Well, this has all come to a head. The curtain is closing on Journal, and time for a little self-reflection in the form of a new composition.
I sent everyone their tracks at the same time, and I made a point to play all of the pieces by myself on drums before sending them off to catalogue the ideas that I had over them and see how they lined up with the players I had selected.
Every drummer on this project exceeded my expectations and made meaningful contributions to my writing and production by feeding me ideas to build around, but they also fed me ideas to incorporate into my own tool belt as a drummer.
The afternoon after every Journal entry, I would sit down and play through all 25 pieces again on drums to see what has changed about the way that I play these on drums, and there was always a little bit of each Journalist that rubbed off on my interpretation of these tunes.“Igneous” was intended to be my “final boss” track. A culmination of all the different sounds I filled my brain with throughout this project, and arguably the most difficult piece for me to play personally, ironically because the tempo and feel I had in mind are so intuitive to me that I knew I’d struggle with deciding how I wanted to orchestrate the piece on the kit, as well as getting the nuanced textures I had in mind under my fingers and wrists, hands and feet.
#machadosjournal
I could have tracked this piece at any point during the project, but I wanted to wait until I had no more drummers left to do it, and I gave myself an afternoon to get a track I liked.All in all, I ended up doing 25 takes of this piece to try and channel all of the drum warriors I enlisted for this project on each one, and I ended up just using Take #1 in the end, which was just me playing whatever felt most natural with my own playing in mind.
The take isn’t exactly clean cut, but I think it represents my mind pretty well, and I tried to treat my drum part as if it the piece was written by someone else.
“Igneous” has a bunch of time changes and a few rather specific stops, so I tried to get clever with introducing them differently each time. I added a fragment of some audio I recorded a year ago of a poem I wrote called “Convergence” towards the end over my “solo”.
I only included a fragment of the poem, but I'll include "Convergence" in its entirety within the lyrics section below.
lyrics
Two points converge beyond the observable horizon
Forgotten to beget, doomed to achieve ill-gotten gains
Of which no qualms exist, for they have been searched and desist;
Resisting their trajectory as if to plot a foul and devious treachery
Forget this. These are thoughts of heresy.
A travesty committed across the amalgam of perceivable knowledge
Perturbed and mildly disturbed
Protruding from the shadows of sanity, yet starved
Starved of the arid continence of re-orientation
Commence the countdown
3…to... None
In a flash, the downpour commences, and we assume the crux of being
Can we truly grasp what we cannot have?
To slip through the fingers of our own understanding.
I don’t understand, nor do I wish to.
We all have, if anything, a prime directive to beget the forgotten
Forsake the mistaken, cast aside the dark, and chase the light.
A farce within a fallacy; a massive travesty.
A crime truly committed without being seen, or heard.
But can we slip past the grasp our fragility encompasses steadfastly?
We plod on, only to receive a glance of encouragement.
Met only be those that we sought to incarcerate through our inhibitions.
Prisoners of our own confinement, inmates of indecision.
We converge on the path of the forgotten
Who look past the forsaken, and set their sights
The horizon awaits. Yonder it lies for the treacherous.
