After months off due to other professional commitments and personal life stuff, Indra’s Net rehearsals resumed on Sunday, July 29th.
We are fully committed to finishing this first album/CD as fast as humanly possible, given our current outside work and personal commitments.
One of the things that we like to do is start off rehearsals by playing or listening to classical music or progressive rock music that we really like and admire. We find that that really gets our energy levels up and going, and generates excitement for our project.
Dr. Andrew Colyer started off by sharing song ideas inspired by Rachmaninoff‘s “Prelude in C# Minor.”
“English Gentleman” Daniel Aggers brought a whole stack of stuff to listen to today, including Genesis, Allan Holdsworth, and King Crimson (more on that in later posts).
We reviewed our song list for the album/CD, which looks like this:
- “The Beginning”
- “Isle of Joy”
- “Swirling Mist of Incense”
- “Forest Rain”
- “Fields of Mourning, Fields of Peace”
- “Ireland”
- “Surge”
- “Space Schubert Vaughan Williams” (don’t worry, it’s only a working title)
- “21st Century Bach” (again, a working title)
Right now, because we write in a more “classical” style of music (hence our newly self-named genre of “Progressive Classical”), these nine songs add up to over 60 minutes of music.
Daniel is really good at critically listening to things, and cutting-editing-deleting parts of the songs that don’t really work:
“What are we trying to say with this song? Does this really work? What kind of statement are we trying to make?”
So while working on “Fields of Mourning, Fields of Peace”, we chopped out an entire section of music = that had cool chords and major-minor changes, but didn’t really fit in with the rest of the song. That dropped the song from being almost 10 minutes to around 7 minutes. Now the song flows much better, and we may use that section in another piece of music later on.
We were in the studio today for about 6 hours, working on things.
We finished up the end of the day listening to a couple of 1970′s Progressive Rock bands = Renaissance and Illusion.
Listening to some of this older stuff really helps to give us perspective on what works and what doesn’t. Some Progressive Rock bands of past and present do a good job of keeping the music going and making a great statement; some bands seem to just ramble on in service of their “artistic ego” without having much consideration for the listener.
Our intention is to produce music that is inspiring and uplifting.
Thank you.
Dr. Andrew Colyer and “English Gentleman” Daniel Aggers
Indra’s Net
“Progressive Classical Music for Progressive Rock Fans”
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