reading pynchon, smoking pot, listening to floyd, watching star trek re-runs: must be the mid 70s. naw. early 00s....
"the real war is always there. the dying tapers off now and then, but the war is still killing lots of people. only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways, often in ways that are too subtle, even for us, at this level, to trace."
i have very clear memories of tripping out pretty hard into audiomulch programs as the sun appeared through some frosty february mornings. these were fun sounds to program through the bright winter dawn.
the concept came to me while reading the opening sections of the novel of the same title. "gravity's rainbow", itself, is a technical term that refers to the period of time that occurred between a rocket strike and the sound of it coming in. as they were able to move faster than sound, this happened in a way that was non-intuitive: the explosion would happen *first*, and the sound would come after. the inability to hear the rockets come in made life just a wee bit stressful in london during the war.
specifically, the opening scene narrates a movement of people into the london subway system, which was used as a system of bunkers during attacks. we're so far removed from this that it's hard to imagine: sirens going off, perhaps in the middle of the night, followed by waves of working class english scrambling for cover by the trains...
there was a point where it came to me fairly lucidly. i just needed to orchestrate it. it's a famously difficult text, but one can get the idea of the song by merely reading the first chapter.
the star trek sample came later. there were re-runs on around 4:00 in the morning; there probably still are, but i turned the tv off permanently shortly after this song was constructed. we all know what else happens around twenty minutes past 4:00 AM. it was a ritual over that winter. the episode precedes the novel, so it couldn't have been influenced by it, but it is strangely topical in the way that it relates the organians to the pynchonian "counterforce". yet, as mentioned, i was smoking a lot of pot at the time....
musically, the track is dual-layered. i've had it described as "an indescribable mixture of conventional and unconventional music" (paraphrase), which is an exaggeration that i'll take as a compliment. the song itself has a sort of an acoustic prog feel that some may compare to porcupine tree or radiohead but was in truth heavily influenced by john lennon and pink floyd (i like early radiohead, but i think porcupine tree is pretentious garbage). the effects underneath the track were constructed using a number of 16-bit sound design programs and unusual approaches to synthesis.
as mentioned, the memories are with the sun coming up. maybe you can get a bit of a sense of that.
recorded in spring, 2000.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/gravitys-rainbow
