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 Back To Ampersand Index PAGE 11 - Wormwood (Track 5) - One day in mid 2004, my mother emailed me a link to a now well known website, http://www.kiddofspeed.com, that chronicles the journey and thoughts of a woman, Elena, on a motorcyle trip north from Kiev in The Ukraine into the town of Chernobyl. I had my yellow Westone Stratocaster copy (guitar) in my lap, and while looking through the pictures, after getting past the pictures of the kindergarten, I realized that I had started playing the repeating guitar part that you hear in the track. Both because of the quality of the shielding in guitar, and how close I was to my CRT monitor, there was this overwhelmingly loud 60 hz sound coming in on the guitar track. It was so hypnotizing and I enjoyed it so much that I decided to leave it in and just hit record to document exactly what was going through me at that moment. As most occurrences like this from the recording process, it's the recording you hear on there now. Not long after recording the guitar part, I decided to solo over it with my Carlo Robelli (Sam Ash brand) $120 fretless bass, which is the bass I used on every track on the record except for The Tundra.  The Carlo Robelli 4 String Fretless live with Paul Wertico Trio in September 2004, right around when I recorded the bass solos. (The red marker on my hand is to indicate that I was under 21). I use roundwound strings on all of my fretless basses and flatwounds on all of my fretted ones. I really have no idea why it's popular to do them the the other way around, I think it sounds terrible. I realized a few years ago that if it wasn't for the problems with my hands, I would have never started playing bass seriously, which would mean that I wouldn't have started playing with Paul, and also that I wouldn't have approached the guitar from the new position I did. With this in mind, most of the bass soloing on this record is played in a very non-abstract way because I felt competant enough at the instrument to still play it a normal way, which contrasts the guitar soloing on the record. Since then, I've started playing the bass in various unique and abstract ways, as well as a wider variety of basses, but for many years I played this bass this way and this is a very endearing documentation to me of that period in my life. I left a lot of space in the solo, mainly as a result of the trance-like feeling of the piece. After listening back to it, I decided it needed more going on, but I didn't want to have the bass any busier, so I decided to create a trade-off between the guitar and bass. In this musical exchange, I wanted the two instruments to sound somewhat similar, so I randomly and extremely detuned the strings on my red Epiphone Dot guitar to put it into the same octave as a bass. I used an eBow on the floppy, almost useless strings and began soloing. With the strings providing little of their own resistance, I really liked the way you could almost hear the pure energy of the eBow device itself coming across. Also, with the strings that loose, I could alter the pitch a tremendous amount just by pushing my finger down harder on the same fret and I could bend any given note an entire octave up. This sound also benefitted a bit from iZtope Trash creating some interesting articulations of the dynamics. When the background parts that I had made ran out while I was soloing, I just decided to keep playing, unaccompanied for a long time at the end. I ended up liking it so much that I wrote an arrangement around it at 5:07 to leave it in. There's a bit of controversy due to translation discrepancies, but the word "Chernobyl" means "black grass" (and is very close to the word "chornobyl," which refers to the mugwort plant), which would indicate that the name of the town literally means "wormwood." Wormwood is a reference to a number of plants in the same family, but mainly Artemisia absinthium, which we also know as Absinthe. There is a reference to Wormwood in Revelations, Chapter 8, Verses 10-11, which speak about the sequence of events that will occur at the end of the world: And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as if it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; and the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter. I found recordings of individuals reading this passage in many many different languages. I listened to all of them and I selected five, whose readers vocal timbre and pitch felt the most favorable to the song. I cut out the sections, strung them together, and played them through the guitar solo settings, which sounds like a cheap radio sitting in a room. The languages and their appearances in the track are as follows: Tamil, starting at 1:05 Bengal, starting at 2:14 Punjabi, starting at 3:13 Tagalog, starting at 4:26 With this very very abstract harmonic palette established with my makeshift choir, I then went to write a legitimate normal choir part to definitively outline the narrative and form of the piece. This was another thing that the first version of which was lost in a power outage. A second one was completed, and after living with it for a month or so, I decided it was too concrete and specific, so I ran it through some effects, including distortion and a UAD plugin that introduced a non-sinusoidal (triangle wave) LFO (Low Frequency Oscillation) of the pitch, bending it up and down from its original pitch. This gave it a constant feeling of either rising or falling. I decided upon a point in the repeating guitar pattern where this new form would start, which ended up being at 2:15, which is where you can hear this choir enter. All of the notes from the choir part are also doubled by the celesta. Here is a short clip of the original choir sound: wormwood_choir1.mp3 Here is a clip of the entire choir arrangement through the effect found on the record: wormwood_choir2.mp3 SONAR has a tool you can use to draw envelopes that basically creates a random pattern with instant (not gradual) intervals to each random point. I recorded about 6 tracks of the celesta from the tune going through the Line 6 DL4 Echoplex simulator and then lined them all up to start at 6:02. I used this random tool on all 6 tracks, so you are hearing a random combination of any number of the 6 of them at once until the very end of the track, going into Boolean Mortality. At 6:07, a sparse mix of &hearts enters, highlighting only the upper frequencies of a number of instruments, such as the acoustic guitar, celesta, and a few synthesizers. Almost immediately after that begins, the bass solo from Soul Partition enters at 6:09. The VCR loop from Halyard can be heard entering at 6:20 and the woodwind arrangement from The Tundra enters at 6:50. At 7:07, I brought back some of the stretched voice parts from earlier in the track that were originally creating the droning noises. This time I put distortion on them and highlighted them a bit more. The sped up drum kit part from Halyard can be heard at 7:16, much slower than the drums were even originally recorded at. Back To Index |