The world according to Jutze
This is clearly a homage to Mike Oldfield. I started out with the 7/4 measure and the melody on acoustic guitar. It’s not really a melody, just four notes. Then I added several layers of acoustic and electric guitar loops. I also included a few melody lines that are not completely repetitive. Finally, I experimented with keyboard sounds. Only here did the opening keyboard line in 7/8 materialize.
This is yet another instrumental track with a title that has little to do with the music. I like how surface tension sometimes appears to be fragile, especially on bodies of water on a windless day. Floating was another thing that came to my mind while working on this track.
I wrote the music right after getting out of my bed on the morning of May 14, 2010. The dialogue between the acoustic and the electric guitar wasn’t exactly what I was aiming for in the first place. Still, I’m quite content with the track and its dynamics.
This is yet another instrumental piece. It’s merely a quick combination of chords and notes. But then again, most songs are. I took the chance to play on the piano, even though I only had my digital camera to record the audio. So the sound is crappy, but you can watch me playing. I wrote and recorded the track last Sunday, after two days of heavy metal at the Keep It True festival. Please excuse minor timing problems. After all, I had to guess the tempo in order to make the song 52 seconds long. So I did have a slightly better version recorded, but it was a couple of seconds too long. The version you hear here is actually has a bit a silence appended at the end to make it long enough. I know that’s cheating, but I rather have it like this than with the additional noises you can hear on the video (which does reach the 52-second mark).
This one started out with vocals. The melody still hints at the title, which I just kept, because I was running out of time to think of something else. A while ago I was looking at the sky and beheld shifting clouds (see video below). It was there that I came up with the title. I intended to make it a song with space between parts and notes. It ended up being rather packed, anyway. I also admit that the verse uses the same chords as “1998” (which Manticess made for Song Fu last year) and that the middle part is basically the bridge from “The Flower Song“. The end result justifies the self-citations, I think. The main reason I omitted the vocals was that I’m not a good singer. But I also figured there’s a pattern in the previous tracks (except for the first one): every third tune is an instrumental. And I’m a sucker for patterns. And, as I said, a bad singer, who didn’t want to spend what’s left of his weekend failing to sound fragile.
This is an instrumental piece that could easily be incorporated in a lonely movie scene. I started out with the acoustic guitar part, double-tracked it and added some high piano notes to augment the atmosphere.
This is actually the first 52-second piece of music I wrote specifically for this collection. I stumbled over the first few notes on my keyboard. Eventually, I continued the idea on the acoustic guitar. I added a second track with just the chords. Still, the composition might well work in a film as background music. The title is somewhat arbitrary. But hopefully it conveys the atmosphere.