Tatsu
New member
Dune Cascade http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=12281201 For this latest incarnation of Not Leaving Forever an all star line up of Alex Holdsworth on guitar, Chick Malaysia on keys, Bob Bruford on bass, Tommy Williams on drums and Jean-Luc Picard on violin. Coming from previous bands such as the Postmodern Jazz Quintet and Kilometer Davis they have come together for their latest collaboration project Pseudo Romantic Intellectual Diplomat. After the horrors of World War II many philosophers, artists and musicians lost their faith in progress. It seemed like the advances in technology and science had only lead to killing each other with bombs and machine guns instead of knives and stone axes; Not better than brute apes. Much worse really. Some musicians couldnt, in good conscience, create music that develops in a linear fashion since it doesnt reflect their current world view that there is no such thing as progress. Going to a concert doesnt have to be about seeing a band but can be about finding yourself. In an interview Chick Malaysia said; For this composition I wanted to experiment with the idea of what music would sound like if I didnt believe in progress. The track was inspired by a documentary on the formation of Frasier Island the largest sand island in the world. Its off the coast of Australia. There are dunes under the ocean and the crests and troughs of the ripples on them are pushed by the ebb and flow of wave motion. Individual grains travel North under the ocean for a thousand kilometers and take decades for them to arrive at Frasier Island. They continued to accumulate until they were piled up so high they breached the surface of the ocean creating shoals and islands. If you really think about it, no progress has been made. If you imagine the grains of sand kept going all the way around the world they would eventually come back to the place where they started. The idea of progress is relative. Another idea comes from the question of where does the ocean end and the beach begin? The water doesnt just stop where the beach is and its not like individual grains of sand dont enter the ocean. The water from the waves pushed far up onto the beach seeps deep into the sand. And individual grains can get stirred up suspended in the water. The ocean and the beach interpenetrate. To make the music embody these ideas, I have sections break down slowly into fragments on the repeat and have the next section build up from fragments.. When the section finally plays in its entirety Ive put an instrumental solo. The breakdown area and the build up area overlap so they interpenetrate just like the ocean and the beach. Another way the music embodies this perception of the world is that the music first slows down like a trough in a ripple on the dune. As the music slows, instruments start to fill in the empty space one by one until the music slowly accelerates again at the end. At that time instruments drop out one by one as the musical space begins to get too crowded. The arpeggic motives in the violin first progress then retrogress aaab aabb abbb aabb aaab. And a ab abc abcd abc ab a. to embody the idea theres no real progress. They also function both as background and foreground. In the A section, the accompaniment is based on the exact same pitch series in the esoteric mode. Its like individual grains of sand all being made of the same material but having different shapes. The parts pile up and are stripped away like ripples on a sand dune.
