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» solopiano 4
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COVER ART:
WHAT DO I HAVE TO SAY FOR MYSELF?
The sun is uncomfortably warm. On one hand, it helps our crops grow, yet on the other, stare into it long enough and you lose your eyesight. This ain't an abyss we're talking about — it's a motherfreakin' celestial body!
The cover art you see above is a composite of 4 Second Life suns taken at varying points during the day. I get an 80s vibe from it, sorta like how the sun appeared in series like Airwolf or Knight Rider, so I pasted a cheesy retro LED font atop, reminiscent of those calculator watches (one of which I had).
It is not meant to be exceptional.
Last week (2007-04-15 to be precise), I promptly made the decision that I was going to sit down and play piano for an hour, and record whatever came out, to share with you. One take, one track. I ended up doing exactly that.
During the course of my piano improvisations, I've become increasingly self-aware. And like the sun, there were parts where I basked, delving into broad chords, or pointillist-like strokes of my fingers, reaching across the span of the keyboard. (Trivia: during sp4, every single one of the 88 keys is played at least once.) And at other parts, I felt off-balance, near-disturbed, but soon enough, lulled back into the conceptual mothership of it all, tractor-beamed into familiarities. But from such unease of exploration comes further discoveries.
So, I don't think this is a great work by any means — my wife said it "agitated" her. And its sheer duration could easily qualify it as bloated, in world a of condensed attention spans. But I believe, as has happened before, that there are moments in the timeline which could be distilled and developed, evolved into stronger compositions. Melodies which take hold and won't die, now that they've been exposed to this sonic sunlight.
[My favorite part within is prolly the boppy, almost techno-like staccato ostinatos in the key of A minor (@ 22:46). It's actually self-referential to some of the first tracks I ever composed on synthesizer.]
As my intent here was one of transience yet captured on modern recording media, solo piano 4 won't be on turned into a badge on the left sidebar. When it passes from my blog's front page, it'll be up to future visitors to find it on their own. Exactly as I intended.
Phenomenal Torley! Inspiring! =) Lets do a piano jam in the voice beta sometime soon!
@Keystone: Sounds like that would be gr00vy. =D
Incredible improvisation!
I play the piano myself, but I would never be able to spontaneously come up with any part of that wonderful music on SP4.
Would like to visit watermelinden land, but it's not available on the teen grid :-(.
like your textures a lot by the way, very useful.
big admiarer!
I would like to add in a classical guitar riff / although not necessarily to the themes built here in 4; guitar / piano accompaniment can be a difficult game given that my instrument can carry melody -
Torley imho you would be better off carrying the lead riff and melody and letting us at first follow you into the piece. There are too many changes here for me to think otherwise.
BTW I am only an hour or so old + I like SL very much.
@Magnus: Thanks muchly! Awww, one thing I've that I haven't gotten to quite yet (there were some kinks), is I wanted to make a portable version of my Watermelinden Land build freely distributable, and share it on Teen Grid. Glad you could get my textures tho!
@Turner: That's a fantastic idea. I like classical guitar songs a lot… there was a time when I did a cover version of the Kingdom Hearts theme and infact came up with something a little Balearic to accompany the piano; the MP3's not up currently but maybe I'll share it again in the future. Also, there are previous piano works when I repeat riffs more, but this time, I wanted to improvise more thematically. And a warm welcome to Second Life!