Ancient Violence

I wrote this piece of music 20 years ago when the news was all about Tienanmen Square. I was deeply affected by the images and stories being shown in the media, and I was of course appalled by the Chinese government's response to the pro-democracy protests. As a young man, the whole idea of this kind of basic lack of freedom was incredibly alien to me. As an older man, I'm appalled at the lack of progress made towards democracy and human rights in many parts of the world. I can only pray that the next 20 years will see more progress toward peace and freedom in China, not to mention Korea, Palestine, Iran...I guess the list could be long indeed.

I started this track a couple of months ago in Reaper, making heavy use of Native Instrument's very unique True Strike Tension Kore soundpack and EZDrummer's Latin Percussion Expansion. The main melody line, a rather haunting vocal synth, was produced with Tone2's Gladiator 2 synth. Today after I installed Cubase 5 Studio, I imported the MIDI file and reassigned the same virtual instruments and got to cutting, pasting and tracking some new overdubs. I worked probably 5 hours on this track in Cubase today without a single crash, hiccup, glitch or unexplained behavior. Those clever German software developers, I gotta hand it to them...this is one smooth and slick program!

I didn't expect to finish this tonight, but I did. Wow....two blog posts in one night, that is a first for me.

Warning: This song is NOT pretty. But then Ancient Violence never is.

here is a direct link to the mp3 for non-shockwave environments