BSPH: Story of Mine Booty CBVPD

Narcissistic self-appreciation \ deprecation time! This is "Mine Booty CBVPD". It is a silly title. I think it is terrible. But i thought it was just right for the thing at the time. And so it sticked and i was too lazy to come up with anything worthwhile later.

"Mine Booty CBVPD" is a minimalist psychedelic ambient drone "sha-la-la, blah blah boom boom" stomper with long lasting mind-melting bore-inducing effect. It goes on and on and on and on and on and on and then on and on and on and on and so on and so forth - it is really long for no particular reason (except for "serious art is long", of course). It was composed by yours truly in a eight week long fit of inspiration in late January, throughout February and early March of 2015. It was a fun time. Let's call it Bil Sabab Overdrive.

"Mine Booty CBVPD" was born out of spite for Amboy Dukes "The Journey to the center of the mind". I always found this song to be annoying. Many years ago i was having sound editing blast with. I've stretched it out to couple of hours of insignificant lowercase ambience. But it wasn't fulfilling. I wanted to make my own ultimate trip music composition - for real. And then it happened.

"Mine Booty CBVPD" is based around a sample from a song by Captain Beefheart titled "Day Poppy". It was inspired by early minimalist work of Steve Reich - "It's gonna rain" and "Come out" in particular. Its phasing hypnotic repetition and subsequent pareidolia caused by sonic distortion and permutation was major aesthetic influence. Another important source of inspiration was then nascent vaporwave and seapunk. While it is not that apparent in the resulting composition - i was really into it at that time and i desperately wanted to repurpose some old fancy musik in an unexpected overly creative way. However things went in a completely different direction and so all that is left of original vaporwave influence is that overwhelmingly incognious and relentlessly stupid title.

Technically it is very simple composition. In its foundation lies two second sample from an introduction of a song "Veteran's Day Poppy" by Captain Beefheart. The main reason behind the choice was simply because i felt that this little bit was completed wasted in a song. I wanted to reappropriate it and make something worthwhile with it. Before that i've tried to do something with a rhythm track from Velvet Underground "The Gift" but it was too rough and low riding. Instead of creating thumping sonic landscape - it was just a bob-sham gurgling swamp of featureless noise. On the other hand "Veteran's Day Poppy" had clean and crisp sound that was perfect for further experimentation. (Thank you, Frank!)

"Veteran's Day Poppy" sample was stretched out to 30 second bit and then doubled with one more track with sample pitched down. It creates Black Sabbath-y unison pulsing groove completely absent from original bit. It always reminded me of some zigzagging buzzsaw shuffle. Then the whole thing was played on two and then three separate media players. Resulting overlapping and permutations were recorded and analysed. After some tries and errors i've managed to create a chart of permutations and based upon that i've started to combine things.

At first i used randomizers to define the sequence. But it was proven to be not very effective as it made the thing sound like switching channels and definitely not like "journey to the center of the mind". After few unsuccessful tries i switched to manual combining. It was time-consuming but very satisfying. Brick by brick i've made a perfect sequence that truly reflected what i thought was "Journey to the center of the mind". Sadly it is not that apparent in the final composition. It appears to be happening at random. On one hand - it always irritated me. But on the other hand - it is fascinating how natural it sounds. By any means it shouldn't be like that. And yet it is.

I'm really proud of "Mine Booty CBVPD". I think it is one of my best music composition. Sadly it is also one of the last time i really managed to create a serious music composition. But you never know what will happen next.