I really only started messing with music when I needed something to go along with the animations I was working on in high school. They were just really simple piano recordings, but it sparked an interest almost immediately. The first couple of things I tried kind of replicating were really lofty compositions. Stuff like the Tale of Ashitaka from Princess Mononoke, and even working out the Prelude Theme from the final fantasy games. I was pretty certain that it was something that I wanted to build up, even if I only did it for myself and nobody listening. It has still been kept that way, now more so because I don't have as much time as I used to.
So I went on like that, kind of latching onto different sounds and learning why I liked them. A lot of times it turned out to be for the same reasons despite the genre, the textures and the narrative music could build. And that sounds a little cheesy I suppose, but it never left. I didn't know what kind of things I wanted to make, because I didn't know that much about music in general (at least the presentation side of things). Music has so many faces nowadays, so many genres, and even more people who are very judgmental about different genres. It took a long time before I could find something that I believed in enough to work fully on. Albeit, I did have a lot of different projects, many of which I will never show anyone. Lots of different attempts at everything from electronic, acoustic, pop, even funk. I was so excited about music, and it's weird to think about that time because the world of music was so much smaller then. The things I wanted to accomplish were so certain but daunting at the same time. Not in that I didn't think I could finish, but just the thought of having some kind of final product that I could listen to and think, "I made this, this is a world I made for myself" was so huge. And that's not too far off from how I thought about animation, but these projects were actually do-able, and not so convoluted where people could pick out what was wrong with a story, or why things didn't look realistic. Music seemed more like a pure energy that could be justified any way you made it. I mean I know now that isn't fully true, there are plenty of sliding scales of quality, but not at the time.
Anyways, the first semester of collage, I had this video project, but it was totally an excuse to create music. I was using my computer to record at the time, and still had my old keyboard. I went around getting strange recordings of stuff like printers and my roommate's sister talking. Just random stuff. I ended up churning out this:
https://soundcloud.com/wesley-cathon/youre-dreaming-arent-you
After that was a year of just focusing on school. Summer hit, and I had this really wonderful time back home. It is honestly one of the most nostalgic memories I have. I spent the entire time inside getting back into music and finding the world of it had expanded to exciting amounts. I was getting much more into electronic music, and at the same time trying to achieve something reminiscent of 70s psychedelic stuff. It was a weird, weird body of work that came from this time back home. The recordings are stored away in harddrives and computers. One of those things stuck, and it carried over to the next year when we had an apartment. I told myself, "This is getting finished".
I took away the guitar parts, because I realized that I didn't have the technology to make that sound good. I still wanted the strange ambient bits, but I wanted the whole thing to be based more electronically, because that was what I knew I could finish. This was what I finished after a long time of figuring out how to compose everything, because it was kind of my baby at the time:
https://soundcloud.com/wesley-cathon/the-childe-thomas
I was on a total high, and wanted nothing but time to work on music. I finished this a few days after the last:
https://soundcloud.com/wesley-cathon/kindredscape
There were many others, but again, those are stored away. I only really show that goofy stuff to people I know really well. Anyways, after a while, my roommate at the time, Luis Perez, sort of out of nowhere introduced me to the world of IDM, and it changed everything. Well not everything, but I found the sound I was looking for. I didn't like anything I had recorded at this point, and realized that I couldn't work on something that was completely limited to a computer.
I researched much more about analog recording, I wanted the work to be as genuinely close to the warm aesthetic as possible. Although I didn't have an analog synthesizer, I managed to get ahold of a four track tape recorder. That was my holy grail of the summer following all of this. As the school year ended, I went back to those 70s roots, but in a different way. I was listening to very orchestral things, and strange pioneering into the beginning of electronic music. Stuff like Tangerine Dream:
and more things from the 90s, like a lot of Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin:
I was seriously in heaven. These textures and nostalgic feelings were overwhelming. I started trying to think of how I could work with these ideas, but not rip them off. I began experimenting almost every day with different things I could do with old tapes and obscuring the sounds of different instruments. It's still a struggle I'm taking on now, but I'll get to that later.
My first real break with this sound came with a recording I put together that used a digital organ synthesizer (bashed to hell through the tape recording/re-recording process) and different sounds from around my room. I also tuned down the guitar I had to the lowest note I could play that still had some sort of recognizable tone. As I transfered everything back over to a digital format, This is how it turned out:
https://soundcloud.com/wesley-cathon/the-voice-in-the-hands
It was just an experiment, and was painfully slow moving, but I still think fondly of it as the first time I generated a sound that I was happy with. It was actually supposed to be sort of a sound scape for a story I was illustrating:
So yeah! I'll stop there for now because I realized how long this post turned out to be. If you read this far into it, it actually really means a lot that you took the time to do so haha. This is a practice I hold onto almost sacredly nowadays, and will never give up recording. I'll be continuing with where the work has gone nowadays sometime soon. Thanks!
-Wes
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