10th Anniversary Edition of Corpus Alienum's Dark Signal
Dark Signal 10th Anniversary limited edition CD
February 11th marks the tenth anniversary of the release of Dark Signal, the first Corpus Alienum release from 2014. A new expanded edition with four extra tracks is available to stream and a limited edition CD is also available at Bandcamp. All download and CD sales on Bandcamp will benefit the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.
Click here to buy the CD on Bandcamp. You can also buy the CD directly from me on PayPal by sending $10 (or more) + $4 shipping to jkenkase@gmail.com. U. S. shipping only. Be sure to include your address.
Dark Signal was originally an EP of five selections that hung together as a suite. All of the pieces were borne of improvisation at the keyboard and overdubbed until they seemed complete. Nothing was planned ahead of time.
The cover is a photograph I took of Maggie Panian, the daughter of dear friends of mine, who was six years old at the time. We sat together playing with various small toys when I got the idea for a 1950s-style horror movie forced perspective shot in which a giant little girl is seen getting ready to eat a seemingly tiny dinosaur. She was a good sport and she gave me the perfect cover for an album of weird music.
It was my first public foray into music that could be described as avant-garde and reflects the influence of electronic, classical music and jazz that hitherto found no outlet in my work. While working on songs that would become the Ken Kase EP, I became disenchanted with the process of writing and recording pop songs and sought to do something entirely different. Recording this music put me on a new path. It would be a decade before I would release some of the more traditional songs I was working on at the time.
The opener, "Echopraxis", a term that refers to a symptom of mental illness marked by the involuntary imitation of the actions of others, fittingly owes much to twentieth century composers Edgard Varèse, Frank Zappa and John Cage. The "ensemble" is a group of sampled east Asian percussion instruments played via a keyboard. There's an improvised call and response between the percussion instruments and the overdubbed electronic sounds. There are three tracks in total, all improvised first takes. This piece could be performed live with a conductor and it would sound different every time it was performed.
"Scrutiny" was inspired by the work of Weather Report keyboardist Joe Zawinul with a little Miles Davis. I used a sampled Fender Rhodes electric piano sound through a ring modulator effect to get a sound like Zawinul used in the early 70s. I recorded the "melody" after laying down the chords and percussion with an improvised electric piano part at a slow speed and then brought it up to tempo so it sounds super fast. The the melodic content is scrambled by a ring modulator detuning effect that allowed me to play the keyboard as a rhythm instrument.
"Synostosis" is the only composition in the suite that has a singable melody. It is meant to be a musical and sonic relief from the intensity of the other pieces. Synostosis is the process of two bones forming together to make a single bone. No deep meaning here; the title just sounded good.
"Agnosia" was put together visually. I arranged the STEMS in Logic Pro so that they formed a visible pattern and symmetry that sounded right. The title is a medical term that means an inability to recognize sensory information due to brain damage. The music came first, the title came later. I was looking in scientific glossaries trying to find interesting titles and found the perfect match. It sounds like sensory information gone awry to me. The electronic sound that hints at the sound of human speech is me speaking into a microphone and using effects to distort the hell out of it.
"Dark Signal" started with a sampled percussion part through an envelope filter and delay. The chords and melody were also first take improvisations. It owes its influence to Charles Ives and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The "melody" was created using a patch that has microtonal intervals that give it an eerie sound. The electronic sounds that moan and wail were overdubbed later so I could give myself a chance to forget what I had laid down weeks before and come to the piece with renewed perspective. It sounds like the soundtrack to a suspenseful movie.
The four compositions that make up the "Bonus Track Suite" were recorded around the same time as the original release. "Breath" is an electronic piece intended for piano and string orchestra that was written and recorded in 2010. "Static" uses ring modulation to distort the tolling bell pulse that happens in most of the piece and it ends with a soothing synth pad that includes the sound of crickets. "Detainment Lounge" was recorded shortly a year or two after the EP was released and has a sampled sound of film library music from the 50s that was added during the Mind Control Dance Party-era. "Fissure" is a drone piece with 6/8 feel like an Irish jig.
This may be my least loved album, but it's my favorite because it took me to a whole new place artistically. Nobody really heard it and I'm sure that a small number of people who did hear it probably didn't know what to make of it or care for it. But there are a select few out there who really liked and understood what I was trying to do. For me, it was a break from my normal compositional style that opened me up creatively.
Ten years later, I've made four Corpus Alienum albums in total, all of which have roots in this project. In a way, it's my greatest personal accomplishment because it took me into uncharted waters and inspired a whole new mode of expression. I hope you enjoy this expanded edition to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its release. It is the album I'm most proud of.