Tuesday, January 31, 2012

What Is A Song Cycle?

With our latest LP of the LxL Song Cycle in post-production the question has been coming up a lot with fans lately: "What is a song cycle, exactly?" So, we're going to get Rebeqa to give you the rundown:
"Great question! According to Wikipedia a song cycle is, "a group of songs designed to be performed in a sequence as a single entity. As a rule, all of the songs are by the same composer and often use words from the same poet or lyricist." Wikipedia then goes on to blah blah blah about how "unification can be achieved" and the "underlying musical means". Scrap all that. In plain English: a song cycle is a group of songs meant to go together in a certain order, and they usually share a music or lyrical theme that repeats somehow within all the songs. It's kind of like the first version of the "concept album"...but before recordings.

"In the LxL Song Cycle we have the following 3 tracks:

1) Evicted From My Skin I Find Myself Unwelcome;
2) I'm A Monster Just Like You Are;
3) Blood And Wine Mingle With The Soil.

"Each track has a distinct melody or guitar riff that goes with it - its own music theme. These themes are then borrowed and quoted in the other songs (some are hidden, so you have to listen close, others are really obvious.) The lyrics also reappear from song to song, but you'll find that by the time you reach the end of track 3 the lyrics from track 1 have a different meaning because of what you've learned along the way. It's a bit of a treasure hunt to find all the repeats and reoccurring themes. We had a lot of fun putting it together and it turned into a band challenge as we stole each others melodies and brought them back later in the cycle in our own parts."

Monday, January 16, 2012

New LP In Motion

We're recording a new LP featuring the 3 track Song Cycle. Aside from having a great day of recording music, two things of interest happened:

1. The studio is REALLY cold; and
2. We ran out of iso-rooms for the instrument amps so had to get creative.