“Drizzlepaint”

 

The third and final of the three songs written for this project is called “Drizzlepaint” and was inspired by Jackson Pollock’s 1948 “Untitled (Silver Over Black, White, Yellow & Red)”/

This painting is unusual in that it does not have a conventional subject (such as a person, landscape or scene). Pollock’s famous ‘drip paint’ technique was used to create this picture. The technique involves letting paint drip off the end of a brush in a controlled manner, as can be seen here (Pollock in 1951, working: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQQ36kojicg)

The song was composed over a period of two weeks and was put together in its final form on the day of recording in the studio. My initial idea was to create several layers of guitar parts of different pitches to put together to emulate the effect of layering one colour of paint over another when drip painting. There are four guitar parts within the song: one repeated chord, two repeating melodic parts and one part consisting of pinched harmonics in repetition. At first, I had planned to layer five guitar parts to mirror the five colours used by Pollock: however, in the studio my producer Laura and I decided that the mix was already very ‘busy’ and we decided to leave the piece with four guitar parts. 

Having never recorded a purely instrumental song before, this experience was a new one for me and if there were more instruments at hand and more time to work with in the studio then I would consider re-recording this with more instruments such as bass guitar, electric 6-string guitar and drums. 

You can hear the song here at: http://twelvestringsthreepaintings.bandcamp.com/track/drizzlepaint