0. The Burnt Ogre Album, as a whole.
I originated the phrase 'burnt ogre' at some point in the last five years, as a simple pun on 'burnt ochre' which is a favourite colour tone of mine; i love all those dark yellows, mustards, siennas. having moved to birmingham, it seem'd a good fit to start a metal band, whose shared their name with the first album, and also the first track on said album, that - crucially - does not contain the name as a lyric. So yes, Everything starts with Black Sabbath.
Before this, I was planning the album 'kno', going as far as mocking up a cover art, and putting it out as a 'grilly' album. However, Kno being a full album of more detail and ambition than anything I had made before, I wanted to try out a vertical slice-style demo, and as I was writing the tune that would become Burnt Ogre, realised it would make sense to fully create that first. After that, I decided to put out an album with Burnt Ogre as the opening track and everything else followed from that.
1. Burnt Ogre
at the start we hear a radiophonic-style backwards delay effect. The idea was to run a note through a high-feedback delay long enough for it to decay entirely into noise, then reverse the recording to make it appear that the signal was emerging from the noise. Despite a couple of takes (both used in stereo) I don't think it was particularly successful. The other intention behind this was to have a distinct sound at the start of the album, as I think it's important to have some sort of unique marker - think of Super Furry Animals' album Radiator, for example. Again, having a sound fade in is not particularly good way of achieving this.
Then we come to the main riff (-11.44). This is based around three notes - an inverted major triad of D, playing F#, D, A. This comes from a very comfortable fretting when it dropped tuning (C in the case of the recording):
C-9-----
G-7-----
C-6-----
The whole first meloding idea is just an unfolding of this arpeggio. it feels unsettled and like it has direction, the heavy inversion preventing it from sounding resolved. We move through D maj/F#, then to Gminor, then down again to F#minor - a chord where only one note is only one semitone different to the opening chord. then we quickly move through Cminor and Ebmajor. all that sequence just felt like a very natural progression from that opening triad.
We play this on two guitars - one classical, the other clean electric. no guitars that made the final cut were intended to permanent; they were just decent-enough takes that I got used to.
at this point, an electric rhthym starts - initially just on off beats, but then coming in as a beating/marching rhythm at -11.21. This was generated through my Littlebits synth kit; noise source triggered from PC MIDI, which I'm effecting with filter, envelope, and delay. there are two takes - the fast rhythm and the slow rhythm are independent, so that I could have a long release on the 'snare' sound and a short release on the 'hat' sound. The rhythm is a musical nod towards Holst's Mars, which I hear Black Sabbath were trying to rip off when they came up with the riff for Black Sabbath. Mars is in 5/4 though, and the first parts of this tune are all in straight 4/4 time, so I had to mangle it a bit but that's where it came from.
Also the Doepfer Dark Energy synthesiser comes in at this time. Like the In Case Of Emergence album, the notes for this are entirely programmed, while filtering and affecting were done live when recording it.
at -11.59 one of the guitars drops down an octave. More synths - a melodic one and chords (the Waldorf Rocket, I think) - and cellos start to come in.
Melodic idea B kicks in at -10:17; a 6-chord sequence that again felt like a completely natural progression from melodic idea A, possibly being written in the same day. The melody to this part came after, written so that this part wasn't 'just chords'. The chords are: Bminor, Ebmajor, Gminor; Dmajor, Fmajor, Aminor. Each chord is related to the last and the sequence still resolves to the Dmajor in the middle. Generally, each chord drops one or two notes down a little to form the next chord, except the last to the first, where it all raises two notes.
We return to A at -9.33 with a synth drum beat starting too. there is more arpeggiation in the guitars now, and the 'snare' sound is firing on a more frequent off beat.
At -8:48 we come to melodic idea C: Dmajor, Gminor, Eb-5, F#diminished. as it progresses and speeds up, it takes on the rhythm of Smells Like Teen Spirit, another musical reference. The pace accelerates so as to naturally bridge to the higher BPM grind section. a breakbeat - Realized's The Human Mosquet, sampled from the Japanese Assault sampler on Relapse records - tells us it's time for the first heavy bit.
Melodic ideas D (-8:07) and E were both written at school during an ofsted inspection. I found it tricky to transpose them into keys that worked well together, ultimately they both resolve to C although they are in slightly different diminshed modes.. Here we find kick and snare drums sampled from Living With Disfigurement's track Better Living Through Surgery, which helpfully starts with a simple 'kick snare' intro. I didn't sample any closed hi hats in this track.
Completing a 'technical exercise' cover of The Berzerker's track Reality some years before, in preparation for this song, helped me with the programming of the drums. All snares are off beats in this section, which is tricky to tell when they're this fast, but I think it sounds better than on-the-beat blast-beats. All programmed, naturally.
at -7.32, we hit a bit of an clubby break (melodic idea F), with chords similar to melodic idea A (but more diminished); we play it light then heavy. This section (particularly around -7:05) is as close as the track gets to a guitar solo; I had planned to some bring in some hot brass to squeal over the track, particularly over D, E, and F, but the pandemic ruled that out.
I think the return to melodic idea D at -7.03 sounds better than when it first arrived. This is partly due to the guitarmonies between the two takes of distorted guitar. As said, these were not meant to be final takes, so rather than re-record the harmonising guitar, i just pitch-shifted it up three semi-tones; an advantage to playing in a diminshed scale is that it allows for this self-similarity.
At -6.44, the last two diminished power chords - an audio reference to the Dillinger Escape Plan's track 'The Running Board' - reach up to a final high, but instead of the C diminshed that would be expected, we hit the notes E and C - an ambiguous inversion of Cmajor, also a transposition of the chord that openend the song.
However, at -6.40, we resolve the ambiguity by introducing the bass note A, defining the two notes as part of an Aminor chord. Also at this point, we leave 4/4 for a folky post-math riff in 5/4 (melodic idea G).
This part was tricky to mix, and i began to pare back the mix by dropping layers in and out. at times the guitars are emphasised, at times the cellos, at times the synths. We've had some fairly maximal music, and at this point it the tune I was craving simplicity.
Melodic idea G does not repeat or make a call back in the tune. This idea of a melodic detour is fairly predictable, but I think Comus did it to another level two songs on their 'First Utterance' album, where an entirely different tune seems to fade into the middle of a song, then fade out again, like an interval or interlude. I see G like that; I needed a complete break from the themes of the song, different key, and different time sig, and this riff was waiting to be used.
Then at -5:26, something changes; we return to melodic idea A, but keep the 5/4 time sig established in G. the tune then proceeds to work through melodic ideas A and B but in 5/4, then fading out into a drum break, before returning to C in 7/8 at -3.22.
from -5:04, the guitars stop, leaving just cello, bass, and drums. I found this space really important; you've heard so much that plenty is going on in your brain at this point and inferences are being made that mean I didn't have to put as much up explicitly.
at -4:27 a filtered and distorted sample of the drum break from Botch's 'Transitions from Persona to Object' comes in. more programmed drums come in and a bit more prominace is given to the rocket synth chords. as the music fades out, extended takes from the intro fade in and further drum tracks kick in, until it's largely noise.
late in the day, i decided to add a cutup of the amen break, as i'd finally figured out how to multi-track the sampler in reaper and was able to build a kit out of cropped samples from the same wave file. this doubles the synth drums from -3.14. we stick to 7/8 as we enter a break-heavy version of melodic idea E; it's missing guitars because I could not play it at that speed in that time, which makes it even sweeter when they come back in the in the 7/8 reprise of melodic idea D. also late on, I kept the amen break going through this section, making the drums less monotonous (at the risk of sounding like a self-rip-off of Klein Bottle Fish Tank).
I remember practising guitar a lot in the summer leading up to recording, for the first time sitting down with a metronome and steadily improving the speed I could play these riffs at; the -3.00 minute version of D is something I'm especially proud I managed to achieve, probably the hardest thing I've ever written for myself to play. This section actually works out as 30/8, as it's three bars of 7 then one bar of 9, or two bars of 7 and two bars of 8. again, we use the pitch shift trick rather than actually playing three semi-tones up; at the same time, i bring the ride cymbal back in which just elevates the mix further.
then the guitars repeat their trick from the end of melodic idea F, but this time land on the Cdiminished chord that was promised. this rings out and knobs are tweaked, and then at -2.20, we enter a slower, heavy reprise of B in 4/4. paring this back to start off with to guitars and cellos, then 2 drum samples I could not better enter; pig destroyer's Junkyard God and Giant Squid's Panthalessa. A new guitar melody has started; one thing that loving Mansun's album Six left me with was the notion of having more than one melody going on at once.
The rocket goes into arpeggio mode, and the original melody enters on synth and cello, eventually the lead guitar joins in with it too.
at -0.21, we get a guitar lick that bridges to the outro; it's on a completely separate channel, with a mild distortion and echo, which sets it apart from anything else in the mix. I've a 'personal best' number of tracks running in this mix - 51 - which I think I've handled, despite being an uncompressed mix. I want to fit in with Earache's 'High Dynamic Range' style of old-school mixes but really it comes from incompetence...
Sort of. I didn't *want* a compressed mix. I wanted something spacious and swirly. something that doesn't cow to modern ideas of listening to music on laptop speakers and tiny white headphones.
now at -0.16, was where the tune used to end. but then I saw a video about the Thue-morse sequence by Matt Parker, and experimented with the chaotic rhythm it produces.
the rule is: A and B take turns at taking turns. so you start with AB, then you invert the current sequence and add it. so AB -> ABBA - > ABBABAAB - > ABBABAABBAABABBA, which is where I left it; I carried out a longer version of it here:
taking kick and bass note as B, and diminished power chord and snare as A. Oh! and then i messed about with breaks over the top and realised that a The Locust drum break sounded great over the top, as it put some some toms in - I can't remember the name, but it's off track 15 plague soundscapes.
I wasn't sure to let the chords ring out or just end it very quickly - letting ring won out this time. I also pasted the very first arpeggio over the ending too.
next time: what are the lyrics all about?
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