Blueshift (1994)

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1. Rhetoric vs. Reality (7:07)
   This piece was written sometime in late 1986/early 1987. The first version was recorded in 1988 at Berklee College of Music for one of my senior production projects. (Oh no, not another Berklee grad...) The original was recorded on 24 track--but this one's got more to it--the first version was recorded and mixed in around 12 hours and I've had about a year and a half for this one...
   
   
2. Gone To Maryland - PK/J. Davis (5:01)
   Sometime around 1989 or 1990 I was hanging out at my friend Jeff's place, playing this rhythm guitar thing in an alternate tuning (C-G-C-G-A-C). He asked me to teach it to him, and the next time I was over there he showed me an extension he had written for it. It worked so well I decided to expand what he had written, which he then promptly mutated into yet another section, etc. The next year when I came back from working in L.A., we got together and tried to play it from start to finish. (I'm surprised we both retained so much of the original idea!) We eventually rehearsed it, went into the studio and recorded the two guitars live to DAT (digital audio tape). I recorded the midi-drums, synth bass, and harmonics almost two years later (talk about an afterthought!). This tune, along with the "New Toy" tracks, "The End", and the "Short Story", is an "all-digital" recording, using a Macintosh computer with a disk-based recording system.
   
   
3. Song 86 (5:14)
   This track was recorded before we had any synthesizer gear or computers. There are no synths on this one . There was a little drum machine, and that was the most sophisticated thing we had, along with a couple of acoustic guitars, the E-bow, bass, some borrowed percussion toys, and a little signal processing. I've been asked a few times about the title--it was the song number on the drum machine. It was supposed to be a temporary title until one day I discovered it had grown on me (like a fungus?), so it became Song 86 for good. Believe me, Gone To Maryland's original title was far worse...
   
   
4. Ode To Michael Ellis - instrumental (4:09)
   You have to be a hardcore Monty Python fan to know who Michael Ellis is, but I'll attempt to explain a little bit about it. (If you're not into Python, seek professional counseling for a deprived childhood.) There was this episode where a real twit (played by Eric Idle) goes to a department store to buy an ant. [Note: famed Zappa cohort and all-around swell guy Mike Keneally disagrees. He thinks Eric's character wasn't a twit, simply an innocent. You're right, Mike. I stand corrected.] Anyway, Eric brings the ant home and discovers it has missing legs and a false antenna, so of course he goes back to complain (this is the really short version--check out the show for details). Well, throughout the entire half hour you see and hear references to someone named Michael Ellis. They never explain who he is or why his name keeps popping up (on the store's P.A., on the TV, etc.), so he's the mystery guy for that show, someone who was never really there, you just hear about him indirectly. Now back to the song...you see, we had this guitarist in our band in California named (you guessed it) Michael. He's the guy in the left channel on the tape your hear after the song fades out. Mike was a talented player, but for whatever reason he had decided to move to New Jersey in the middle of the night without telling anyone else in the band (we wouldn't have minded so much if he had taken the time to inform us.) You see, he had been temporarily taking care of my cat, so the poor thing was abandoned in the middle of winter (believe it or not, you can freeze your butt off in Southern California). So, in the days that followed, after we figured out what had happened, Mike became the mystery guy, our own Mr. Ellis, the guitarist who was never really there. The band went on a while longer without him, and this was written around that time. Here's the instrumental version. And yes, we found the cat after about three weeks. He's still pissed off about the whole thing...
   
   
5. Getting A Grip - PK/R. Wade (3:36)
   Back around 1989 I was living in a shitty little prefab"villa", working nights at a tape duplication facility before I made the ill-fated pilgrimage to California [insert violins here]. A friend of mine was living in an equally shitty little "efficiency" apartment, except he was having major problems with his "significant other" at the time. I got home one night to find this message on my answering machine. He didn't have a phone and I had no way to get in touch with him, and I didn't hear from the guy for almost six months after that. I kept the tape of his message, not because I planned to use it in a tune, but because I had a strange feeling that I might not ever hear from him again (thankfully I was wrong--and he has since told me that he likes this tune). About two years later Rick and I were experimenting with a four-track cassette machine, and he recorded this acoustic guitar ostinato (a repeating figure or groove). We were searching through my cassettes for some sound effects when we stumbled upon "The Message". Rick was intrigued, so I overdubbed it onto the four track on top of his guitar part. This version grew out of that original four track experiment. It was recorded by me alone in the studio, but Rick lent a hand as...well, whoever he's supposed to be (maybe the guy in the white coat?). I coerced a couple of people from the studio to add some voices.
   
   
6. New Toy? (2:49)
   Every time I buy a piece of musical equipment, whether it's a guitar or a synthesizer or computer software, the reaction from friends and family is usually the same-"Oh, Paul got a new toy the other day" or "Did you hear Paul's new toy yet?" This sort of bothers me. A musician usually prefers to think of his or her equipment as "tools", not "toys". These are tools of the trade much in the same way that a blacksmith uses an anvil or a writer uses a word processor. So when I bought a guitar synthesizer recently, I decided that for this project I would include at least one tune that featured the new "toy", and name it "Do You Like My New Toy?". That idea mutated to include not only the "toy", but became a completely live improvisation with no overdubs (added parts), using only the "toys" at hand. Most of these tunes were written, arranged, produced, recorded, mixed, and edited over the course of almost two years. So I decided to make this one something that was not written, that was not arranged or mixed in any way, and was produced only by circumstance. A friend of mine, whose opinion I value highly, told me he could hear the thought processes involved as the piece progresses. This is a great compliment, and gives me another idea... Keep in mind that everything you hear is being performed live from the guitar. It wasn't written or rehearsed at all. It just happened. However, I must be completely honest with you--there is an edit in there somewhere; the original performance was a little longer than what's included here.
   
   
7. Naples (3:39)
   This is another tune from the "Berklee days", written on a freezing Boston afternoon in 1985, when I stayed in with a nasty flu bug and my roommate's four track recorder for company. It also uses the dropped-C tuning. (It was originally a D tuning (D-A-D-A-B-D), but on a lot of steel-string acoustics, if you attempt to tune the G string up to A with medium strings, you can put out an eye!) I had been thinking about a road trip we had taken to the west coast of Florida when I was a teenager. We ended up sleeping on a private beach in the city of Naples. We got some strange looks that morning, but nobody kicked us out.
   
   
8. The End Of Civilization As We Know It (4:30)
   I wrote the music for this "thing" the day I got a real-live Kurzweil synthesizer. (It's weird seeing my name used as a noun--I guess it's better than being called an E-mu, although Oberheim or Synclavier would be cool last names too.) It started out as an apocalyptic"Terminator 3" type theme, but became something a little different when I actually recorded it about a year later.
   
   
9. Aunty Guitar (1:59)
   Just a guitar thing. Uncle Bass will be home soon...
   
   
10. The Tango Express - PK/R. Wade (11:51)
    Originally called Tango Expresso Suite. It had something like five different parts with different names. I really don't know what to say about it. This woman gets on a train, she kills some guy who tries to hit on her, and generally has a good time. If you really really really need to know what the hell she's saying (since she speaks only backwards when she's on the train) then send me five bucks and I'll send you a cassette of that section of the song played backwards. Why you would want it is beyond me, but then again, I'd probably be curious too if I were you... If you want to save yourself the fiver, then record that section onto a reel-to-reel tape recorder, or a four track cassette, and turn the tape over. (Call it Tango Reverso). You have my permission to do a little home taping in this respect (just a little, okay?). So what does a tango have to do with this tune? Nothing at all--we just liked the title. Maybe she danced with the guy before she pulled out the whip... Many thanks to Bob Milam, wherever he is, for taking part in the original improvisation six years ago that eventually became the E-bow section at the beginning.
    
    
11. Another New Toy? - PK/R. Bell (2:04)
    The title is self-explanatory. Ray joined me for this improv. It went on for almost seven minutes (this stuff is fun!) so I gave it a painless fade. (I wouldn't want you to think that we spend all our time making up weird stuff like this-only about half our time). Again, every sound you hear is being performed live. There are no overdubs at all. I swear.
    
    
12. Ode To Michael Ellis (vocal) - PK/K. Touin (7:30)
    You know the story. Here's the piece in its entirety. I guess the lyrics at the time represented our general feelings about the whole affair--Kathie's "I'm sorry it didn't work out" in the verses, in contrast to my "screw you and the guitar you rode in on" at the chorus.
    
    
13. A Short Vegetable Story - R. Parker/PK (2:10)
    My executive producer's daughter insists that he reads her bedtime stories--with a twist--at least once a week, even though she's well past the age for bedtime stories (my nephew used to pull the same thing on me). Here's one of them, adapted for your listening pleasure. If you enjoy this kind of thing, check yourself into the nearest mental health clinic and pray for an entire album of this stuff. If you hate it, please take a moment to write your opinion down, and send it to me as fast as you possibly can, before Russell makes me record the Egghead Story...

Credits

all songs published by Mutant Music Co., administered by
Kurzweil Music Publishing, BMI except:
"Ode To Michael Ellis (vocal)" co-published by
Mutant Music Co. and Fermata Music, BMI,
and "A Short Vegetable Story" published by Snarky Music

produced/arranged/engineered by PK
additional button-pushing by Rick Wade, Ray Bell, and Steve Horowitz

Executive Producer for Bluxo Records: Russell Parker

the musicians:

Ray Bell: bass guitar (Song 86, Another New Toy?), backing vocals (Song 86) voices (The End Of Civilization As We Know It, The Tango Express)

Jeff Davis: acoustic guitar (Gone To Maryland - sort of left channel)

Steve Horowitz: midi drum kit (Ode To Michael Ellis)

Rick Wade: acoustic guitar (Rhetoric vs. Reality, Naples, Song 86), electric guitar (The Tango Express, Ode To Michael Ellis) voices (Getting A Grip, The Tango Express)

William Bacalos, Cris Bjelajac, Aisha Forbes: voices (Getting A Grip)

Wendi Cockerham-Yacovone: lead vocals (Song 86)

Russell Parker: narration (A Short Vegetable Story)

additional people whose voices somehow ended up on the recording:
Wayde Fulton, Robbie Greene, Glo Maltz, Rob Notoris, Phil Reilly, and of course the infamous Michael Ellis.

all other instruments by PK:
guitars: electric, E-bow, 6 & 12-string acoustic, nylon-string, and bass; guitar synthesizer, midi keyboard-triggered drums, synthesizers, real percussion, synth percussion, drum programming; lead vocals (Ode To Michael Ellis), backing vocals (Song 86) sound effects, tapes, and sequencing.

guitars: 1978 Ibanez PF-300 with custom electronics and frets by Larry Lashbrook, Lashbrook Guitars, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; Ibanez NW-20 acoustic, Guild F-112 12-string, Giannini classical, and the Heet Sound E-Bow.

synthesizers: Kurzweil K-1200 Pro-1 (did you really expect I wouldn't have one of these things?), E-mu Procussion, Roland D-50, and the Roland GR-1 guitar synthesizer, plus a little Novation midi controller for triggering the percussion and drums (like in Gone To Maryland).

Paul Kurzweil, Kurzweil Music Publishing, and Bluxo Records are not affiliated with Kurzweil Music Systems, Cerritos, CA. "Kurzweil" is a registered trademark of Young Chang Akki Co., Ltd., but it's my given name, so sue me.

THANK YOU: Ray, "Cousin" Steve, Phil, Glo, Rick, Cris, and Aisha; Mom & Dad, Jamie, Jason, Grandma, Jeff, Kathy, Matt, Shaun; the crazy people at SPOTS who treat me so well: Bob, Mike, Karen, Robbie, Deb, Bucky; the folks at Park Place for keeping me in french fries, Jim at Sweetwater Sound, Kathie, Paul, Wayde, Dave, and of course Russell and the Bluxo crew.

© 1994 P. Kurzweil

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