Fly Away
Well boys and girls, I’m done with Larry Lines’ Numen. By the way that man himself has a blog here at twistedpop – Here it is! He was pretty dormant at first but now he’s started to make posts and they’re pretty deep and profound and they’re about all kinds of other people’s music and everything so go check it out.
Anyway I was just kinda going in order as I looked at my catalog on NQuit. Well that brings up my last album Bleed
So I guess I’ll start in on that one.
The first track on it is Fly Away:
This track is short – like a minute or so – it’s supposed to kinda be the “intro” thingy. The whole megalomaniac idea I had was to actually make something like “oh my god here he comes he’s back he’s the greatest!” kind of crap, but it’s interesting to me because it was the first time I ever thought about making a record that was actually intended for my audience that I might see on stage doing slams and stuff.
So I tried to be dramatic but then stick a piece of me live from the 2003 slam off in Houston, which I was figuring would be recognizable to the houston poetry cats – and it would – only I really never sold the record to them. It’s so weird. I was already gone. I was at Stanford when I made this track and finished the record. We put it out from Oakland and I hardly touched Houston.
I did make a sort of half-hearted attempt to do a tour supporting bleed, in that I went out for about 3 weeks, starting at the national poetry slam (but not performing at all!) and then doing some gigs in Houston.
As far as the tour and supporting the record and – god forbid – playing the songs from Bleed live – it never really materialized. I did this track live ONE time, at South By Due East the next Spring, in Houston. South By Due East is a film shoot/music fest that’s a sort of anti-South By Southwest thing. I did this little track as my intro track to a poetry set. I didn’t do it too well, actually. Couldn’t hear right. Rapping to the beat and singing to the song is not as easy as it looks and you can fuck it up if you’re not careful.
Anyway, I sat in one of the B-studios in Stanford’s CCRMA department (where I did my masters) and used some old roland synths and played most of this stuff live to tape. Grabbed the rap lyrics and sung lyrics out of one of my notebooks almost at random but they fit the idea – especially the part about locking myself behind a studio door, etc. The whole idea was to “bust back on the scene” (that’s a theme I’ve had in songs even when I was just supposed to be busting onto the scene initially, I was still thinking “bust BACK” onto the scene – what the hell?).
The very coolest thing to me about this track though is the stuff at the beginning that goes through the whole track – the eery wuaaaaaaa electronical thing.
I didn’t make that. That’s a layer of two versions of homework number one from the first class in our master’s program there at Stanford. It’s my classmate Sandra and my classmate Rob’s assignments. The reason I used them is they sounded cool and dramatic and they’re actually derived from my voice.
The assignment was take this recording and twist and turn it and mess with it using – i think we used the programming language scheme but i’m not sure – could have been PD. You can twist any digital audio recording into a lot of different stuff, it turns out. The recording was of me doing a piece of poetry, the whole class got the same piece. The professor tricked me! He asked if I would let him record me for this, and then one time he was sitting there with a microphone, and I thought he was just testing to see how it MIGHT go when we ACTUALLY recorded, like as in days later or something, and I just randomly spit this thing
“on a greyhound to LA, I found my path laid out in the crook of a virgin’s arm”
And he recorded that and gave it to the class the next day! I was like – oh wait – whoa – really? That was it? Oh crap!
So anyway I used it. Both Sandra and Rob earn one percentage point on sales of that song, which means one percent of one 15th of album sales of Bleed.
I owe them both something like a penny.
So there you have it. The first track to the triumphant ret….
irement…
of Aaron Trumm.
Fly Away.
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