Nuclear Spin (Hello)
Version 1
February 17, 2007
[2:32]
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See also:
Nuclear Spin (Man Will Never Fly Version).
Lyrics:
Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.
Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.
Die schönsten Früchte ab von jedem Baum...
Baum...
Thuswise ends the bonus track!
Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.
Do you think man will ever fly?
No, come to Hotel One, it's the best prime number...
... and it's not divisible by its own bowls.
Alright, I think we've got everything we need here,
Where's the uh.. oh...
That's awful... forty-nine minutes...
Do you think man will ever fly?
Die Luft ist still, als atmete man kaum...
Instruments: Yamaha CBX-K1XG MIDI Keyboard + Oscillator; Hands, Feet, and a Chair; Percussion Samples; Epiphone Wildkat (played acoustically); Pulse Pro Jr. Drum Set + Hi-Hats; Kramer Baretta 5-string Bass (plunk, slap, & slide); Kramer Focus 111S; Dean Exotica QSE Acoustic/Electric Guitar; Sofia Mari SM3448 Accordion.
This is basically a glorified instrumental, intended mainly as a let's-get-things-started sort of number. Like
Sever (Ballad of The Leg With Gangrene), this song was named by looking at
Wikipedia articles at random until a phrase came up that I liked. The riff is a fairly straightforward loop, only really distinguished by the strumming rhythm. The conservative drumming draws from when I practiced the song a few times playing the guitar and drums at the same time, meaning I could only use three feet and no hands to play the kick, snare, and hi-hats. In this mix, however, the drums were recorded individually and mixed in later.
The intro to the song is marked mostly by the ambient glowing sound created by running my
MIDI Keyboard into a slightly detuned oscillator in
FruityLoops and smushing my whole arm down across all the white keys (fortunately, the song is in the key of C). The staccato percussion in the latter half of the intro was the metronome I used in recording the song, derived from an abbreviated sample of a song by
The Strokes.
The muffled vocal samples scattered throughout the song are simply a device to break up the repetitive cycle of the instrumentation. They all come from recordings sitting around in my archives. Some bits came from friends and dormmates I lived with in the Japanese House at
William and Mary: the two German bits (Jen), the weird backwards ambient chatter during the second "Hello" part (various people), and the "Alright, I think we've got everything we need here..." (Andrew). "Do you think man will ever fly?", "Come to Hotel One", and "Forty-nine minutes", as well as the "soy soy, hoy hoy" mumblings in the last part come from Ray and Kevin, with whom I have periodically recorded jams. "Thuswise ends the bonus track!", as well as the mumble at the end of the intro, come from a drum-n-guitar demo I recorded recently before working on this.
Trivia:
This is the first time since 2001 that I've played the
Kramer Baretta bass (the first bass guitar I owned) in a recording.
This is NOT the first time I have inserted the timekeeper sample, used to synchronize recorded tracks, into the final mix — the muted strumming heard throughout version 2 of
The Thawing Song up through the fade-out was the timekeeper I used for that song.
Finally, the backwards double-speed
acoustic/electric guitar parts were originally recorded in July 2003 against an instrumental called "One And Only", also in the key of C, composed by Ray Naegle.
See also:
Nuclear Spin (Man Will Never Fly Version).
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