Lee Barry Composition Diary

 "Brian" Mix: Sum 1: Nostalgia Galaxy by Lee Barry  Final Mix: Sum 1: Nostalgia Galaxy by Lee Barry  Rough Mixes (November):   Possible lyric: Disaster movies It's what it's like to live in the world Subconscious movies It's what it's like to live in the frame Disaster movies Why we fight to live in the world Your favorite movies Inside your television and mistaken for your mind Paintings so surreal Abstractions in the marks Projection uses light But ends up in the dark Disaster movies The flicker of the fear in your brain Psychotic reaction Life without illusion is no life at all Disaster movies It's what it's like to live in the frame Subconscious movies Inside your television And mistaken for your mind Paintings so surreal Abstractions in the marks Projection uses light But ends up in the dark   If all the disaster movies that we've seen over the past fifty years are in fact projections—as they have been in many cases (most notably 911), the...

  A short pastoral piece for the holidays. I've included some ambient atmosphere consisting of field recordings in natural settings. It is loosely inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian Houses built in the 30s and 40s.   I've included some ambient atmosphere consisting of field recordings in natural settings.  

  December is F Lydian month and this year it's "Winter Clocks". The title is a variation of "Simmer Cloks" in the Scots language, which are sunbeams through the clouds seen in the summer. Lydian can sometimes slip into Mixolydian like it does here when it seems to resolve to G. Lydian is in the middle-ground or "rift" of the modes.

Listen on Spotify What does funky bass music have to do with the 19th-century French sculptor Rodin?  Fragments. This is the best image that illustrates how I work when I produce albums.  I've always been a collector of ideas and have a good system for organizing them. It's essentially the process of serialization and generativity: making another piece in a series, transforming existing works into new ones, then framing them within some kind of a concept--as Rodin assembled fragments of sculptures.  I invent nothing, I rediscover.- Auguste Rodin "In later years, Rodin also used to tell the anecdote that the bust he originally intended to create had actually become a fragment, because as a young artist, he could not afford to heat his studio overnight. During a bitter cold winter night, the back of the 'Man with the Broken Nose' froze and broke off; this way from the bust only the face was left. Rodin officially favoured such accidental damages - at least he fa...

  Per the Rifts system, the Lydian mode for all 12 keys moves up in fourths and is associated with the months. November is C Lydian month. December is F Lydian, then starts again in January with Bb Lydian. February is Eb Lydian, and so on. Lead sheet:

Tool that uses machine learning or an algorithm to map lyrics to a video file: https://autolyrixalign.hltnus.org/ Source Lyric (Mine) PERFECT WORLD (1994) In a perfect world We can have no walls But we hide behind a curtain In a restless world A government falls And leaves our futures quite uncertain... Result:

  Another piece in E Locrian, with more of an ancient Greek vibe. Its "i" chord is diminished. I am also using its iv chord (Am) as well as its V (Bb), VI (C) and vii (Dm).

 A piece in E Locrian. Video:  https://youtu.be/px9Kl Hg6Yz4

When I first saw Kamala's clip of her phoning Biden , I thought it had a musical quality, and here it is transcribed for history. 

Something I wrote in my diary in 2004, but not as a song lyric, and now inspired one. If you take public transportation you tend to see the same people for years--and then you don't. (Alas, the Tragic Bus ). The corollary is the mercurial nature of relationships.

  This will challenge you--as most conundra do. Full Mix: Mix Minus One: It arises from a riff idea I had back in the early 90s (originally titled Trick of Life) when I was more into jazz. It is a repeating chord pair consisting of a major chord advancing up in fourths through all 12 keys.  I composed a possible solo and highlighted the operative modes, but you can select your own. The real challenge is to memorize the sequence moving up in 4ths (or down in 5ths) without the root always being there, while sometimes feeling unmoored and lost, then merging again at some point.   Getting lost is inevitable, and is the point of the etude. It is also finding your way as a group. It's okay to make mistakes--which could even be more interesting in a jazz setting where it expected that things sound "wrong". The sequence also lends itself to pattern formation. For example, you can play the Phrygian mode across all of the chord changes, and move the sh...

Incidents 11x14 inches, acrylic on paper Making an artwork using tape makes it an "incident" or injury that is "treated" and eventually "heals" (recovers) into a final state. The tape is the "bandage". 9/2020: For Eddie Van Halen: I was unwittingly inspired by your guitar in a visual way. #2014 #angles #geometric

  https://issuu.com/apollosong/docs/2015-2020

  Provisional lyric: Esperanti Esperanto Words from tomorrow Don't let them write your tragic story Always imposing and never sincere Men behind the curtains My safety lies in my defenselessness

The Unabomber was arrested in April 1996. This was my reaction. It is also a send-up of Zappa's tune. The "billionaire" is thus a dental floss tycoon. (7/7/1996) The AI-generated version, a totally different vibe--redolent of T. Bone Burnett or Nick Cave.

An artist book where each page is some shade of blue, with its content relating to blue in some literal, self-referential, or figurative way. Most of the entries will draw from my book Dynaxiom , and also connects in series with Continuation and the set of human universals --primarily "Classification of Color", but also "time, cyclic",  "rituals" (daily entries), and "Continua (ordering as a cognitive pattern)". Other topics now include entries for the approximate hexadecimal values for the shade of blue of that particular page, lyrics that have the word 'blue' in them, chord changes from pieces of music that have blue in them (e.g. Miles Davis' Kind of Blue ), recalled dreams where blue was prevalent My decision to integrate red on the first page was reflexive of what was happening in the world in 2020. However, the original idea for the Blue Book came to me a long time ago, based upon Wittgenstein's Blue Book , as well as the b...

 

The original lyric re-styled using AI-generated music and re-titled T V Motel (2 Versions)   An R'n'B-ish song written around the beginning of the internet when computers still had tube monitors, even though I was using the word “widescreen”.  Marshall McLuhan had been talking about TV being a “hot” medium--that we couldn't interact with it. But in 1995,  interactive TV was already being talked about, along with the specter of mass surveillance. Technology is now “cool”  via social media, and perhaps not so cool in that it opened the door to the possibility of surveillance, as well as our addiction to social media,  the new way to be a couch potato. In retrospect, the lyrics are kind of a prediction. (6/4/1995)

  I am using a capo at the 5th fret, which makes it more of a strummed chordal instrument or "rhythm guitar" rather than a bass--and a very short-scale bass--only 16 frets. These are some fairly easy shapes for both major and minor chords, and switching between them it's fairly easy. Essentially it’s an open-A tuning.

12/2023: A short on the first verse using text-to-speech voices and shifting the syllables to where the original vocal was. (They voices are "Amy" and "Geraint" a Welsh voice) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XRB1OXK75P4 I now realize the song could be about the Nag Hammadi but I didn't realize it at the time. When I started to make the video I thought footage of flowing and thrusting lava flows would be an interesting element. I watched some documentaries of Iceland volcanic history, then I saw the news about the current fissure eruption there. A curious synchronicity.   10/30/1996 This was inspired by a documentary on the search for a lost city in the Arabian desert. I thought that it was interesting that our digital culture will leave no artifacts at all, even in a time capsule. There are no guitars on here at all. All the "guitar" parts were played on the bass through a distortion pedal.  

  A piece with a decidedly “Americana” feel.

  These are inspired by the symbol shapes in candlestick financial charts : "The bullish harami shows a downtrend of negative-colored (black) candlesticks engulfing a small positive (white) candlestick, giving a sign of a reversal of the downward trend." They also might suggest cigarettes or syringes if you didn't know the background. I see them as a "cell" as they are used in music, which are short thematic elements that are used as building blocks to generate the work. One of the ideas I had initially was to do them in encaustic and/or crayon as clever self-reference (wax). Perhaps the next in the series ("Three Line Strike"). The titles of the charts were also very cool: Doji Dragonfly Black Marubozu Takuri Line Bullish Harami Three Line Strike View the Series #2020

The distorted bass is the bull in the china shop because the original is so wispy and breathy--the initial feeling I got from the lyrics when I began to write the music. As primarily a jazz player--or I played a lot of jazz in the past, the music is very harmonic and vertical with large extended chords. But the bass reduces it to the roots and to the chords stripped of their extensions. Embracing denial is an escape from certainty, so the edgy approach also fits.

A miniature piece exactly a minute long. (64 bars in 5/8 at eighth=320). The chords are inverted so as to make step-wise ascending and descending bass lines.

An idea generator.  Video Examples: The Original Book:     Alternate Tunings For Bass by Lee Barry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License . Based on a work at www.box.net . Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://barrystudio.blogspot.com/2020/08/alternate-tunings-for-bass.html . Miscellaneous Loops/Demos:    HISTORICAL NOTE Unconventional tunings, or scordatura (It., from scordare, to mistune); were first used in the 16th century by Italian lutenists. They were primarily used to facilitate difficult passages, but also used to alter timbral characteristics, reinforce tonalities through the use of open strings, and to extend the instrument's range. Violin scordatura was employed in the 17th and 18th centuries by Italian and German composers, namely, Biagio Marini, Antonio Vivaldi, Johann Pachelbel and J.S. Bach; whose Fifth Suite for Unaccomp...

This was a set of changes that I wrote around 1990 on an old acoustic that I bought for $50 in 1978. The original had the title ‘Americo’, that apparently is the name of an insurance company now. The original demo recorded on now-ancient technology, a Tascam Portastudio I bought in 1988. It's a personal flight of nostalgia I like to take because the new arrangements can be vastly different yet share the spirit of the beginnings. Lap Steel part: Technically it is in the Lydian mode, but not really. It has a Spanish flavor, hence the title. But I have changed it here to Dorothea, at least temporarily.

Similar to Chromatic Windows , Phases are a series of color systems whereby a color sequence is mapped across a shape sequence, e.g. mapping 5 colors across 6 shapes across 5 objects. There are some artists that use the actual paint chips, but I am using their virtual equivalent and designing the actual "chips." The color sequences are completely customizable in context with the color of the wall.  The RGB values used are below. If you want to match them to wall colors, here is a handy conversion tool .   RGB values for the 5 colors: 1. Signal Red: 170,60,35  https://www.color-hex.com/color/aa3c23 2. Light Blue: 88,135,142  https://www.color-hex.com/color/58878e 3. Black: 30,30,30  https://www.color-hex.com/color/1e1e1e 4. Deep Cream: 200,165,110  https://www.color-hex.com/color/c8a56e 5. Eau-de-Nil: 100,135,120  https://www.color-hex.com/color/648778 RGB values for the 4 colors: 1. Jubilee Blue: 195,220,230  https://www.color-hex...

One of my musical metaphor pieces based on the Intervals series--in this case an augmented octave, which is essentially an octave displaced by one semitone, commonly known as a minor ninth or "flat nine". The shape of the octave in the series is a perfect circle. The offsetting or overlap of the circle (as in a Venn diagram) is its "augmentation". How the two circles interact with each other is different for each piece. 8x10 Giclee prints available (as triptych only). Contact me if you would like a set. 1. Augmented Octave No. 1: Color Burn 2. Augmented Octave No. 2: Lighten 3. Augmented Octave No. 3: Luminosity Using the music metaphor to images of the Moon and phase-shifting and intervals ("double-stops"). #2014 #minimalism