There to here: After a lengthy radio silence, Che Underground: The Blog returns with the long-rumored musical resurrection of the scene’s sharpest ear and most astute culture critic. Listen to his first release while reading King Therapy’s process and prospects.
King Therapy is the alter-ego of a secret-identity by Jeremiah Cornelius, created for the presentation of some musical thoughts and ideally, collaboration by like-minded musicians in the roles of various Dissonauts.
“The Air That I Breathe” is the first track completed for a prospective EP of cover songs that are in various stages of near-completion. I always like this song’s ability to poise on a knife-edge between sincerity and pure corniness.
This creation of The Hollies with Gene Clarke (produced by Alan Parsons) is pretty wonderful to begin with. I used to be divided in my opinion about it, until a time I heard it playing, half-distinguishable, from another room, when I thought, “What Bowie song is that?” I can’t ever listen now without the 12-string echoing “Space Oddity” and “Lady Stardust.”
The genesis of this project came out of my frustration with an inability to connect around musical projects with various collaborators in the past few years, given constraints of time and geography. In September, I found myself jet-lagged in a Barcelona hotel room, and used the early-morning hours to experiment with GarageBand on a laptop — using free General MIDI scores as a starting point to explore what was possible. Like everybody, I’d owned GarageBand for years, without making much headway in its use. The first two instrumental tracks were largely produced and engineered like this in a few hours time.
Related sounds: Jerry Cornelius performs “Sister Heat” ca. 1988!
I liked taking generally available, almost unmusical sources, and applying criteria of sensibility that I find lacking in a lot of popular music in the last decades — producing something both familiar and strange. Working from old, General MIDI sources is like re-imagining a well-known painting, working solely from an amateur copy in needlepoint.
Without taking specific instruction as I worked in these tools, I was inspired the approaches taken by Brian Eno, including partially remembered “Oblique Strategies.” Eno’s statement that with synthesizers, technical competence in an instrument is replaced by the quality of making selections, certainly helped. Continuing in that vein, I made the creative choice to limit my toolset strictly to GarageBand, the stock instruments and effects available with the software, and those available as Apple provided add-ons from in-application download.
Vocal production intimidated me for a couple of months. I don’t have it sussed yet, and some of that shows in the final result. My singing is compromised by competing with the headphone mix, as I also operate the controls. The effect suits an urgency in the song, and produced a happy accident. Four takes were made in immediate succession, in just about 40 minutes. These were mixed into a layered track, where I tried to emphasize micro-tonal wavers from pitch between the tracks, to produce something similar to “The Glitch” of an Eventide H910 Harmonizer, made famous on “Low” in Tony Visconti’s production, and used to create a glassy presence on hundreds of recordings in years following.
A side note: I also figured out the licensing for streaming covers of copyrighted work, so this effort has a number of other practical effects. I absolutely encourage anybody to jump in and just start putting their ideas into some sharable artifact. The means are readily available and the limits are largely of your own imagined causes to be uncertain. — Jeremiah Cornelius
Listen to King Therapy play “The Air That I Breathe”!
More There to Here:
Impressive and encouraging. Did you play the guitars as well?
Paul,
Thanks much! That means a lot.
If you are asking ME about guitars, that’s also a sincerely taken complement.
Especially?
Because there are no guitars in this track. The 12-string is a cheesy GarageBand sample with a bit of Leslie-speaker effect to take some of the mechanical feel out of the strum. The leads are a GarageBand synthesizer patch, pushed through the standard tape-delay and phaser plugins -- with the phase set on as extreme LFO parameters I could get, without “booming” speakers. I have a slightly cleaner version of the opening lead, that seems a tad more ‘listenable”. I’ve not been able to make up my mind between the weirder/approachable axis. Tho’ I guess for the first bars, you want to attract people’s ears!
Nice work, Jerry!
Thank you, Robin!