FirE

/// The Energy ///

Light and Shadow

‘Light and Shadow’ has been in my band’s repertoire for a while now, at least a few years.

However, we haven’t had the chance to record it until now.

In fact, it is the only surviving song of what was going to be the record after ‘Voice = Power’.

It’s true. I had an entirely different album planned, but like most plans, it was upended by the pandemic.

I am actually grateful that album never happened. To be honest, it was essentially ‘Voice = Power’ all over again, and to be brutally honest, my heart wasn’t in it.

I was just going through the motions. I felt like I had to make another album, but I wasn’t inspired to make another album.

Out of the eight or so songs that would have been on that album, ‘Light and Shadow’ is the only one we still play. This one was inspired and therefore it gets to be on the inspired album!

I wrote ‘Light and Shadow’ when I was in grad school at Temple University. It was an assignment in my composition class with world renowned pianist/compost Elio Villafranca.

The assignment was to ‘write a blues that wasn’t a blues’. That might sound confusing, but I know what he meant. To take an aspect of the blues and use it to create a song without using the traditional blues structure.

This I did by using the 16-bar blues form but instead of using Dominant 7th chords moving up by Fourth, I used Major 7th chords moving down by whole-step, and a turnaround that did something similar to John Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’.

Then…to add another small difference…I put the song in 3/4 time!

‘Hey Nick’, you may ask yourself, ‘it’s not in 3/4. What gives?’

You are correct it is no longer in 3/4 time because of a small twist of fate.

At the time, I saved the song to a PDF file, but over time lost the original file from Musecore (my music notation software).

Years later, when I wanted to save the song in Musecore, I had to use a third-party conversion app to convert the song from PDF to a Musecore file.

In the conversion process, the app, through some sort of glitch, added an extra beat to every measure making the song 4/4 time.

I immediately went to fix the mistake, but found that I liked the song better in 4/4!

‘Light and Shadow’ uses a very strict and constant bassline to add structure to all the changing parts above it. It is somewhat collectively improvised, yet grounded in the rigid structure, somewhat like a series of still-life photographs taken over a course of the day to show the changing light/shadow over a constant structure.

Embers

I had no intention of recording ‘Embers’ as a song. It started simply as a test.

We had just built a little recording studio in our house and I was unsure of it’s capabilities …

All I wanted to know was … 1) can I record video and audio at the same time AND 2) will effects on my arco bass sound cool ?

However, as you can see, this turned into something else.

I recorded the bass at my home studio and immediately thought that it would sound good with a full orchestra !!!

The problem is … I don’t have access or the budget for an orchestra … so I had to settle for just strings (and not real strings at that !)

I recorded the string parts using a sound library that is used for many film scores … it uses samples from the BBC orchestra and sounds pretty great, especially if you aren’t using too many different techniques.

So, I recorded the strings using my MIDI keyboard, put some distortion effects on the bass, and even experimented with the video !

This is the full version of ‘Embers’ … on the CD and LP there is a shorter version … that was a creative decision because 1) LP’s have a strict time limit and 2) I just felt it flowed better for the album listening experience.

I’ve never released the full version to the public and, until I do, here is the only place to hear it … pretty cool, huh ?

BoNus CoNteNt !

Below is a little treat … a live video recording of the first time we played ‘Light and Shadow’ live … the band is a little different … and you can hear how much the vibe evolved from this to the album recording … I hope you enjoy seeing the evolution of these songs !