Audient Music
The Black Room was composed using Logic Audio with (mostly) free sounds from the Web for the Kurzweil K2500.
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Audient Music
The Black Room
I wrote this piece while my wife and I were separated. I suppose you can hear that in the music when you listen to it, but I doublet you could extract that information simply from listening. It's funny how you can hear things in music if they are suggested to you, but they aren't obvious until they are pointed out.
...
While we were separated, I lived in a smallish apartment run by the college where I am employed. It was fortunate for me since the rent was so cheap, but it was unfortunate for the college when I burned the kitchen down trying to cook fried okra...
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I decided to spend some time "finding myself" while I was living there. I don't know if that's what they called it in the 60's and 70's, but that's what I called it.
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The Black Room was a result of some stuff I found. It's one of those pieces that just started flowing out from a simple idea. I found some free sounds for my Kurzweil online. They were very inspiring sounds. Once I started playing with them a little, the piece very quickly began to be about the "playing out" of the sounds. I mixed the piece almost as I composed it. The drums and sundry percussion were all played live on my keyboard while the pads were shifting back and forth between 7ths and 9ths. I had no map at all when I put in the pads....just started playing. I then had to "learn" how to play the piece. By the time I was finished learning it, I had finished composing it.
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One very nice thing about having time to "find myself" the way I did was that I could spend hours on end playing through all this stuff...zoning out, listening, letting the entire vibe of the piece crawl under my skin...I could mix at loud volume levels. I could mix with headphones. I could mix naked! It was great.
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The day after I thought I had finished mixing and putting the final touches
on The Black Room, I figured I'd make some fried okra and watch
some of the NHL playoffs while I drank some beer and tried to think of a
title for the piece I had just finished. I started the okra, then stepped
out for (I SWEAR!) only 2 or 3 minutes just to pee. 
When I came back my
kitchen was engulfed in flames. The cabinets had about 1,378 layers of paint
on them and when the flames hit, the paint just took off! So there I was
with everything I owned covered in soot and ash. It was perfectly appropriate
to call the piece The Black Room.
...
Oh, and there's a movie by that same title, too. Nice coincidence, eh?