Mubla Tubed Notes
#Grinding
The main riff of this song kind of happened by accident. I had my guitar plugged into a whammy pedal set an octave up and it gave the guitar this glitchy, scratchy tweaked out kind of distorted sound and I randomly played the main riff and thought it was kind of cool, so I recorded it and ended up creating a song out of a bunch of different riffs that kind of all naturally popped up one by one. It’s funny, the final version of this song isn’t much different than the original demo from the first session when I wrote it. During the production of this song I purposely cut some bars short and made the transitions between sections happen a little faster, but the overall structure of the song didn’t change from that initial first writing session. I love it when that happens, I love capturing an entire 2 or 3 minute composition naturally in an organic sequence, it always ends up feeling like the song evolves how it should when it’s captured correctly the first time. Sometimes one riff speaks to you and demands a specific thing to happen afterwards, and being able to capture that inspiration when it happens is always a magical experience.
The voiceover stuff happened as an afterthought. I came across some pretty hilarious rage gameplay videos on YouTube where this guy is just yelling at his computer whenever his character dies in the game he’s streaming, and so I contacted the guy and he agreed to let me take snippets of his gameplay rage vocals and randomly disperse them throughout the song. I don’t think it necessarily makes or breaks the song but to me it’s kind of entertaining and a nice element of something else to listen to.
Stumble
I wrote this song a few years back during a Jeff Beck kick. There’s a kind of a bluesy verse melody that happens that’s about as bluesy or pedestrian as I usually venture to go, but for this song it felt right and gave the song a nice space to breathe before the whole band kicked in again for the rocking energetic part. I love the drums in this song too, that’s Pat Steward playing and we recorded the drums at the Armoury Studios in Vancouver with my good friend Paul Silveira engineering. He always captures such huge, magnificent drum sounds, it’s by far my favorite studio to work in.
Super Rev
This is another song I wrote during a big phase of listening to lots of Jeff Beck, in particular the albums he’s put out over the past 20 years. I love the production on his latest records, the marriage of immaculate guitar work and fantastic, cutting edge production really give his albums a unique stamp and sound. The main riff is a heavy Drop D tuned guitar and the vibe of this song kind of felt like it didn’t have to be hard and rocking the entire time. So I manage to transition into a bit of a funky section with cleaner, funky rhythm guitars that seemed to work fine in combination with the heavy drop tuned distorted guitar sections. The middle breakdown bridge features a speech by the Reverend Jesse Jackson that I made some slight edits to and took a little artistic liberty to make it work in the context of the song, but I thought that it really fit in and suited the overall feel of the tracks so I left it in.
Moonlight
This is a song that I wrote with an interesting flamenco inspired altered tuning. It’s a little bit of a free-flowing form, and to me it invokes images of a moonlit night somewhere on a Spanish seaside. I wanted to have some kind of a different textural sound for this point in the EP, after 3 pretty straight ahead rocking songs I thought a different timbre and textural sonic landscape would be nice. I don’t consider myself to be a very advanced flamenco or classical style guitarist, and a lot of times I will use a pick on the nylon string guitar, but I always liked the melody in this song and the dark, haunting chord progression of this piece so I decided to include it on the EP.
Never the Machine Forever
I’ve always wanted to do some covers of Soundgarden, I’ve been such a huge fan of Superunknown and Down on the Upside since they came out in the 90s. I chose this song since it’s a little bit more obscure and wasn’t a single, but like most of their music even the non-singles were amazing songs, and I’ve always loved the main riff to this track. Of course it’s not easy to cover Soundgarden unless you’ve got a crazy amazing voice like Chris Cornell, so I decided to take the easy way out and do an instrumental cover instead. I decided to have some fun and change up one or two parts to make it different from their original version. I put in a drum breakdown section where the chorus happens, and I felt it worked good that way to allow the main riff in the verse to rock out straight ahead and have the different sections broken up by a breakdown feel for the chorus section.
Endless
This track obviously stands out as completely different from the rest, being a lush, vast orchestral soundscape. I included this song on the album to tie into another album I was concurrently working on that I released a few months after Mubla Tubed, called Aetherium Divine. it’s super spacious, ambient, very lush and dreamy sounding with some sparse, ring modulated effected guitar parts very spaciously sprinkled throughout the piece.