Continuing on the post from two weeks ago, this time I’m going to share some of the “building blocks” of Within - the projects that served only as parts of the bigger picture. This time we will focus on the poem, one of the core ideas, and on “Within Persistence.”
This is a method I often use when creating bigger projects. Sometimes I take a melodic/harmonic idea, a sequence, an arrangement, and sometimes it’s just a sound or just one little random idea.
Starting with “Talks 1,” which is related to the piece that led to Within (of which it was a part) but was created before it. One day I was watching a documentary about Hayim Nahman Bialik, and there was someone reading one of his poems. This part touched me, and I first took his voice from the documentary itself to see what I could do with it. This is what you hear in “Talks 1.” Later, I contacted the person who was reading it, and he was kind enough to agree to record his voice specifically for my purpose, as taking the audio from the documentary itself could have led to copyright issues.
Here is a link where you can see Zali reading the poem (3:19 to 5:00). Although I believe this footage is not included in this form in the documentary I watched, the video likely contains material that was shot for the documentary but used in a different way.
“Talks 1” is from June 8, 2023. At this point I was already deep in the creation of the piece that eventually led to Within, and looking back, I think I reached a deep level of concentration there, almost disconnected from the outside world. For good and bad, I was completely living inside the creation, and I could find some ideas that felt obvious to me while also unique. I can hear it in the minimal way I use sounds there, and I remember this feeling well.
“A GOOD CALL TO REMEMBER” needs no further explanation, I believe. But what I can tell is that when I created it, I never believed it would take a prominent place anywhere, like it eventually did.
“ASHKAVA INS” is where “Within Persistence” is coming from. This part of Within was first composed before it was arranged. And “ASHKAVA INS” is the project where you can hear those very first wanderings about where this could go. The weird name of that project comes from the inspiration I probably had from this piece, which is the soundtrack of a play that really touched me. From what I remember, I started with the piano, then moved to record some things with the MIDI keyboard just to recall what I did, while I kept wandering and exploring. But the full thing was later fully composed on the piano alone.
Lastly, I also shared with you “Talks 23,” 24, and 26 this time. In “Talks 23” you can hear all of the poems we were recording in a pretty raw way, and other poem ideas that didn’t make it into Within (not all of them are from the same poem). You can also hear some other sound ideas I had around different poems, like in the beginning, for example, which has a completely different energy than “Yam Hadmama” (Sea of Silence), which was originally chosen for the piece before Within and later for Within itself.
“24 & 26” are the last exported projects before this one moved to the bigger Within project, with a one-month gap between 24 and 26. There I probably realized how the entire poem would be used in Within, and not just its first verse like in the original plan that started before Within. There is also version 27, which was not exported, as it is probably just some final editing before this project was moved to the full project.
This is a very small taste of those building blocks, and I might share more of them soon, like the sounds I made, patches, other arrangements, rhythmical ideas like the South American rhythms, or even the “options” folder, which contains things that I felt had the potential to be used but eventually were never used.
I must say that writing these things feels a bit like writing a dream. I didn’t think I would remember it in detail, and as I’m writing, I see that I can tell much more than I planned - similarly to when you write down a dream.
P.S. The photo for this post was taken by me exactly during the composition of Within Persistence, after the part discussed here. The open book is the poem.
Listen here: https://on.soundcloud.com/w5rNF9hdCOTGPR6Hi4