Frownland

So I'm going to talk about myself again because my new album is one of the best of 2015 so far. I'll also be providing a little insight on how the tracks were made, what influenced them, and other trivia.


The title for Obtuse Psychotria came from a random word generator. I just generated different pairs of words until I found one that I like, and since psychotria is the genus that are used to produce DMT, I decided to go with that one since it fit pretty well. I took the photo for the album cover in San Marcos, CA. I got dropped off at the train station and the train was coming in around twenty minutes so I had time to dick around and smoke a cigarette whatehaveyou. I noticed the creek after a little bit and was struck by how similar it is to some of the imagery in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker. I played with the grain/contrast/etc. a little bit until I found a combination that I liked.

"But Frownland," you ask. "Why are you releasing a new album so soon after Thunder Music?"

Because I'm a fucking musical genius, that's why. Musically I've been on something of a peak, similar where I was at with Wolves In Sheepskin around mid-2014. I can record essentially every day and lately my procrastination skills have allowed me to direct my focus to anything else with great results.

I'll be talking about this album track by track. Commence this talk.

1. Excessive Eating Ceremony

Excessive Eating Ceremony is quite possibly the most minimalist song that I've done, since my music tends to go through several changes in the same song. It's also one of my few composed tracks as this one uses aleotoric methods. First, I emulated Alvin Lucier by creating acoustic resonance in my room through recording silence and playing it into the room over and over again, recording it each time. I think that for this recording, I did somewhere between 10-15 re-recordings to get the resonance to take over (although I did the piece with silence and the sounds of me sitting at my computer dictate the resonance as opposed to how Alvin Lucier used speech in I Am Sitting In a Room. Following this, I made two copies and laid them over the original, making it so that three of the same track were going on at the same time. After this I started to manipulate each of the tracks, and my method for determining how to do so is where the chance methods kick in. Using a random numbers table, I went through three rounds to decide at what lengths the manipulations would go on for. Going through each row, I would read the numbers in threes and use 001-100 to determine the length of the changes in seconds until I completed the length of the whole track. Having had the times determined, I moved on to choose by what percentage I change the speed of the sounds at those times. I also decided whether or not to alter the speed in a positive or negative direction based off of coin flips. It took me around 5 hours total (not at once) to do the track and I'm very happy with the result.

2. Dazed By the Sunn

This album is a scatter across several different styles of mine, so I went into my catalogue of unreleased tracks that shouldn't stay unreleased. I came up with Dazed by the Sunn for a MusicBanter thread I was running where musicians would compete to create a track to follow a theme which we would vote on afterward. For the round that led me to make this track, the theme was "sun." Being a massive dronehead, I decided to add another n to the theme and do some heavy guitar drones. At one point, my roommate came into the room and walked in from of the mic, which is why the piece sounds a bit muffled partway through.

3. Prenatal Remnant

This track is much newer than Dazed by the Sunn, having only been recorded around 6 hours before it was released. It was played entirely on my pedals, which is two analog Behringer VD400 delay pedals and a Digitech Whammy that has pitch shifting and harmonizing effects. I was just really feeling it after getting a second pedal and this is one of the better tracks that came out of it.

4. Clerical Photographer

Another newer track, this was while I was practicing for a show that I played. I was so enthused by the sound that I had to record what I was doing. This is another guitar drone track, but it's much different from any of the drones that Sunn O))) or other drone metal artists offer. It's more akin to Keiji Haino, John Cale, or Tony Conrad in its style. Using a bow I played my guitar while it was facing up in my lap while I fed these sounds through a Crybaby wah pedal, octave harmonies, reverb, and distortion as high as allowed. The result is a very noisy and very powerful piece. As much as I like this track, the recorded version doesn't do it much justice; playing in this style with my amp turned almost all the way up at the event I was playing at was otherworldly.

5. Breakpoint Soundtrack

This is the soundtrack to a friend's film that I starred in called Breakpoint. The story follows the investigation of a college tennis player who has been suspected of throwing games, but it turns out that the coach was drugging him before the games in order to make the tennis player lose. The coach does this because he owes money to a racketeer who pressures the coach into doing this ****. It was a pretty terribly written script tbh, but the friend who asked if I'd star in it was just the director and cameraman. During one scene where the coach asked the tennis player if he was throwing games, a very freeform and contemplative guitar starts meandering over the top notch bad acting from the tennis player. The director knew that I played music and asked me to make something so I just went to my guitar and hit record. What I ended up doing was almost like jazz, almost like ambient, vaguely Japanese, and entirely different from everything else that we hear on this album.

6. Fazed Baptismal Reasoning

This track is the only one done on an acoustic guitar. I prepared it by sticking a fork in the strings along the neck; when I plucked the fork's handle, it would rattle the strings in a very pleasing way. This was another chance recording when I was experimenting with a fork and really liked the sound. It could have been longer, but this was done with a few minutes until I had to leave for class. I stuck with this version instead of recording another one because I really liked its general sound and making it shorter made it better because I bet some people listen to my music and think that it overstays its welcome.

7. Foamy Boycott Ascending

This one is from the same recording/jam session as Clerical Photographer. This one has more focus on the wah and starts off with some ambient leanings and slowly progresses into something more dramatic with me hammering strings with the end my bow, then progressing further as I begin to bow again. I think that Clerical Photographer is better because it's so in your face and intense, but this one's really good as well.

8. Missing Pretense Report

I recorded this one over Christmas break after my dog passed away. My family had gone out to take care of some of their bullshiit that didn't involve me so I took it as a chance to drown the house with the sounds of the electric guitar. Still very upset from my losing Skye, the result was a raw, rumbling, and angry piece that stands out from my other drones. That's one of the reasons why I'm so proud of this album, there are a lot of drone tracks, but a lot of them sound entirely different from one another. This is a feat in the drone world because sometimes artists can become one-dimensional in their approach to sustained tones.

Since I'm too lazy to look up an art piece, I just decided to save the album cover for the end. Click the image for a link to the bandcamp page.

__________________

Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.