Back to Hear The Colors albums2010 - Soul Scenery
Details:
I wasn't very satisfied with the original debut Whirltwine album Soul Scenery from 2010 already after the release of the second album Pearly Beams, which I consider to be my first truly good album I am proud of still today.
For this reason I completely reworked and rerecorded two tracks Sea Shell and Soul Scenery for my third album Oneness. I really liked both of those tracks and felt their potential, but the original Soul Scenery versions are very flat and badly recorded. One of the reasons is that these tracks really required to be recorded on acoustic guitar that they were composed on as well, but at the time of recording I didn't have any good microphone and I was recording only my electric guitar directly from computer with line-in input. On the Oneness album I also finished these two tracks to a more colorful multi layer form.
Now the original recordings were only taking up space on the original album and I almost never listened to them anymore except when I very rarely listened to the full album. There are also two more tracks The Glazy Skies and Thoughtful, that I usually don't listen to or skip when I revisit the original Soul Scenery album. Both are not bad, but they are very average and don't have anything special enough that would draw me to listen to them again. Unlike all the other songs from the original Soul Scenery that despite their very low production quality have something beatifully raw, dirty and experimental in them which I still like a lot to this day.
So in 2020 for the 10th anniversary of Soul Scenery album I decided to create the "Condensed version" with omission of these four tracks and also with one more heavily changed track Ragged Stripes. Ragged Stripes has very nice finale, but the majority of the track is badly recorded and falls to the similar category like The Glazy Skies and Thoughtful for me. So I cut the finale out of the track and put it at the end of unused Soul Scenery track Song #4 which I always liked a lot, but I somehow never finished it. Song #4 was originally also longer. I omitted about minute and half from the beginning. The transition between these two cut out parts, to my great surprise, flows perfectly. The track is no longer too long for what it represents like the original Ragged Stripes was, so the final combined track is something I finally really like as a whole and it definitely deserves its place on the condensed version of Soul Scenery. I changed the title to Ragged Stripes (Finale) as the finale is what inspired this whole idea.
The nine track half hour condensed version of Soul Scenery is finally an album I enjoy and have desire to listen to from start to finish once again. I am happy that it reached this form that stands much better next to the other albums following it like Pearly Beams and Oneness in terms of the flow, no filler and unique character of each song that has its proper meaningful place and home on the given album.
2012 - Pearly Beams
Details:
Pearly Beams is a journey into our subconsciousness and essence of human soul in a very abstract and open way. The album is divided into two phases. In the first phase it starts with more concrete motives mainly from the nature, but in the second phase it's getting purely abstract as we go deeper and deeper into our mind. However, the interpretation how, where and what exactly is happening is all up to the listener.
Composing music is one of the biggest passions in my life. I started composing music more seriously somewhere around February 2006. At that time it was just a lot of trying, experimenting and learning to program music in FL Studio 4. That was how my first project Turbulence Music started. I learnt a lot really quickly. I started hearing music in my head more and more clearly. Until October 2007, I created three albums Lightning, Try and Seasons.
I didn't have much time to continue creating for a while and later after my eighth year of playing piano, I started to play guitar. This was very important step in my life, in terms of music. The reason was my teacher, who learnt and inspired me far beyond anything I could imagine before. At that point I started to really feel and hear the music inside of me and I started to compose the music on guitar. I decided I have to record this somehow. So I began learning how to work with Cubase. The quality of the recording was bad, but I was getting better at it. I was adding many and many layers of guitar and some interesting songs came out of this process. The result is the debut album for my project Whirltwine called Soul Scenery which was finished on July 2010.
I felt for a while that guitar isn't the only way I want to represent my music and I felt a strong desire to experiment with keyboards as well. So after Soul Scenery I bought a cheap but great MIDI keyboard and I began using Reason software, which provided me a huge spectrum of amazing sounds and gave my music a whole new dimension that you can hear on this album. To add even more color to my music I started recording many different sounds on my own, which I later used together with Reason samples in some of the songs. I basically poured together my ability to play guitar, keyboard, programming drums and samples and huge amount of my soul and effort into this record. The result is my first proper album I'm finally satisfied with called Pearly Beams.
2016 - Oneness
Details:
Oneness is in many ways a transitional album that was born with great difficulty. It was always important to me that each album had its own unique character. Oneness was searching for its character for some time, unsuccessfully. The songs I composed among the first were The Seaweed, Flying Beauty and The Passage Of Living Marbles, which was an interesting experiment, since the basis from which everything came was a small plastic toy airplane that sparkled when the wheels turned and thus made an interesting sound. I recorded it and its rhythmic shuffling on the ground is heard in the background throughout the song. It's also a song completely without a guitar.
The original version of The Seaweed, which you can hear on the archive album One's Pearly Archive, was recorded with an electric guitar, just like I recorded the songs on the previous album Pearly Beams.
Flying Beauty was another kind of experiment, where I tried to create a melody based on a bird's chirping, and the rest of the song came out of it, which naturally required an acoustic guitar, because I wanted to achieve the atmosphere of being right in the forest, having a conversation with the birds. I had already composed a certain number of songs on acoustic guitar before, but this was the first one that inspired me to buy a sound card and a quality microphone and start being able to record acoustic guitar.
Then, on vacation in the summer of 2013, I suddenly got a strong inspiration from which the main theme of the song Oneness was born. Later, I combined it with one of my recorded ideas from six months ago, which became the intro of the song. Another strong inspiration came when I recorded strings for this intro, which practically composed themselves. That's when I finally got a clear vision that this would be the opening track of the album, that would set the tone for it. Since it was recorded with acoustic guitar again, a vision that this would be an acoustic-only album came to me, and with that came the idea that this was the perfect opportunity to revisit the songs Sea Shell and Soul Scenery from the debut album, which were always meant to be recorded acoustically and would therefore be a great fit for this album. I also decided to re-record The Seaweed on acoustic guitar, and keep The Passage Of Living Marbles, despite its distinct nature, to give the album some variety and still not disrupt the concept of an acoustic album, since it was completely guitar-free.
But then came the big challenge when I was recording Soul Scenery. Its difficulty, combined with the complexity and constant evolution of its structure and my lack of experience at the time, meant that after recording all the guitar parts by September 2013 and creating additional layers in the first half of the song by February 2014, I was burned out and had no inspiration for any more songs or finishing Soul Scenery for the rest of the year. It didn’t help that in September 2013 I moved with my girlfriend from my parents flat to a rented apartment. I was making music on my desktop computer at my parents flat, so the possibilities of working on the album became very complicated logistically. Even in early 2015 I was still only finishing the details of the songs I created up to that point and decided to at least record the guitar on the much simpler Sea Shell for now.
Inspiration returned only in the second half of 2015, when we moved into another rented apartment, where it was just the two of us. After much consideration and postponing, I decided to switch from recording on Windows in Cubase and Reason, which was no longer sustainable for me, to a Macbook, which is much more suitable for music, and to learn to work in Logic Pro, even though I originally wanted to finish the album the old way. The new environment and possibilities of Logic triggered new inspiration and very quickly the first ideas for the song One's Healing emerged. It developed into a large, varied song with my first longer and more elaborate guitar solo. The new energy and inspiration also allowed me to finally successfully complete the songs Soul Scenery and Sea Shell while visiting my parents.
As a Christmas present for my parents, I composed the song Bansuri, where I decided on a minimalist experiment focused primarily on a flute melody. I remember how excited I was to finally be able to work on a song wherever I had time and inspiration, whether on the train or on the road in the car. After that, it was just composing the rest of One's Healing and the usual work on the details of all the songs on the album.
After the album release and this difficult period, combined with the later difficult personal stage of my life, I was unable to fully and long-term get back to music, which I didn't mind at first, but over time I started to miss it more and more. In the meantime, however, I developed my color music theory, which I eventually used to create an album for the new project Hear The Colors, the creation of which was unexpectedly enabled by Covid in 2020
The album Oneness has its imperfections and over the years I perceive it as weaker than its predecessor Pearly Beams, but not by much and even though it is composed of songs from different periods and was created gradually over four years and few apartment moves, it still has its own coherent character. But mainly it was an essential transitional album on which I learned a lot and where I also realized that I want to create music on the acoustic guitar as a primary instrument, for the possibility of simply picking up the guitar anywhere and anytime and to start playing right away. Also for the feeling of a more intimate and direct connection with the music and the sound I create, which the electric guitar did not provide me as much, although I really like its sound in the music I listen to.
2017 - One's Pearly Archive
DOWNLOAD bonus One's Pearly Archive album (256 kbps MP3)
Tracklist:
01) Healing Intro (0:58)
02) Song III #3b (0:55)
03) Rough Ball (2:01)
04) I'm On My Way (2:36)
05) Glow (With Guitar) (3:13)
06) Pearly Beams (Early Idea) (1:41)
07) Soul Scenery (Unused Ideas) (1:57)
08) Akin O' Rev (3:32)
09) Oneness (Demo) (4:31)
10) The Seaweed (Early Version) (4:19)
Details:
One's Pearly Archive is a collection of various unused tracks or early versions of songs from Pearly Beams and Oneness albums. Even though it is not a proper album I still enjoy listening to it from time to time as it flows nicely and contains some interesting material, especially the track I'm On My Way.
Notes on each track:
Tracklist:
01) Healing Intro (0:58)
02) Song III #3b (0:55)
03) Rough Ball (2:01)
04) I'm On My Way (2:36)
05) Glow (With Guitar) (3:13)
06) Pearly Beams (Early Idea) (1:41)
07) Soul Scenery (Unused Ideas) (1:57)
08) Akin O' Rev (3:32)
09) Oneness (Demo) (4:31)
10) The Seaweed (Early Version) (4:19)
