop into some of the music for Mythconception.
"The Apotheosis of William Harvey" is essentially ready to be recorded. Likewise with "Stigma." Also in the last couple weeks, a few musical ideas for middle sections of the album have begun to gel. (For example, "Blasphemy" may evolve into a musical reprise of "Stigma.") I have played around with ideas for "Sarah In the Garden," but nothing concrete has come up yet. I believe the music for it will show some inspiration from Genesis circa Selling England By the Pound. I'm definitely leaning toward the overlapping acoustic arepeggios style they liked to use around then. The real musical stumpers are probably going to be "Coyote" and "The Long Day of Gamayun." I have not begun to attach any musical notions to either one yet. I'm worried about the mismatched line lengths in "Coyote," as well as how I will use music to distinguish between the narrative verses and the two which are Krist telling the fire-thieft myth. I'm not to that point yet, but it might turn out to be difficult.
By the way, if you're interested in modern progressive music, check out Scott Mosher's Virtuality album. This is some great stuff!
