Just a one-off, single-take recording i made trying to blow off steam after work today. This is a cover of Precious Things by Tori Amos. i was a bit shaky in the hands from low bloodsugar, but i was really feeling this song today so i had to bust it out.

Precious Things (live, one take)

This is the original draft of the spontaneous piano improv i put to the first movement of "Surrender," a live, improvised piece recorded at the Emanuel Vigeland Mausoleum in total darkness .  After the first listen-through of  the performance wrenched my stupid feelings to the surface, i immediately turned out the lights, blindfolded myself, dropped the track into FL studio and started playing along, imagining that i was one of the ghosts of the mausoleum, invoked or just stopping by to jam got a minute.  i had to feel my way through the dark on this one, and try to flow with Billy's dynamics organically without already knowing the piece well and no looking at my keys.  You can listen/download the original full 40 mins of this beautiful, soul-baring, gut-wrenching piece at Third Seven.com

Surrender (Third Seven) w/piano improv

This may turn into a trip-hop track. It sounds pretty rad with a slow break beat.  This is just the piano and strings for the first half or so.  

improv for piano and strings clip

Improv on the the first movement of Tubular Bells.  


Tubular Bells

Gorgeous track i composed with Jeff Bailey-Cannon a couple years back.  There is a distinct feel of ebb and flow, meant to emulate the breath, a heartbeat pulse (at 60 bpm) throughout.  Digital sounds add a biomechanical element.  Life in digital.  

Jeff:  composing, microkorg, synth, beat programing
Arcane:  composing/arranging, sequencing, piano, synth, additional percussion, mixing

Aspiria (draft)

Erasure is a narrative consisting of a series of tableaux, each illustrating an aspect of the dark and harrowing journey of the victims caught in the twisted designs of the Nazi war machine.  

1.  It's a Sinister Work they do at Night -00:00
They come in the dark to carry out their infernal business.  A steady creeping fear, a neighborhood looking on powerless until the banging at the door shatters the night.  

2.  The Machine Proceeds with Stealth 8 Speed -3:07
Aboard the locomotive, it's grinding and relentless barreling through the verdant green of the countryside into the Eastern forests, it's mechanisms churning like the war machinery of the state.  

3. A Tower in the Snow   -5:01
As they stepped from the train, into the chill of the midnight air, into the falling snow, they beheld, rising above the jurisdiction of the gaze of the gargoyles in their watchtowers, and the floodlights, the stacks of the crematoria presiding over the grounds.  

4.  Funeral March     -6:33
A dirge, the ash of the countless and nameless who came before falling upon the procession to the gas chambers. 

5.  Lest We Forget     -10:06
"The world had forgotten us."  -A survivor on the Allies decision not to divert any resources towards bombing supply routes to Auschwitz and Birkenau, seeing the fighter planes above, disappearing into the distance as they continuously disappeared.    If we could turn our gaze from the lessons of history even in the throes of its ugliest moment, at the death of God before us, the sins and sickness of the past could find us all too easily again.  The Nazis, in their most heinous act, tried to erase history, to shroud in a dark secrecy the truth of all they had wrought, trying to effect a final erasure of even the memory of those whom their perverted philosophies and twisted practiced had ripped from the world.  We must continue to mourn and decry the execution of the innocent, the complicity of the ignorant, and the silencing of the truth by those who come in the night with infernal machines of war, of they who use art for lies and science for the ill of mankind.  

NEVER FORGET.  NEVER AGAIN.  


Erasure

New trip-hop track. Melancholy, atmospheric, reflective sound with a building double chorus at the end. Piano, synths, wurlitzer driven. No vocals yet. Not quite finished, but getting there.

Trip Hop Nocturne (rough cut)

Appassionata con Moda Cambiante

Improvisation on Nine Inch Nails' "The Fragile" with intro from "The Frail" and bits from Tori Amos' "The Waitress" and Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game". 

Piano, strings, and synth pads each recorded in one go.  This isn't some polished magnum opus   i just thought it would be pretty if i slapped some strings and things on this piano improv before i uploaded it.  

Fragile Improv for Piano, Pad, and Synth String

Work in progress.  

This is my song for summer's end.  
Melancholy, haunted, but refusing to not love so hard it hurts.  

I Could Have Been (unfinished draft)

C Minor improv

Found in a box i was rummaging through
i was hurting so bad when i made this recording.  
And then everything broke into pieces and there was only survival, no time for heartbleed.  i can hear the desperate edge in my voice, trying to keep myself from going feral.  

Well, i tried to keep a grip.  i'm not the one who pulled my hands away.

My Skin

i created this to share things i'm working on.  A lot of these pieces aren't finished or perfect.  
Please click on the track titles to see the info i've included regarding them as you listen.  =)

TheArcane

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