The Pushpin Revolution EP began with the song of the same name. I'm not sure at this point which came first, the actual song, or just the name, but I'll tell you about both, starting with the song.
I woke up at my then-girlfriend's house one day, and she was sick. I seem to remember it being a pretty shitty day outside, and being lazy and unmotivated, we proceeded to waste the entire day in her living room. She played Kingdom Hearts for PS2 while I killed time writing music on my laptop. Luckily, there was no internet connection to distract me. I somehow managed to write the song, from start to finish in one long sitting, on her living room floor, while she was glued to her video games.
The song kicked around my hard drive for a little while before I released it on
EM411, an electronic music community site I had recently bought a paid account on. I'd been hanging around the forums for a while, and when they started offering a paid account with limited hosting and release privileges, I went for it. The first song I put online, in June of 2003, was Pushpin Revolution.
The name was coined by my neighbor at the time, who fancied himself an anarchist. He'd stopped by to borrow some pins and tape or something, and somehow in the course of conversation, the phrase "Pushpin Revolution" came up (perhaps he was telling me he was liberating my pins? I don't remember exactly), and I filed it away in the back of my head for use as a title.
Anyways, fast forward to mid-2005. I had released my
Apparel EP earlier in the year, and was trying to decide what my next project would be. I had a few ideas, and one of them was to release a re-mastered version of Pushpin Revolution with a B-side, sort of an online digital single kind of idea. I was at the local laundromat with my laptop one day (again, no internet connection available, thankfully) and started to actually work on this idea. I took the original file for Pushpin Revolution, stripped out all the sequencing information, leaving just the instrument and effect settings in place, and resaved it. This essentially left me with a template to use the same sounds to build new songs. And instead of starting one new song that afternoon, I wrote the first little bit of three separate songs. This was when the idea to make an EP hit me, instead of just a single. Oddly enough, two of the songs I started that day didn't get finished, and didn't make the EP, although I am considering finishing one of them, as an online bonus track of sorts. Which doesn't make a lot of sense for an online-only album anyways, but what the hell, right?
I kept plugging away at the new tracks, eventually coming up with several more fragments along the way. Of the first three tracks I began at the laundromat, one became "Papercut Diplomacy." The melodic intro at the beginning was the first part I wrote, and it took quite a while to write the final bass-driven section. "Pincushion Empire" and "Thumbtack Ambassador" were started sometime later, the former mostly written (about two and a half minutes worth, at least) in one long burst of productivity one day.
At the end of 2005, I moved from Santa Rosa, CA to Seattle, WA, and for a little while during that time, I struggled to finish some of the songs I had in progress. In particular, two of the tracks that had begun at the laundromat were going nowhere fast, and I was trying to figure out how to flesh this suite of songs out to EP length. For some reason, when I started bringing my laptop to Bauhaus Cafe with me, I managed to make myself even more productive. The change of atmosphere somehow helped me focus a little more, even though there were technically more people around to distract me. Whatever happened, I managed to finish "Pincushion Empire," "Thumbtack Ambassador," and "Papercut Diplomacy" in a pretty short span of time. "Safetypin Tyranny," the newest song (started while on Christmas vacation in Southern California), was easy to complete as well, since I knew from the start that it would be a shorter, introductory piece, and wouldn't need as many sections and transitions.
6 songs has always felt like a good EP length to me, but for some reason, I was stuck on the last track I was planning on using for the EP, a track I was calling "fuzz" for the time being. I had a good start to it, but couldn't really bring it together. Also, it was very similar in tempo to 2 of the other tracks I had finished, and in a fit of frustration one night, I wrote the beat that would become "Razorblade Tribunal." Breaking from the synthpop influences that I was relying on for the rest of the tracks, I was trying to imitate a faster, drum n' bass style beat using the basic, lo-fi drum samples on the rest of the EP. While the beat I eventually came up with bears little resemblance to that style, it has a different, driving quality that inspired me again, and I soon brought the last track to a close.
I've mentioned the songs by name this whole time, but the actual names weren't finalized almost until the end of the composition process, and "Razorblade Tribunal" actually had a last minute name change (from "Paperclip Tribunal") just before mastering. But I had known from early on the general idea for the naming convention I would use for this EP. After the
Apparel EP, which was sort of an exercise in fitting the music into a pre-defined concept (more about this in a later post), I wanted to stick with the idea of using a naming convention to give some sort of implied meaning to a collection of otherwise abstract, instrumental music. I even had a list in my notebook, with a column of office/stationery words and a column of political/revolutionary words, which I planned to mix and match to create titles.
The next stage was to export raw wave files of each separate part from each song in Buzz, the program that I use as my main composition tool. Each song had about 7-8 tracks (drum machine, blippy lead synth, warbly FM synth, bass, granular percussion, kick, and a handful of effects tracks). Once I had those exported, I brought them into Cubase, a multitrack audio application, for final mixdowns. At this point, I made some decisions to keep the placement and relative levels of the individual sounds consistent across the EP, and formulated a track order. A lot of the mixing was done on another family vacation, to Kamloops, British Columbia. At nights at the hotel, after visiting with family, I would put on my headphones, fire up Cubase on my laptop, and tweak my mixes for a while before bed.
I finished the last of my mixing once I was back in Seattle, and brought the EP in for mastering at
panicStudios, run by John McCaig, an
excellent musician and mastering engineer who I'd met through
Em411.com. The process was quick and painless, taking about 3-4 hours altogether, and the results of his hard work and great instincts for dynamics and frequency balance were the last bit of polish and shine that the tracks needed.
And now it's out, at the official
Miniature Airlines website, and, as of June 13th, at
Belladonna Records, a Madison, Wisconsin based netlabel (and home of several other great artists). So go download it, if you haven't already. It's freely available, and licensed under a
Creative Commons license, allowing you to remix and reinterpret the tracks (as long as you release any derivations with attribution to the original, and under the same license). Enjoy.
