The Founders of the NKC » Kawlinz

Instruments are abstract?

Kawlinz — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:11:59 +0000

Not too too long ago, Tori invited me to her place for swimming, food, and painting lessons. We started talking about abstract painting and why we like it so much. During that discussion, I tried to see if there was a connection between the abstract visual arts that I enjoy the most, and the aural art that I create. I’m really into electronic music (no way!) so the initial parallel I drew was that the synth sound that I like so much was itself an abstraction.

I thought about this a bit more the other day, and definitions are always helpful when trying to clarify thoughts and perspectives, so I thought why not look up the definition to the word “abstract”. Dictionary.com gives us a few definitions, so I’ll concentrate on the one that is most relevant:

ab·stract
–adjective
thought of apart from concrete realities, specific objects, or actual instances: an abstract idea.

Applying this, a painting is abstract when what you’re painting isn’t representative of an actual thing. If I want to paint a tree, I can make markings on the page to represent the tree with varying degrees of accuracy. If I want to paint love, there’s no “love” that I can paint. I can paint people who are in love, and try to portray that as best I can. I can use symbols like a cartoon heart to represent love. What I can’t do is paint a thing called love. I can’t paint gravity, the speed of light, sounds… you get the idea. I can try to evoke certain emotions and ideas with different colours, brush strokes, and techniques

So when we turn to music, it was apparent to me pretty quickly that when I create music, I’m not trying to represent a real thing. When I create a 4/4 drum beat, it’s not an attempt to “paint a tree”. There’s no 4/4 beat in the universe that I can point to and say “here’s my recreation of the 4/4 beat”. The only thing we can find are other people’s interpretations.

Another example is that if I use a guitar string, I don’t say that I’m trying to recreate a cord being vibrated against a piece of hallowed wood with a specific shape, I’m just using that as my starting point to make something else. To analogize with painting, I don’t say that I’m trying to recreate the 650 nanometre wavelength as it appears to the human eye, I use that wavelength as my starting point – it’s red, if you’re curious.

So are all instruments abstract?

Soul Music is Winding Down

Kawlinz — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 11:37:10 +0000

It’s definitely my most ambitious attempt in music. Soul Music has been an odd song to put into words, from the experiment and structure of the song, what I’m attempting to do with it, and the journey it’s taken. From rewriting the lyrics, scrapping melodies, adding harmonies, changing synth placements, replacing effects, revising the title, I can’t believe it’s still a song. After all the changing and re-arranging, I stayed true to the limits and vision I first had when coming up with the idea of the song. I’m quite proud of how this has turned out so far. Many times when I’m creating, something will happen during the process that will change the initial idea of the song, and most of the time, I’m quite alright with that. Most of the time, it works out better than I intended – something I didn’t set out to do but takes over the first conception.

Soul Music was different, I knew that I couldn’t compromise the foundation of this song without losing it completely. It’s frustrated me to no end, often I’d put it away after becoming stuck in its core, sometimes for months. I’d revisit the puzzle once in a while to see if I could solve it. Sometimes I’d have marginal successes, sometimes I’d have seemingly great breakthroughs that would end up not being so much of one. Tonight was definitely my biggest piece of progress, and I’ve got the feeling that the ideas that I’ve synced into the track are keepers. Everything that I’d laid down fit perfectly into itself and its surroundings. Each verse of the beat perfectly matches the progression and mood in the lyrics.

Oddly enough, it all came together after re-writing the last lyric (yes, I linked to my previous post, while only having three posts total at the moment on the homepage – that’s right). I’d have never come up with those parts if I hadn’t changed the last verse at all. The content was completely different. I don’t know what else to read into this, other than maybe rewrite lyrics sometimes?

Lyrics, and Stuff

Kawlinz — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 06:24:55 +0000

I did something a few days ago that I don’t usually do, which is re-write a verse. I put it up on my twitter, but anyone who visits the site wouldn’t have known that. I’m working on the new site, and I hope to integrate twitter posts directly in the story feed, but that’s not here, but probably there, where “there” is “sometime in the future”.

I rewrote the last verse in This Is Total Take Your Soul Music, mainly because I found what I’d written previously to be lacking, both in quality of the lyrics themselves, as well as lacking in creativity. Uninspired, really. It had a bunch of points that didn’t really flow from one concept to the next – everything was just kind of… there. I knew that I really liked the first four lines of the verse, so I kept those and built from there. It turned out really nice. Hype came by to record some scratch vocals tonight for Soul Music, and he was feeling the newly improved verse. We also had to re-record Faithfree because of some messed up things happening with Garageband. We’re using Garageband at the moment, until I can get my laptop back from my folks. I think we’ll survive though. It’s all good.

Back Up and Running

Kawlinz — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:00:19 +0000

We had a few hitches with our webhost. We lost our posts and comments. But I did manage to get a new mySQL database up and running to get the site back on track. The site is at a bare minimum of information, which may be a blessing in disguise. I’ve gotten bored of this layout for quite sometime, so instead of continuing with it, and I was thinking of a few new layouts for the website anyways while the website was down. I ran a few by Hype, and we liked the idea of one in particular, so I’ll give a shot at it, to see if I can implement it.

We’re also hard at work on the song “Faithfree”, we’ve got a great beat going for it, we’re getting the vocals down quite nicely as well. I’m really impressed with the flow of the track, the way the beat drops, and how well they mesh together. I think that some people will end up hating us when the song is recorded and released, but I gotta do me. I can’t censor myself in music, or in life.