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I think I have seldom been so optimistic about something I created, so free of doubt and worry - which is coincidentally a feeling I want to convey with this new piece and project / album.
I dearly love the OST for "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis and always wanted to do something in a similar fashion, but up until now lacked the means to do it. The means being a library (I'm not big on collaborations of such an interconnected nature and am quite the control freak, so outsourcing performances isn't yet my forte) that could portray solo strings in this very specifically rustic and imperfect, soft and brittle form that is so iconic to Warren Ellis' style of playing.
Well, along come Orchestral Tools and break my mind with the unbelievably authentic and brilliant "Peteris Vasks' Strings", forcing me to make this!
I gotta say, I've never been more happy about any kind of enslavement.
But jokes aside, this really is one of the best purchases I have ever made, and one of the best pieces of music I have ever made - maybe not because of some brilliant melodical structure or a perfect arrangement (which this obviously doesn't have :P), but because of this unbelievably authentic and iconic sound, and the atmosphere it creates.
I did have to do quite a bit of EQ adjustments and automation to iron out some of the more resonant moments (didn't quite achieve a perfect balance, but I'm gonna get better the more I use it), plus making my own mic-mix cause the library was recorded in a bloody huge church - but the close mics are, despite this, bone dry and together with some of the other options able to have this up-close, intimate feeling that I wouldn't have thought possible.
One or two samples are a little borked sometimes, but with a bit of imagination one can circumvent these small errors.
All in all, this product is nigh perfect - for me, obviously :)
But enough about this - what Revalescence is about, is a journey. As always. I need to wander, both in reality as in my fantasy so this kind of theme will never go away, most likely :P
Anyhow, the term describes the process or rather state of getting better, healing. And since that is such a loose concept, you could apply it to really anything : a struggle with mental health, a physical injury or other avenues of trouble that open themselves up to you.
This time, I will not describe an actual story, but rather a more metaphoric path to betterment, whatever that might entail for you specifically.
I love placing things into the setting of an Arizona desert, cause it's just so relentlessly beautiful to me, but feel free to wander off to anywhere you would like to go with it. Sometimes, I'll be more setting-specific, other times it'll be more ambiguous - whatever I feel like at any given moment.
You can expect ups and downs, but at the end I will try to weave it all together into a calming, reassuring and hopeful outlook and reflection on things past, present and future.
All of this sounds terribly pretentious and usually I would refrain from writing bloated nonsense like that - but I think this time, I'll try being more conscious about creating music, with a broad, human theme in mind that one can read into if one chooses to. Don't know whether or not it's gonna work out, but what the hell - I'll try anyway :D
If you did, thank you very much for reading through all of this and I hope you'll find a connection to Revalescence, as have I.
Cheerio,
Cedric
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