Sulphur Mill Garden b/w Repetitive Cycle
"Sulphur Mill Garden" (Recorded 23 September 2005)
This five-minute free-form composition consists of me making scraping noises against various objects with a pen, a sample from a cassette I made a few years ago that I used to record rhythm patterns on so I could use them at a later date for some song, and a drum machine loop -- all slowed down to unrecognizability and echoed relentlessly. A sample from the end of this composition appears in the song below.
"Repetitive Cycle"
A doomy monster of a song -- the bass consists of two notes that seem to echo to eternity and carve a muddy path through cesspool sludge, sombre atmospheric effects swirl and bubble and flow in the background, and in the wordless choruses this psychedelic riff (not a guitar but actually these booping noises on my drum machine programme that are VERY heavily treated and distorted) develops out of nowhere and it's pretty startling! It's the only song I have written (lyrically at least) that affects my emotional state -- and of course I'm the hardest person to please that I know of, so for something of my creation to accomplish that is quite impressive. However, I'll have to re-record the vocals because they kept getting distorted and so you hear these crackling noises at times -- I wish I knew how to simply polish it off without scrapping the vocals, but oh well. I don't have time to re-record them today, as it took several hours to do and I can't work on it for another few hours as I have to ready myself for work in an hour or two.
We commit fraud when we advertise ourselves
And lie when we claim that we act on free will
Commitments we've made were only contracts of repression
This is not what I wanted but I've settled for much less
When problems dissolve, more flourish in their wake
As the world returns again, the apple cart overturns
I'm left yearning for a lifetime I'm afraid has long since passed
My passions went careening from eighteen stories up
As careless assertions only proved to convict me
My words and my actions were mechanical and contrived
But soon I implicated myself as a fraud
And my love for another vanished without meaning to
Each response of mine only served to incense me
The facts I started offering swerved round to indict me
"Don't judge your faithfulness by the way your lover lies!"
--Was my only advice as I walked out and said, "Good night."
But your ambitions were empty, and yet they'd gobble you alive
Your victories and defeats were quite abstract to me
"Climbing social ladders turns you to a filthy snob," I warned
Though I knew my words would slip right out your Teflon ears
A sense of detachment concealed your excursions
Your innocence would blanket and discourage what I thought
I nearly proposed to you -- how daft to think you'd react
With your heart obedient to me and your fate sealed in a ring
Sometimes I thought her eyes absorbed the Emerald Isle
At night how I adored her when her body throttled mine
In daylight she contrived her smiles and erased them
Knowing well that I desired smiles without artifice
We can't have any happiness -- it's too expensive for us
We can't communicate at all, but we barely even tried
And the repetitive cycle of counterfeit affairs
Only shows a mirage of a relationship
I wish we left behind pretense to actors and charlatans
Were we this indifferent to know each other not at all?
I broke our only portrait -- it distressed me to know
That we only share its frame and we hang ourselves with it
Now help me pick a name already!