This past week I released a couple of (chill/dance) songs that have been kicking around on the back burner over the last few months. The first one (chronologically) is entitled Blue Paradise:
Blue Paradise is a fun collaboration with my long term Wednesday Night Music cohort Paul Frick, and influenced by one of our favorite bands, dZihan & Kamien. We started this project back in May, basing the main song idea on a continually droning “pulsing beep” sound, backed by an eclectic melange of at least SEVEN unique parts containing drums and rhythmic accents (shaker, triangle, surdo, cajon, etc.), added to a simple chord progression played by my trusty Lounge Lizard, which seems to make it into a prominent place in pretty much every song I write! The working title of this track was “Percolator“, which you may understand the reasons for once you hear the pulsing beep sound throughout the track. But in the end, we didn’t figure it was all about that one part any more, and so we chose “Blue Paradise” as a name that seemed more fitting with the overall mood of the project: a laid back, chilled out electronic dance groove. We hope you like it!
Inspired by the release of Blue Paradise, I decided to finally put the final touches on another track that I’d been working on for several months (a solo effort this time), entitled Causality:
Causality is a chill/dance/funk song, and uses one of (Fila Brazillia member) Steve Cobby‘s often-used clever production tricks, that of beginning the song with a misleading rhythmic part implying an underlying beat, but which is eventually proved to be a syncopated part of a different underlying beat as the song unfolds further. This technique features in several of his published songs, including one of my favorites, The Sheriff. I’ve done something similar, by building a complex rhythm with several inter-dependent syncopated parts, and then removing everything except the bass during the intro section, and building the other parts back in individually.
Another prominent aspect of Causality is the lyrical content that is sprinkled rhythmically throughout the song. These were pulled from recordings of a discussion about The Illusion of Free Will, with modern-day philosophers George Ortega and Nick Vale. Here’s a link to their website. I found a few key phrases that seemed important to the discussion, and also had desirable rhythm. I hope you enjoy my treatment of the material.
As always, I’d love to hear what you think about the music. Enjoy!