SAW 2009 #14: Cathedral Prayers by Chris Devine

OK, so this song fits in with something I do very occasionally with the SAW ... I veer off into experimental territory and try to stretch the boundaries of what fits into the concept of 'song' for the podcast. In 2007, I did it with the song I called 'Summer's Chill', which was composed entirely of samples and loops not of my own making. It was instrumental, it didn't have a traditional song structure and, while it did have a loosely defined chord progression it had no identifiable melody to speak of.

Over the last few weeks, I've been listening to a lot of strange stuff on the iPod. The stuff that's particularly germane to this composition is the work of Throbbing Gristle and John Foxx (lead singer in the late '70s-early '80s of the post-punk/New Wave band Ultravox, who in recent years has dived head-first into making ambient music). The title of the track is in fact a really obvious echo of John Foxx's two-album ambient masterwork, Cathedral Oceans.

But listening to Throbbing Gristle, in particular, I was moved to think about what really qualifies as 'music', much less what qualifies as a 'song'. If you've never heard them, they essentially invented the term and the concept of industrial music, except you wouldn't recognize much of what they've done in bands like Nine Inch Nails or Front 242. Throbbing Gristle's output consisted mostly of layers of noise, sometimes with a little bit of melody but mostly not, and sometimes with a little bit of rhythm but mostly not. Is it music, or is it noise, and what makes it so? Where's the dividing line?

With these things in mind, I basically went to town, recording a bunch of random bits of varying lengths. To make things sort of fit together I generally settled on a G minor scale, and particularly a G minor seventh chord, and tried to make anything I played that had an identifiable musical tone fit into that scale and that chord.

Then, in the time-honored fashion Brian Eno pioneered with Music for Airports, I cut and pasted, layered and generally played around with all these separate, independently-recorded bits, repeating some and cutting others into pieces.

And because ambient music is usually a little too amorphous for my tastes, I HAD to add a couple of rhythmic elements -- one a drum track of my own devising, with drum hits on almost random beats and nearly random drum sounds, then complimented it with a modern dance drum loop slowed down to slightly more than half its original speed.

Add a crapload of reverb, weird EQs and other effects and some surprising things emerged -- the swells and emotional tension were never really planned ... They were just the product of where the little snippets happened to land and overlap.

And no, that wasn't a real guitar in there, though it's mostly low enough in the mix that it almost sounds real. I just thought a chimey/echoey U2-reminiscent guitar line might serve as a little tribute to Brian Eno.

Does it work? I dunno. I feel like I could have put more work into it, and it feels FAR too short to me. But as an exercise in breaking out of my usual box, it was a resounding success.

This is pretty much the only song I've ever put together that was meant to be background noise ... I find, anyway, that my attention actually sort of slides off it, the harder I try to listen to it. And that's not a bad thing.