The challenges of "Circular Song" (Pt. 1)

In this series, I discuss the inner guts of my music creation process.

Hi there, this time let me discuss one of the songs I had a hardest time putting together, both from a musical and from a lyrics standpoint: Circular Song.

This one started a loooong time ago, as an experiment, with the main revolving melody endlessly looping, using an ever-evolving sound. The phased pad was also part of that experiment, along with the echoed panning of both sounds. The whole thing resulted in a wheel-like, always-looping but never-the-same sound, and stayed as such for ages.

Then ad some point, an attempt to add a vocal melody was introduced, using the words of a preexisting, dual-language, mirror-like poem, where each line in English was mirrored by a line in the other language, both contradicting while also complementing each other, with the combined meaning being different from each part of the poem taken in isolation. I had the feeling that this piece, with its duality and sort of circularity, could be a match to the musical experiment this song still was.

Well, hmm, not quite so.

One problem with that original idea was that, even if the words of the poem had some strength in their own specific way, their rhythm did not quite fit with the spirit and flow of the music itself. So while each was flowing, it was on its own, at its own pace, with little true cooperation between the two. They were not of the same wavelength, sort of.

So the whole project stayed as such for a pretty long time, stuck in a sort of dead end from which I couldn't see any good way out.

But like some things in life, sometimes you need to let things settle down, leave them alone and almost forget about them, before anything interesting may happen.

This was exactly the case with this song, and I’ll discuss that next time. Stay tuned!

Play Circular Song

On Spotify ->

On Deezer ->

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