Where Are You began as an instrumental track that I was messing around with after listening to one of my favourite Underworld tracks, "Dirty Epic". I actually toyed with the idea of covering that song, but I wanted to start doing more original material.
So this groove was meant to be Underworld circa 1994, even though I wrote it in 2006. After completing the arrangement, I found it was too heavy on the music and there was too much empty space... I thought it needed words.
I envisioned spoken words, rather than sung lyrics, and I started putting the word out to all the writers I knew soliciting random poems and so forth. The perfect one came to me from my sister who had this poem entitled, 'Where Were You', and I liked it immediately. I recorded vocals the next day through a crappy internet mic and then chopped them up in to bits, stuttered them, time-stretched them and EQed them to sound lo-fi, and spaced them throughout the track. It worked beautifully.
Originally, I had a sample from Seal's "Crazy" (the drum loop from the breakdown) but for fear of getting my ass sued off, I replaced it at the last minute with a drum machine playing a similar pattern.
For Glory, I did a harder EBM-style remix just keeping the main ideas from the original, but with a little more bite.
VERSIONS
- Where Are You? (Original version) (11:27)
written, produced and arranged by Perpetual Emotion Machine.
The original no-vocal version, and with the Seal sample intact. Was released with some early Omega bundles. - Where Are You? (11:27)
music written, produced and arranged by Perpetual Emotion Machine. lyrics written by Heather Mowery.
The final album version without the Seal sample. - Where Are You? (The Immaculate Contraption Remix) (5:58)
music written, produced and arranged by Perpetual Emotion Machine. lyrics written by Heather Mowery. remix by The Immaculate Contraption (OCIII)
blurb
0 comments: