BIC FLASHBACK #12 - 'The Storm Before The Calm' soundscape...
Unlike our previous releases, ‘The Storm Before The Calm’ album was six (6) tracks clocking in at about 49 minutes of music. Looking back, I had actually planned to weave together the 14 songs on ‘finding beauty in chaos' with some short musical interludes … almost making it a ‘seamless’ listen. Imagine putting the FBIC CD in an it only having one track ID! :). Well, common sense took over as did math as I added up the time of all fourteen songs WITHOUT adding any interludes and it was over 79 minutes. (maximum CD time is 80 minutes). Truth be told, we had to edit a bit of ‘Un-Natural Disaster’ to come in under the time threshold!
Ok now fast forward to ‘The Storm Before The Calm’. As we prepped to release the CD, I saw we would have 30 minutes of unused ‘space’. This gave me the forum to do something a bit different … which I found exciting. At my home studio. SAINT2, I begun recording a bizarre mix of soundscapes … blending treated guitars, Eno-esque synths and textures. odd voices and more. I had also been talking with Adrienne LaVey, a darkwave opera…. yes opera singer about being part of BIC. As I envisioned this soundscape sort of being in ‘moments’, it seemed to be the perfect time! I brought all of these abstract musical ideas and dropped them in the lap of Michael Rozon and said ‘lets make this the title track and fill up the remaining ‘space’ on the CD”. Together we mixed and cobbled this into a 29+ minute opus … broken into 3 seamless movements … The Gathering, The Storm and The Calm. The result, at least to my ears is a strange journey reminiscent of David Lynch, Brian Eno, Pink Floyd and Nine Inch Nails. In addition to Adrienne’s operatic section, there are some strange voiceovers … and taking a page out of Prince’s Purple Rain movie (the scene where he is playing Apollonia the cassette with the backwards crying); there is a bit of female ‘pleasure’ and also ‘sobbing’ … both reversed - with each now sounding like the other. Confusing ? LOL.
Well - as we were compiling the remixes for ‘Out Of Chaos Comes…’, I thought it would be interesting do put our a visual to accompany this track … to also call some attention to it as it closed out the CD, and (due to time constraints) did not fit on the vinyl, I enlisted a friend, Rachel Duff to help compile some visuals …. please seen the result below!
MC X