“Pendel” (8/8/15, Eilean Rec.) - Liner Notes
http://eileanrec.bandcamp.com/album/pendel
https://yadayn.bandcamp.com
While the collection of tracks on my debut album “Vloed” was deliberately recorded as a fully thought out album, “Pendel” came about completely different. Only a few months after the release of “Vloed” Mathias Van Eecloo of Eilean Records contacted me, asking me if I would like to release an album on his label. At the time I had no plan to record new stuff, but I agreed anyway. In the end I just started recording a bunch of songs both finished and unfinished, hunted for samples in old recordings, and composed some entirely new material. Despite songs originating from different contexts both chronologically and geographically, the album does feel specifically linked to the time (mid-2014-mid-2015) and place (Brussels) I was in at the time of recording. It is a less cathartic experience than “Vloed”, simply because it does not contain an epic centrepiece like that album’s title track, but perhaps because of this it feels more balanced to me.
For the handful of people who might be interested, here are some liner notes on the individual songs.
When Mathias asked me to record an album for Eilean, he was especially interested in more compositions along the lines of “Vloed”s opening track “Eb”. “In” probably comes closest: a loop taken from an old recording (on a 12-string guitar) twisted beyond recognition and augmented by a droney bass and some other loops taken from old recordings.
Mussorgsky’s “Pictures of an exhibition” is a wonderfully varied work which always returns to the same base theme, a construction which I thought fitted quite well with the eclectic musical mood swings I was aiming at with this record, so I included this interpretation of “Bydlo”. A few years ago I had a momentary craze for covers, which resulted in this as well as interpretations of (among others) Johannes Brahms’s “Tragic Ouverture” and “I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys. “Veld” changed quite a lot throughout versions: it used to be slower, contained (badly) sung vocals and it has had a number of different titles. The audio sample of Halldór Laxness’ poem is a very recent addition (I am grateful to Bára Sigfúsdóttir for providing me with a rough translation), but one which I find works very well with the track. His book “Independent People” was a devastating read for me. Highly recommended.
Barst (Crack (as in, a “crack” in the wall))
In an earlier tracklist of this album, there was a constant alternating of electronic and acoustic compositions, as a nod to the pendulum in the title. This concept got somewhat changed around, especially in the later half of the album, but the album does start out with this pattern in the first five songs. I believe it works exceptionally well with “Barst” which echoes the reversed lines at the end of “Veld” and ends with triplets that are echoed again in “Spiegel”. This track was built around short bits of accidental sounds, to which I then added the ukulele part.
In another initial version of the album, “Spiegel” was the title track. “Spiegel” means “mirror”, a title taken from the fact that the composition is structured as a palindrome. I have a great fascination with palindromes, and initially even tried to record this album as a palindrome of sorts with this song as the midpoint. Obviously, that was way too difficult to achieve, but the song itself still has a central place on the album.
Another track built around samples taken from earlier recordings, to which a simple ukulele part was added. I got the ukulele as a birthday gift from my girlfriend not long before I started recording this album, probably the best present I ever got!
This is a companion piece to “Bries”, and was built mostly by reusing elements from that track. The initial droney harmonium sound is actually the melodica of “Bries” heavily pitched down and layered, and the guitar is part of its ukulele pitched down. The drums are accidentally recorded sounds. Despite being built around samples from “Bries” I think it sounds quite different melodically. I love the way samples can really take on a life of their own in different contexts but still refer to each other in a sort of intertextual logic.
“Pendel” is a very special composition, the key that finally made the album work as a whole for me. I had constructed a much longer, quite epic song (+10 mins) in the same tuning as this song but was not really happy with it. At some point I started improvising around some of its chords and suddenly I fell on the main theme of “Pendel”. Following this, I was quickly able to finish it with bits and pieces of that earlier song. The recording was done on that same day on a warm spring night on my balcony in the clear light of a full moon. You can actually hear the wind and distant traffic of the city. One of those moments when suddenly everything feels right. I could have recorded a more polished version of the song (this one is still partly improvised), but in the end decided not to, as an ode to that moment of bliss and inspiration.
One of those rare songs which seem to compose themselves. I layered a short organ note into the thick opening drone, improvised the ukulele part (I actually can’t remember how to play one part of it!) and then on a whim added the melodica, which I then duplicated in echo.
This is an older song which didn’t make the cut for “Vloed”. It’s the only song I composed while studying in Cairo which I still play often (there’s a few songs with vocals from that period as well, but sadly enough my singing voice is useless). The window of the title is the window of my bedroom, out of which I would stare endlessly instead of doing my homework. I wrote a short story about the feelings I associate with this window and won a writing contest with it some time ago. The story can be read here.
When composing this, I was listening to a lot of John Zorn, which perhaps explains the melodic leanings. The second part with the voice sample actually originates from another song, but it works much better in this context. The voice sample is an Arabic preach ending in the Islamic proclamation of faith (shahada) which I found on a cassette tape in Cairo (it was supposed to contain Arabic pop).
Two of my absolute favourite albums are “Spirit Of Eden” and “Laughing Stock” by Talk Talk, and I tried to create a similar atmosphere around silences here. The keyboard parts were again improvised, live I play different lines on guitar.
I took clarinet classes for a few years but did not really get to any level of proficiency (playing a wind instrument is hard work!). I did record a few very basic things, from which I sometimes reuse parts (see also several songs on my electronic “Snow-Fi” ep under the Gluem moniker). The initial drone of “Wind” is built around one clarinet note heavily layered and downpitched, which ends up being joined by some samples and then again a ukulele part which serves as a bridge to the last song.
On this album I often used the ukulele as an instrument to record some lines to fill out electronic compositions, but here I actually wrote a song on ukulele to which I then added a second part on guitar. I think it quite nicely encapsulates the nature of this album, with instruments taking the cue from each other and different musical atmospheres alternating in a continuum of sound, a pendulum of musical styles.
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