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Go Easy 2 : Deeper into Sepia

by Mentufacturer

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Scotoplanes 03:38
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Zeroidade 02:24
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Ruby Rag 02:17
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StarTides 06:59
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about

Wow! Talk about "that difficult Nth album"

This is the promised sequel to "The Go Easy Mixtape" (mentufacturer.bandcamp.com/album/the-go-easy-mixtape).

That one really did come together "so easy". It was just a bunch of experiments that I found worked really well as an album. And I still often listen to it in its entirety.

This time I set out to deliberately "develop" the aesthetic of the Go Easy Mixtape - particularly the track called "A Sepia Sonority" - to infer the "grammar". To try to turn the "pidgin" of random juxtapositions of experiment into a "creole" with an implicit logic for how the parts go together.

And, boy!, has it been difficult.

It's taken me almost a year and a half, and led to many false starts and strange decisions, some I'm not sure about even now.

In fact I'm not even sure I "like" it, exactly. I might have spent 15 months creating an album that no-one could or would really like. Not even me. :-)

But I think it is, finally, "finished".

So, many of the elements are the same as Go Easy 1: pseudo-vintage chord progressions calculated in Sonic Pi. A riff from my own Pure Data synth I developed in a tutorial video. Quiet "noise" tracts like Zeroidade. Kitsch verging on twee melodies. More noise. Oceanic ambience. Gratuitous use of FL Studio's cheesy stock vocal phrases.

But they are allegedly woven into a more "coherent" whole. Though somehow this largely seems to be about making everything a bit darker and more muffled / subdued. (I also was blown away by a "dark jazz" DJ session I saw in a loft-party in Feb 2022, which made me want to turn everything into sludgy saxophones. Blame that for the sax sample on Nude Descending a Staircase)

Some tracks that initially seemed to fit had to be ripped out when they added nothing, or broke the flow. Others had to be imported from other projects. "(I remember that) I was Improvising" was one of those silly throw-away sketches that I wasn't intending to do anything with, until I realized I loved it more than any of the tracks I was working on for this album, and that I NEEDED to remember to improvise and be silly. That was part of the magic formula of the first Go Easy, so I brought it in here too.

"A Lounge Underground" is an ancient piece, one I started around 2008, and always liked the vibe of, but never quite felt was complete. One milestone in me figuring out the shape of this album was when I realized it could work as the final track. But while the original vibe of "A Lounge Underground" was established 15 years ago, I only had the idea of adding the salsa-ish piano riff in Jan 2023! Possibly that was the last straw that convinced me that "Deeper into Sepia" was, finally, finished.

I need to give special thanks to the two guest musicians on this album. Aleks Dolgy is in Ukraine and recorded his great bass part for Lilting Lovely a few weeks before the war started there. That's an unimaginably horrendous situation and tragedy. I've exchanged a couple of messages with him since then, and he does still seem to be able to keep working as a session musician online. (So check him out if you're looking for one.) But I hope the war can be ended soon and peace definitively established; and that Aleks stays safe.

It's an incongruous accident that Aleks's bass appears on the lightest, most twee sounding of the tracks here. And while I thought of "darkening" it, I realized that that would be an injustice, both to the music and the musician.

As it is, Lilting Lovely is still "experimental": the beat is fiendishly polymeteric, and I was trying to get Aleks to perform the impossible by fitting a bass part to several different feels at the same time. I then compounded the problem by changing the rest of the track including the drum parts, giving them new stresses.

As I didn't want to throw the bass away, I had to edit and warp it to try to fit it to the new drums. The resulting mess is maybe 60% deliberate and 40% incompetence. But any oddities and imperfections are down to my kludges, not Aleks's playing.

Matt Giella's trumpet on Ruby Rag was far more straightforward. The track itself was almost entirely a Sonic Pi chord-progression with random notes. The beat underneath it came from combining a couple of different breaks through Hainbach and AudioThing's "Motor" plugin. The decision to add trumpet was another result of my "dark jazz" epiphany in February. I already knew I needed something extra for the piece, but had no real ideas what, until that inspired me to get a trumpet on it. It's the raw take he gave me, just with a proverbial f-tonne of compression.

credits

released January 17, 2023

All music composed and arranged by Mentufacturer except

Bass on Lilting Lovely - Aleks Dolgy (www.youtube.com/channel/UCEqePZoW2A1ZTClH5txE3cQ, www.fiverr.com/dolgyyy )

Trumpet on Ruby Rag - Matt Giella ( www.fiverr.com/classicbreeze2 )

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Mentufacturer Brazil

Originally conceived as an industrial band in the early 90s, Mentufacturer is a solo electronic project of Phil Jones, who has grown up to admit a love for melody, repetitive mantras and broken beats.

Originalmente concebido como um banda industrial nos anos 90s, hoje Mentufacturer faz musica eletrônica com varias influências, finalmente admitindo o gosto pela polirritmia e mantras melódicos.
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