Restraint (lost-&-found home recording #12)
A draft of Restraint was written in 2012 after my album, Surrounded, was completed but not yet released. The title of the song was taken from a list of words I'd claimed to’ve cut out of a dictionary I was editing for obsolete myths or wishes. The book didn’t physically exist, but was envisioned from time to time when moody circumstances called. During this interval, Restraint was expanded into four, five-minute recurring themes for a twenty-one-piece song-story I was constructing called Thirst. I’ll be releasing those four parts, called Terrible (1-4) in future posts, as well as other sections that make the whole. The story of Thirst is basically: a child leaves their house at night & hears a voice from a well that warns of what’s to come. Songs that morphed in this process are Measured (a minidisc coda), Freedom (lost-&-found home recording #7), Trust (lost-&-found home recording #1), Redemption (lost-&-found home recording #9), Tradition (lost-&-found home recording #6) & Forgiveness (lost-&-found home recording #11) — all previously released in EXTRACTIONS.
In 2015, I pared Thirst down to just eleven songs to make the story more lean. The rest were set aside for an album that would undergo a few name changes before being abandoned, as well. Collected here, they’re are now simply called lost-&-found home recordings. About this time, I specifically condensed the fleshed-out Terrible (1-4) to a single version again, edited lyrically as an amalgam, which eventually became the below demo of Restraint, recorded on the Roland 2480 in July 2017. The whiteboard went to the attic.
Restraint 7/2017 1.X 2.X 3.X 4.wurlitzer electric piano-vibrato/sm57/grace-3-harmony 5.fender rhodes piano bass/direct-2 & outro 6.marching drum-rubber ball mallet/ev cardinal/grace-double 7.marching drum-rubber ball mallet/ev cardinal/grace 8.casio sk-1/jazz organ/leslie-slow/akg c3000/grace-1 #2 & outro 9.casio sk-1-piano/direct-line-3 & outro 10.wurlitzer electric piano-vibrato/sm57/grace-line-3 & outro 11.casio sk-1-piano/direct-line-1 12.wurlitzer electric piano/sm57/grace-line-1 13.vocal-neumann u48-harmony 14.vocal-neumann u48-main 15.kalamazoo/standard/silk&steel/ev cobalt/direct 16.kalamazoo/standard/silk&steel/at 4033/grace 17.X 18.X 19.X 20.X 21.X 22.X 23.X 24.X Lying still for months to finally come scratching past their grins, into their gums in self-inflicted myth-infected flight, crashing as it scurried from their touch, suckled as the puzzle lost its taste smoldering in the catalysts' restraint: the secret of the servant, unreleased, was bowing while the curtain went to flame splitting at the road between the signs showing where the linchpin opened wide, to keep in place the first mistake of trying to believe. In doing what they knew they didn't mean, in innocence, they ended, running from the blood of double-tongued archaic dreams.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to EXTRACTIONS to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.