The New Album - "Laws of Repulsion"

Here it is folks, the new album completed - "Laws of Repulsion"












The Song List:
1. Obviate, Question, Give
2. Cosmic Disorder
3 .Unholy Magick
4. Divine Forgetfullness
5. Quantum Irrationality
6. Negative Thinking
7. Extinguish
8. Elysian Failure
9. Irreligious Science
10. Obverse Purchase
11. Pathological Solipsism

This album is my return to my love of free-form jazz-rock-fusion and improvisation. My tribute to some of my old favorites - Sonny Sharrock, Bill Laswell, Last Exit, Miles Davis, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Greg Ginn's Gone project, Joe Morris - and some new ones - Nels Cline, Marc Ducret, Marc Ribot, Gregg Bendian, and too many more to mention.

Basically, the music is in the form of a guitar/bass/drums power trio with some extra synthesizers sparsely added here and there to spice up the intros, outros, etc. But what you have as a result is a bunch of very freely improvised jams, mostly first takes, ... to borrow from a John Scofield album title - "loud jazz."

I'll also be posting this album at last.fm and most likely provide a Mediafire "mirror" link.

Please download, burn to CDs, play it loudly, tell your weird friends about it, re-post the link at your blogs, etc.

Jazz Improv Project

I've put my current semi-vocal project album aside to work on some completely new music. I've been immersing myself back into a style that I was heavily into in the 1990's - free jazz improv. Sonny Sharrock, Bill Laswell, Last Exit, and a few others were big on my playlist back then, and I've begun to listen some of the newer guys in the noisy-improv scene, like Marc Ribot, Nels Cline, Gregg Bendian, Joe Morris, etc.

These bands create some incredible music, most of it improvised and created on the spot. And some of it is pretty noisy and chaotic. So I'm forcing myself to try to come up with some jazzy-sounding stuff, and record it as fast as possible with very little preparation. Just hit play and record. I want it to sound very loose and spontaneous, like a trio of musicians in a room just jamming and having fun, making noisy music and musical noise.

It's not as easy as it sounds. I may try recruiting a few folks to see if we can actually get some live jamming done, but we'll see. I may just have to be daring on my own. I haven't played real free-form in a while, so I'm sure I'm a bit rusty. Maybe the guys from Burn Without Me or Moroghor might be daring enough to face this odd challenge. Hmmmm,...

Vocals?? Maybe, but not mine...

The album is on hold for a bit - I've decided to give a copy of it to my neighbor, Clint Mitchell, who is the bassist for The Screamin' Barfys. He's going to give it a listen along with Screamin' Barfys vocalist, Dan "The Man" Flynn, who I might have come up with some lyrics and lay down some vocals. This will be a big "first" for Dimaension X.

I decided to do this, because I just thought the music was missing something. It was a lot of great chord progressions and riffs, but it sounded like it was ust missing something on top, like WORDS. These songs actually sounded like songs for once, so instead of trying to add additional guitar riffs on top, which just wasn't working, I'm gonna wait and see what Dan and Clint come up with.

I like Dan's style with the 'Barfys. It's not my usual style, but I like how his lyrics are somewhere between Jim Morrison and Henry Rollins. His vocal style is more like a more unstable (in a good way) Eddie Vedder, or, again, Mr. Henry Rollins from his early Black Flag days - very raw, but with some interesting lyrical twists.

So we'll see what happens. Either way, I'm not crazy about the music on it's own, so if the vocals don't work out, I may only release a few of the songs that are fine on their own.

New Dimaension X album nearing the end

Nearing the finish line I am! The parts are basically recorded, but I need to give it a few more critical listens and mixdowns before unleashing it unto the universe. It's a bit odd; I'm really not sure of how to describe the music. It's actually very spontaneous, a lot of the parts recorded as I came up with them, so not a lot of forethought went into this effort.

I did use my "Word/Phrase" composition method for the "basic" chord progressions and riffs, but kept it very loose, and revised things that didn't quite work. I also did most of the album with my Schecter Omen-6 tuned to CGCGCD, so I had to completely re-learn the fretboard, too. To help with this, I discovered a very helpful website called StudyBass.com (www.studybass.com - duh?). This site has a great feature that allows you to print out fretboard diagrams with custom tunings, scales, chords, etc. A huge help. Just type in how your guitar or bass is tuned, and then tell it what scales you want to see, and it creates a great printable diagram of the fretboard.

This album is very different than my usual work, which usually has a lot of keyboards and synths. This one is 95% guitar-oriented. Only a few very short and simple synth parts, and a few that are actually guitar with some freaky effects that make it sound like a synth. There aren't a lot of "melodies", mainly chord progressions and riffs that will hopefully keep your head bobbin' and your foot tappin'. I've been listening to a lot of "post-rock" and "post-metal" bands lately, and their music tends to be comprised mainly of very open and free chord structures - the songs mainly rely on simple and repetitive chord progressions, but the variety is in the dynamics of the songs, going from heavy to lighter sections, creating crescendos and decrescendos through sheer volume and tempo changes.

So you may love it or hate it. It could be ground-breaking or a total snooze-fest. But I've been wanting to do something new and different for quite some time, and my work with both Burn Without Me and Moroghor inspired me to delve into unexplored areas.

I also have to work on the cover art, and figure out the best places to post it. Very soon, folks.