what's it all about?

most of the story behind this track can be found on the cordelia page, but this is really the introduction to the character of cordelia, beautifully and insanely brought to life by the otherwise angelically voiced helen turner.  george and cordelia have been exchanging postcards about their individual tweaks on society over the years since 1863 at the gettysburg address.  problem is, george keeps forgetting to put the postage on them, hence cordelia's unhinged reprimand. 

i sat on a train one morning and worked out that george owes cordelia something in the order of $30,000 at an average of two postcards per week.  that says far more about me i think than the creation of a notional time traveller who keeps mucking about with world history.

instruments & tone sources

surreal fairly simple straightforward orchestration despite the musical structure.  it needed to feel quite spacy and sparse but structured.  two bass guitars with identical sounds (in fact i think played straight after each other) with the 3/4 waltz loop from the zoom 234.  the guitar is the red ibanez rg550 played through sans amp and a dbx compressor to get the sustain.  all reverb duties handled by the roland vs1680.  this was the first piece recorded on the 1680 as a matter of fact.  written during the recording of helen turner's album, 'permission'.

production comments

a surreal tale needed a undeniably quirky feel.  i also wanted to reflect the interplay of the two main protagonists in some way musically.  i came up with the slightly unusual solution of having two harmony bass guitars forming the main accompaniment, leaving the guitar to sail over the top with some odd modal work.  the waltz 3/4 time signature completes the slightly 'addams family' atmosphere of the piece and reflects back to the 'antique' nature of the two players.  someone said it reminded them of 'minuetto allegretto' by the wombles....  go figure