Pressure & Profits

I have put a new mix (original song) up on my MySpace page. I really like this song a lot even though it may be annoying to some people. It's called "Pressure & Profits".

Actually I created the meat of the song twenty years ago using a cheap Casio sampling keyboard. Ole Ronnie was trying to explain away the Iran Contra mess, and I decided to have some fun with it, the result was this tune. There really is no message besides the fact that "Pressure was put on from the other side" and that someone was going to "profit from what was going on". But one can read between the lines... and those concepts are more germane now than ever, even though it's a voice from a different era. At any rate I think the result is kind of hysterical.

A long time ago my father played me this piece by composer Steve Reich called "Come Out". It consisted of a recording of some spoken words. To be precise, it was the words of a young black man who had been beaten during a race riot (this was the turbulent sixties). The young man was saying that he would have to squeeze his bruise to make the blood "come out to show them". Apparently for the red cross or something. This piece of music took a repeating loop of the phrase "come out", split it into two, offset the timing a bit, split those two into four, offset the timing, etc. etc. until you have this raucously complex series of loops offsetting each other, which sound absolutely nothing like the phrase "come out" by the time it's done. But you do have a very repetitive, rich environment.

Now my song makes no pretense at being high art, it is "Just a Groove" as Captain Jarvis will remind you. But I think it does have some of the same elements, a repetitive recognisable phrase. But I'm hoping by the time the song fades out, the phrase has become music. That's my hope :) Enjoy. H.