And now some news from the Bram Cools music front. For those who don’t know, I do make music, but not everyone is going to like it since it’s a bit rough and weird sometimes… (Listen to an older compilation called ‘I am the Belgian Christian lo-fi scene’ for example to get an idea…)
Years ago, in 2007, I took the RPM challenge, and recorded an album in a month (februari even, the shortest)! It don’t think it’ll ever reach the top-40 though (none of my music ever will I’m afraid…) since it was a weird, raw, lo-fi and not very professional concept album loosely based on the classical liturgies. It had all kind of weird musical styles, and was sung in a lot of different languages (Dutch, English, Latin, Greek, 2 words of Hebrew and one word of French) There was an electronic repetitive Kyrië, an avant-hop psalm of praise (in 5/8 meter), a lo-fi folk self-written creed, etc…
I made some home-’pressed’ CD-R’s’ at the time, but they have been ‘out of print’ since forever, and the music has been unavailable for quite some years now… I never even dared to listen to it because I was afraid that I’d hate it for being rcorded too hastily, and since I lost the tracks in a computer crash, I’d never been able to rework them again either.
Listening again years later I don’t find it that bad, so I decided to make it available again, with some songs slightly remastered.
And the re-release is… Tararara…
NOW!
From now on it can be downloaded via the ‘Gloria in Te Domine‘ bandcamp site, where I want to share my more ‘religious’-minded music (like worship, praise, gospel, meditative and liturgical stuff, if I’d ever be able to play such stuff….) You can get it for free or choose to pay for it if you like… And if you like soundcloud more, you can also find it here.
So you can all download the album in the format you like for free or for the price you like …. If you want to use them and need chords or lyrics or so, please contact me…
And now for something completely different, one of my own songs. Someone told me today that she likes the song, and it’s been stuck in my head ever since. Like most of my songs it’s weird, and this one could be described as a lo-fi psalm with noise orchestra and a choir of clones of myself (long live multitrack!)…
Yes I know it’s not a ‘real’ video, and I also know I’ll never get rich and popular making this kind of music, but I do like it myself, and I play it for the few people who so like it… And this is one of the songs that some people find really good (which surprises me), while others hate it (which doesn’t. Those people of the second category can just listen to something else [no, you won't be rickrolled by clicking, but it might be worse] and skip this post and everything about my music, or just read teh lyrics and pray them or sing them to gregorian melodies or the tune of the latest Matt Redman hit…
Father I’m tired (Bram Cools)
Father I am tired (Father I am tired)
Father l feel empty (Father I feel empty)
Father I feel lost (Father I feel lost)
help me to focus on you (help me to focus)
help me to focus on you (help me to focus)
help me to focus on you (help me to focus)
I’ve been distracted
the emptiness calls to me
I’ve fallen asleep
in the centre of Babylon
fill me up with your spirit
fill me up with your love
fill me up with your life
unconditional love
compared to this love
this whole world is so small
i t could dissolve in a cup of coffee
how can l be distracted
how can I be distracted
how can I be distracted
Once I came up with a theory about personality types and certain types of music. It is just a personal theory, and not complete in any way, so don’t take it too seriously… If it is valid it will be only in part, but it may be interesting.
I noticed about different people having different ways of looking at the world. There are lots of ways to describe people and divide them into personality types (like Myers-Briggs; DISC, enneagram,…) but I’m not going into that for now. I just noticed that some people seem to think in straight lines, and other more in chaotic associative thinking. I clearly am in the second category, and I guess a lot of people would be at the middle, and no way to describe and pigeonhole people and their personality will ever do judgment to the uniqueness of every person, but let’s just go on with the simplified model in which people can be divided into ‘straigh thinkers’ and ‘chaotic thinkers’.
What I also noticed it that a lot of music can be applied to certain personality types, and I saw clearly that some styles of music can be easily put into my 2 categories. Lots of classical music (lik Bach and Mozart) are totally in the ‘straight thinking’ camp, as well as a lot of metal. On the side of the chaotic thinkers you’ll get more alternative rock, noise and lo-fi for example.
Let’s just take Iron Maiden and Radiohead for two examples. Iron maiden has a very structured way of composing, and technical qualities that can be easily recognized by people who are known with the craft of music making. The same with the lyrics: the have a certain structure and a certain meaning, which can be known. And it is quite fun.
Radiohead on the other hand, especially in later albums, can be anti-rational and purely intuitive sometimes. It is totally unpredictable. Even though some songs may be more or less ‘traditionally’ tonal in composition, others are pure chaos and dischord, or repetitive atmosphere more than composition and melody. And for the lyrics, God may know what some of them mean, but even Thom and co don’t, and they don’t care about it either…
Okay it’s not exactly hard music, this particular, especially not this one song, but it’s pretty intense if you get into it. And if you don’t get into it there’s no way you can understand what it is about. You cannot analyse the structure or the techniques, it’s purely intuitive… Another good example of the ‘chaotic’ thinking in music is this dEUS-classic, which is very big in Belgium…(it actually was #11 in the timeless 100 list on national radio ‘studio brussel’) :
I don’t mean that people who like Iron Maiden will never live radiohead and vice versa, but there still is a barrier between those 2 kinds of people sometimes. I’ve noticed that some musicians just cannot cope with anything that isn’t in their musical system on the one hand, and I’ve met others who are suspicious of anything that could be conventional. And I think that this has everything to do with what I’ve described. But I do like both, even though I take iron maiden as being just theater…
Also part of my theory, that I found interesting, was where the extremes go bad. Straight thinking goes to extremes in one direction, like extremism, fundamentalism, of Satanism. A lot of satanic music is blackmetal, but I’ve never heard of truly satanic noise or lo-fi… On the other had, the chaotic side will fall into nihilism, disbelief and ‘nothing makes sense’. There is a totally different danger here… Maybe you could call ‘straight-thinking’ right and ‘chaotic-thinking’ left, but I don’t think that would be entirely correct either…
The funny thing is, being on the chaotic side myself. I feel that there is a strong connection to my ‘postmodern thought’ and my chaotic thinking, my ADHD divergent thinking.
, an avant-hop psalm of praise (in 5/8 meter), a lo-fi folk self-written creed, etc…
