trepanation nation disc 1...
1) this is the first version of the track, which was written as an arena rock anthem in the summer of 2001 for use in a gestating rock band project that never happened.
i rerecorded the track to capture it in it's initial state on aug 3, 2014. track dated to aug 15, 2001.
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/untitled-original-mix
2) the successor project to the aborted rock project was rabit is wolf, which consisted of myself and the singer from that project. while it was initially constructed around a shared interest in post-punk, the project took a sharp turn towards folk in the first half of 2002. the track was consequently converted from an arena rock punk/industrial anthem into a folk punk tune. this is the initial folk punk incarnation, as recorded in february of 2002. dated to feb 19, 2002.
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/the-day-i-saw-you-cry-demo
3) i first started to record this track in earnest in march of 2002 by reconstructing the drums to utilize a mixture of machines and live loops. in the process, i began to experiment with the structuring of the track. the track may have been initially written on a classical in the first place (i don't remember); it certainly integrates the perspective of the classical guitar, and for good reason - i was playing a lot of classical guitar music over the course of 2001. so, it transferred to a finger picking style very intuitively. the final versions all have multiple classical guitar overdubs.
it was on the classical guitar that the track was expanded into the scale it came to exist in. this is an early performance on classical guitar, dated to april 7, 2002.
the knocking in the background of the track is literally background noise of my father hammering something outside my room. it became the inspiration for the ring modulator adlib in the final versions of the track (i gave sean a mic, plugged it into a ring mod and told him to bash on it while twiddling the knobs).
this version is very rough and is only available for download on bandcamp due to space requirements on the physical media.
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/untitled-classical-guitar-mix
4) by the beginning of may, the track had taken on a defined shape. at the same time, sean and i were discussing ways to present rabit is wolf to the public and had decided on a two-person guitar/voice duo. the track consequently needed to be reworked for live presentation, which is what this is.
i constructed the mix in november, 2014 out of a guitar part dated to may 5, 2002 and vocals dated to june 7, 2002. i'm dating this to may 5, 2002.
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/the-day-i-saw-you-cry-live-version
5) the recording of this track over the spring of 2002 seems to have occurred in spurts, likely based around gaps in my school schedule. the drums in the first part of the track were sculpted together on the night/morning of march 7/8, which would have been a little after the track took it's initial folk punk form and centred on it existing in that way. the drums were sculpted from a mix of the initial drum machine part, real time ry30 square pushing, washes of digital noise and short, sculpted samples of greg playing in real time. the track seems to have been shaped into what it is during the week of april 15-22, a little after it was expanded by playing it as a classical piece, with the addition of multiple guitar and synth overdubs and all kinds of digital wave shaping through notch filters and time manipulation. i must have had that week off for exam related purposes; i probably had late exams that year. incomplete versions of the track exist that seem to have been burned around april 25, which are what the live version with sean would have been based upon.
the next spurt in recording was to add bass parts over the weekend of may 17-19. further drum and guitar parts were also added at this time.
i was growing very insular during the period this was recorded, which was partially out of a decision to force myself to go straight edge in preparation for transgendered hormone therapy, which i was set to begin at the start of may. the bulk of the track was recorded before i went on hormone therapy. it may in some way reflect a sense of resigned preparation for a difficult process. but, it really comes more out of the isolation i had forced upon myself.
my parents were coming out of a difficult financial situation due partly to their own mismanagement and partly to my father coming out of a period of unemployment. he was completing a course in management over the period, which put me in the weird position of having to do his statistics homework for him. i was a second year honours math student at the time, so his basic stats assignments were not very challenging for me; conversely, he wasn't interested in the topic. i should probably have a diploma in business stats from the university of manitoba along with my math degree from carleton. but, who's counting, really? my math degree never got me anywhere in life (i haven't aspired to use it for anything....), but his management course opened up doors for him that have aided me. so, it worked out....
what this meant was that i found myself living in a split duplex around the beginning of 2002. for many years previously, i had lived in various basements and more or less had those basements to myself, merely having to tolerate the odd laundry run. the split duplex put me in the rather normal situation of having a bedroom upstairs, the privilege of having a studio downstairs and the inconvenience of having to follow scheduling rules. as i'd been so used to having total freedom in my scheduling for so long, i was unable to adjust to this.
if i were to come up and down the stairs in the middle of the night, i would wake my labrador retrievers up (who just wanted to come say hi) and that would wake up my parents. this was consequently forbidden. to get around this, i started sleeping in the afternoon, so i could go downstairs in the evening and not come back up until the morning. this left me without human contact for days or even weeks at a time. on long days, i would sleep on the carpeted floor of the studio. some days, i simply wouldn't sleep at all.
what you're hearing here is in many ways the culmination of this lack of human contact, complete abstinence from drugs and sleep deprivation - all in the context of the stress from simultaneously completing two university programs and preparing for a dramatic life shift. while the music was recorded in spurts, those spurts were emotional stress outlets. while parts of this may sound like my sanity was fragile while it was being created, the process of recording them is probably the only thing that allowed me to maintain it.
this version is dated to may 22, 2002.
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/the-day-i-saw-you-cry-instrumental-version
6) sean's vocals were added at the beginning of june. i had to add some extra synth parts, as well, to fix some of the harmonization. i've successfully glossed over the problems, but this is the one recording where sean legitimately couldn't find notes that fit. it's hard to blame him, as the music is rather complex from a harmonic standpoint and there isn't an existing melody written out for him to follow. he didn't have the training required to interpret this. the vocal manipulations i used in the track caused some conflict, but the reality is that the vocal melody he had extrapolated out of the guitars for use in the acoustic version was simply not transferable to this mix and the mods were necessary to compensate. placing his naked vocals into the track would have created large amounts of dissonance where no dissonance was desired. when the track opens up a bit, there's more space, and the vocals are left unaltered.
looking back, i suppose i could have explained that to him and asked for a rewrite rather than just taking it into my own hands and slathering on the effects, but i was very keen on both maintaining his autonomy as a vocalist and maintaining my autonomy as a producer/composer. on top of that, i simply liked the end result. i suppose that, had i not been able to manipulate the vocals into what i wanted, i would have had to ask for a rewrite....
for the ring mod part, i wanted to emulate the knocking sound that existed atmospherically in the classical version. so, i gave sean a mic plugged into a ring modulator, locked him in the room and told him to smash it against the ground and play with the knobs for a while. i've kept this part in further instrumental versions.
that said, sean largely rejected the track in it's psychedelic form, so this is the last rabit is wolf version.
this is dated to june 15, 2002.
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/the-day-i-saw-you-cry-3
trepanation nation disc 2...
7) once it had become clear that sean had rejected the track, i wasn't entirely sure what to do with it. i had some material i had put aside for a noise project (subsequently compiled as inri032: jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/give-em-hell-harry-strung-out ) that was meant to merge noise & politics, and i was maybe eager to get back to this idea of music as a political art form.
while there were not lyrics attached to the initial cynicide project, i did already have the idea of a conceptual piece connecting the existing condition of north american society to the idea of trepanning, or self-lobotomizing to get the precise point across. we were in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks (which seemed staged even at the point) and the political reaction to them. i felt the need to say something about this, but i didn't want to be too direct or judgmental about it so i compiled a list of samples that presented what i felt reflected the general condition of the world we were living in. the references are broad and vast; there's not really a succinct way to over-simplify it.
the overall context is the view that we were living through the end of the civil rights period. it could be argued that the focus on civil rights accidentally erupted as a reaction to world war two propaganda, hit a high point in the 1960s and began to irreversibly erode at the beginning of the 1980s. in this narrative, the collapse of the twin towers was the final death blow to something the elite never wanted in the first place and was happy to sweep into the trash heap of history.
but, i'm specifically focusing on how this is self-inflicted by our collective desire to be stupid - to drill these holes in our skulls, as though there's some kind of enlightenment in abolishing our ability to understand the world around us, and focus instead on our own short term gains. in that sense, it's an attack on the neo-liberal model and how it encourages us to destroy ourselves.
the spoken word section in the middle was a poem i created out of those word magnets you see on fridges. i was working as an overnight security guard at the time (summer of 2001) and just not sleeping at all. as i was doing my rounds, i stopped and made the poem. i got fired from that job for yelling at a coke machine...
i've considered doing a sample-by-sample breakdown of this but have decided it's neurotic. however, if you want to write an essay, and i like it, i'll link to it.
dated to july 4, 2002.
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/trepanation-nation-sample-mix
8) in late 2013, i decided to complete unfinished tracks in a chronological ordering and it led me to the decision to complete the track in the form it was initially written in. completed on sept 24, 2014; dated to sept 16, 2001.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/10-to-spin-inside-dull-aberrations
