Coronavirus Admire Us -
Recorded in a single hour, one layer on top off another (think looping, but in a studio, one track at a time) Coronavirus Admire Us combines my work on wood flute, percussion, '60 Gibson, and bass, with keyboard maestro and medical frontliner Novel Ruiz' wizardry on a Roland (you can find his work on earlier fabric songs such as Something Ain't Right) The song runs east to west, and back again, and explores threads of transmission, failure, hope, breath, and denial. If anyone thinks the the title is flippant, it's more an homage to the old Thelonious Monk song titles. Plus, think about the meaning... a virus is not a foreign object, it is a mirror.
We Too -
Knowing that studio Room Eleven was closing up shop for quarantine, I wanted to get at least a rough version of this little tune that had been running in my head the last six months down. The result is a very first take We Too, in which Novel Ruiz capably takes three unique patterns and stitches them together. Although I hope to rerecord this proper, it is always interesting to have that fly-on-the-wall glimpse at the original process of creation.
There are five other "sides" of Avocado Sun to be served up on a nice piece of burnt toast over the next couple months, as bandwidth allows. They basically follow the same pattern of starting with a fairly well worked out song and ending with an interesting original WIP that could use some more progress.
Incidentally, the recording method used for Coronavirus Admire Us is similar to the first ever fabric studio composition, way back in 2015, when (fresh from Malasimbo epiphany) I played a few flutes at Alchemy, testing out the mikes, and created Lost Upward - the first track on Chasing Sun. After my mother commented that the song was too dense, I went back and brought sounds in and out and had my first crash course in arranging. Now that approach is pretty much second nature. For example CAU involved one hour in the studio and about 12 of arranging and EQ work on LogicPro.
Listening back to Chasing Sun (below) I think what wonderful times, before the dark clouds of fake news and proto-fascism came snaking around and enchained us to our differences.