Jahzzar

Simple, the hardest part is making it simple.

With the huge spectrum of posibilities that computing offers to our music, it is easy to fall into the temptation. Effects, sounds, reverb … Simple. One can put make up on a melody, overload it, always taking the risk of overdoing it. Less may be more as they say. And in the end it turns out closer and more sincere, if a song can express the maximum with the minimun. Sakamoto or Glass may serve as examples, as well as Satie, Chopin, Granados, etc …

Simple. From this point of view I got my hands on Sea. A melody for piano with a small cord arrangement that gives a subtle crescendo at the end.

I think it sounds very much like a soundtrack to a movie. Like a good bye scene at the train station, like a Super 8 recording of childhood scenes, with face close ups in slow motion from a friends meeting … What about listening while looking at the sea?

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Turning back home in the night, tired, wasted in the back seat of the car. Green and red reflections from the traffic lights, from the neons, and all the street lights distorted by the raindrops on the window.

An image is also a state of mind, a sensation; in other words, it has a meaning for the observer. And is this meaning what music has to seek and emphasize.

Working from what an image brings to our mind rather than the image itself allows us to save time creating a music library, to defocus from detail and to avoid being specific at the same time. This way the music theme can be extrapolated, generalized and applied to any scene that shares some meaning.

Cristal works with multiple situations despite its duration, its style, form and the fact that it comes from a memory. That’s what I like from it, it can communicate either sadness or joy depending on the moment. A simple and recursive melody, very few effects, lots of pad and echo, recorded in one take. The piano, random and insecure trying to reach the back seat in that car, the image, the melancholy, the meaning.

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