SpinTunes 17 Round 2 Listening Party

[MicahSommer]

Crossposted from https://spintunescontest.blogspot.com/2 ... party.html

Another SpinTunes deadline has passed. 23 of 24 entrants submitted by the deadline, leaving one open spot for an eligible shadow to fill. That spot has been filled by the highest-ranked competitor eliminated last round. Welcome back, rackwagon!

The 24 official entries in Round 2, as well as our shadow entries, will all be played at the Listening Party tonight at 9 pm EDT, hosted by our faithful Tommy G. Drop in, join the chat, and hear the premiere of your and your fellow contestants' songs!

https://youtu.be/5AC8C-NLvsQ

[Toshiro]

Hurray, more work!

[crumpart]

Yay Rackwagon! In with a good one, too.

[EmKayDeeBee]

Have a great listening party everyone! It will be the middle of the night for me. Sad not to be able to join in the banter, but look forward to catching up with it all tomorrow! Can’t wait to hear what everyone’s done - such a great challenge this one!

[gizo]

WE ARE BACKWAGON!

[mholland]

I’m bummed that I bailed on the listening party during the shadows and wasn’t there to laud All the Robots on I’ll Have What She’s Having. Truly inspired.

[Pigfarmer Jr]

I’m bummed that I bailed on the listening party during the shadows and wasn’t there to laud All the Robots on I’ll Have What She’s Having. Truly inspired.

Aye, definitely a good tune. I left even earlier and had to go back to listen to the rest of the album/stream. (For the record, Micah was right. ) I think it's a strong round and I need to listen a few more times to wrap my head around the whole thing. The challenge was my favorite of any of the nur ein/spin tunes so far. I'm going to use it in the future.

[JonPorobil]

All right, now that the judging is over, I'd like to share a few details about my song.

First of all, a couple of reviews broached this (and I expected it to be a dealbreaker, to be honest—I'm surprised I didn't get cut)... No, there's no existing connection between Futurama and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." My brain made that connection, and I spent most of the challenge time frustrated at myself for coming up with this idea that was simultaneously kind of perfect but also so tenuously-connected that it was likely to confuse some listeners.

Second—I tried to hold myself to some rules, to demonstrate the helplessness and futility of Kif's situation. He's such a passive character: He hasall this barely-veiled frustration and disgust, but none of the initiative to achieve the things he wants, so the verse chord progression barely moves. It hangs on the tonic (A), briefly ventures into the subdominant (D), but goes back to the tonic in one measure. The I-IV progression itself is pretty weak motion, too, so even that one step isn't really enough to get anywhere. I had a second chord progression for the B-section, but midway through the song I realized it wasn't working with my melody, so I replaced it with the progression from the Futurama theme song. Nobody seems to have noticed that, or perhaps everyone thought it was so obvious it didn't need comment. Art is frustrating sometimes!

The other rule I stuck to was that, in the main part of the song (outside of the "When I'm alone..." bridge), Kif never uses the first person active voice. Things happen to him, but he's never the one doing them. It wasn't "I call Amy," it was "Amy answering her phone." It wasn't "I breathe into the line," but rather "My labored breathing fills the call." Then, most of the lines in the bridge were in the first person, emphasizing Kif's fantasy of self-actualization. Back in the "real world," the closing lines have him taking a little baby step in that direction by "I'll have to become more than..."

I used a few tricks to emphasize the contrast between the two sections, which really were basically two distinct songs. The guitar and vocals are performed and miked differently. For the verses, I finger-picked with the microphone very close up pointed at the sound hole. For the bridge I strummed loudly from about two feet away, microphone pointed at the 12th fret, and I double-tracked the performance for stereo widening. For the verses, I performed the vocals while sitting in my office chair, literally slouched over the microphone, at a distance of about 3 inches. For the bridge, I turned the mic volume way down, stood up about 8 inches away from the mic, and belted as much as I could. I used an imager to "narrow" the stereo field of the solo sections, to make them feel less spacious, and I used the same imager to widen out the bridge. And of course, the bridge also contains a bass, piano, drums, background vocals, and four extra layers of guitar.

I thought for sure I was getting cut. I'm pretty sure I would have been, if not for Dave Leigh, so thanks, Dave!

[arby]

Very belatedly, would just like to respond to the judges' feedback for our song.

First of all, totally respect why we got cut - we did struggle that week in producing a song, and we knew it wasn't our best effort. Also Cybronica is 100% right that with an extra day or two, we could have made it better. I am mildly annoyed at myself for not guessing that what was wrong with the first line was that it was flat. I'm usually pretty good at catching that!! I knew there was something amiss with it, I just didn't figure out what it was in time to correct it. Definitely agree that the song as a whole needed a shot in the arm that it didn't get .

Cybronica wrote:

Mal is an interesting take. Is this to be the real Mal, or the part of Dominick’s mind that imagines her? Its not clear in the lyrics, and maybe that’s the point, because he can never tell either.

Yeah, it was supposed to be Mal's actual POV from

Spoiler

after they came back from Inception land but before she killed herself

BUT as you say, we don't REALLY know what she was thinking, only what Dom thought she thought.

Wil Whalen wrote:

I think your sound is just intrinsically kinda spooky, and I wish I knew enough about theory to know/express why.

Thank you! Spooky is absolutely our goal and our aesthetic. I think a lot of it is the intentional slight dissonance that we play around with - like I'll play a minor on Omni while Nivs plays a major on guitar, or vice versa - or he'll play a power chord and I'll play the respective major/minor. Or how we break the songwriting rules with abandon (because we don't know them!) like going from a major to minor or 7th on the same chord, because I really enjoy how subtly Omni conveys that difference, and I try to bring it out with my vocal melody.

Finally this is the BEST FREAKING REVIEW (from DJ Ranger Den) that we have EVER gotten and I love it so much that I fully intend to quote from it in our press from now on:

Something about your song reminded me of falling slowly off of a truck, in slow motion, off of an overpass, down a cliff, into the ocean, down into a trench, into a sea, into an abyss, and going into a deep deep deep deep sleep. It’s that VOICE. There is something about your voice that is weird and then you combine it with the omnichord and it’s an eyelid operation I haven’t had much listening exposure to—so it's always a bit surprising to me. You are not afraid to brazenly refuse to resolve a chord until you damn well feel like it. I respect this. This is the sort of thing I am here for. I barely remember inception, so this seems really appropriate and also—incredibly appropriate that we are here right now. I should not have waited for this to be the last review I wrote. I think I am asleep. I am probably in the dream. Maybe I am dream. Or you are me. Or this song is the dream. Or there is nothing but the omnichord. It’s time to stop.