Band Names of the one man variety

icarius — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:49:32 +0000

I’ve been writing and working on new music at home, mostly electronically based stuff using my Nord rack, with a bit of vocals. Also have been taking my cassette field recorder around and recording sound that will eventually be incorporated into an ambient recording. Or an ambient album. So since I’m heading down this musical path, I’ve been brainstorming a band name, or “project” name. God I hate the term “project” for a band. A project is something you do for your junior high school science class. Come to think of it, my musical pursuits may only be at the junior high level, so perhaps it does fit? So band names. “Book of Iao”? No, reminds me of “Book of Love”. “Courtyard With Lunatics”? Actually, that one is kind of great, except that it’s a famous painting by Goya. “Visqueen Victoria”. Nah, that is a kind of jokey term I could hear the Beatles using. “The Cheezits People”? Wha? This is serious art (heh), not a Wierd Al outtake! I had thought “Clouds of Kala” would be good. It has a floaty vibe and “kala” is short for the Haleakala volcano on Maui. A very wonderful place. As I thought about it “Clouds of Kala” was just a bit too…expected…like you flipped the lever on the ambient band name generator and out came “Clouds of Kala”. So for some reason I kept coming to some form of the two words “Chroma” and “Ki”. Chromatic is a type of scale and Ki is an early sumerian goddess. But how would I spell this? “Kromaki”? “Kromakeye”? “Chromakai”? I settled on the derivation “Chroma-Ki”, though I’m not that happy about the hyphen. What bands have there been where a hyphen is actually desireable? But I suppose it’s weird enough to kind of work, so that’s it. “Chroma-Ki”

mellotrons and severe thunderstoms

icarius — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:46:22 +0000

A few weeks ago I purchased g-force media’s software plug-in of Mellotron samples. I’ve been happily playing around with it–if in fact you bought a real physical Mellotron today, it would cost somewhere around $5,000. The Mellotron was an early version of a sampler. If a band wanted orchestras or choirs on their record but couldn’t afford the cost, they would use a Mellotron. The Mellotron looks like an organ, except when a key is pressed a tape plays the samples of choirs, orchestras, flutes, etc. You’ve heard Mellotrons as the flutes on Strawberry Fields Forever and Stairway to Heaven. The Moody Blues practically made a career out of using the contraption. Mellotrons were not really that stable and so the tapes would sometimes dip in pitch or sound a bit warped, which added to the appeal of the sounds for me.

I just returned from Missouri where severe thunderstorms are as common as telemarketing calls I get on my voicemail everyday. Since I haven’t been back there for about 3 years, it was refreshing for me to see some rain as a nice contrast to the dry Phoenix climate.

On the song licensing front, we met with a publisher a couple of weeks ago who is interested in Broken Nights. This is an exciting prospect, so we are keeping our fingers crossed for some good placements.

Icarusenvy Weblog

Band Names of the one man variety

mellotrons and severe thunderstoms