»Notes: Touching A Nerve

The idea for this song came about after I was reading something about dub and decided that it would be fairly easy to try and incorporate some elements of dub into my music. This basically translated to thinking along the lines of a slow song with heavy bass and a snare drum saturated in reverb. This shows the depth of my understanding of dub music.

I had to record the drums as two separate tracks, one for the kick and cymbals and one for the snare. The kick and cymbal got a slightly less prominent reverb added than the snare.

I'm not particularly sure what scale the main guitar is playing. It's probably a mode or something, I just wanted something with a bit of a weird, eastern sound.

Interestingly, on the distorted guitar that comes in about halfway through I used my effects pedal to knock it down an octave. This sounded really cool and the cool pitch-wobbling type effect was a happy coincidence.

There are some ethereal sounding, waily vocals. That's just me making those noises with some chorus and reverse delay added. I bet it doesn't sound so cool now. I really need to befriend an ethnic sounding female vocalist and then every song can have a middle eight like 'Smack My Bitch Up'.

The samples in the middle are from Inland Empire. The Inland Empire DVD has no scene selection, the entire film is one big scene. This makes scanning through the film on the hunt for samples a real pain. Fortunately you don't have to delve very far into a David Lynch film to come up with evocative, weird shit.

The David Lynch connection continues with the thumbnail which I dredged from his website.

I had a hard time coming up with a name for this song. Possible ideas were being lazy and just pulling something from one of the samples/vocals, which would have resulted in 'OooooOOoooh, EeeeEEeeh', 'Look At Me, You Fucker' or some pointless transcription of the other sample. I almost called it Axxon N though that would be ripping off David Lynch yet again. 'Touching A Nerve' came about after seeing if 'Axxon' was actually a word in the dictionary. An axon is some sort of nerve fibre, so that was some nice imagery to play around with. But hey, what's in a name?¹

¹ (A lot.)

Axxon N