JOHN HERMAN: I had a eureka moment when I realized that the song's lyrics involve the breath of God, and there is an artist named Jesus literally breathing on the track. This was not as intentional as it may appear. Also there is also a strong environmental theme swimming through the track. I feel like this song should be played fairly loud or with headphones.

CHALLENGE #1: On keyboards with a piano or organ sound or a sound similar to either one, watch a favorite recorded movie/tv show with the sound down and play to it. Allow the track to be no greater than 5 minutes long.

FRANCIS POWELL: Having woken up to pale blue sky on the first of November, following an unwarranted telephone call that interrupted a vivid dream, I switched on my computer and proceeded to check my e mails, which is my routine start to the day. The night before I had spent with a young wild French woman, we had ended up going to a compact cinema, to see a Woody Allen film, from the eighties, which I had found relatively entertaining. She told me she could rest forever in this film, trapped in the film, in the same way the principle character in the film, gets to be a part of a movie. We then went onto a bar where there was an annoying band playing, though not dreadful, still horrendous cover versions, with the lead singer not having the voice to carry off the songs. We walked through the streets and saw some interesting artifacts, from Asia, which we would have loved to have stolen, however there was a lot of evidence of security cameras. She told me she had spent twelve hours in a Police station on the 31st of October, so this day marked an anniversary of sorts. I told her about a visit I once made to a prison, for a job, that I didn't get. We walked past the the Louvre, which she told me used as a background to a scream, she had made during the summer. We walked back to she lives, she told me she had to make a phone call in a phone box, I waited. She did not tell me the purpose of this call, it was an abrupt call. We talked for a while, after this call, she told me her plans and we discussed a party and a concert which I will do next week. We parted in good spirits, she told me she was tired, I failed to tell her I was sick, though she had remarked I appeared cold. Before we parted she explained to me a pendant, she was wearing, which her sister had given her from Egypt, which symbolically had her name.

I had had an uneasy sleep, waking early. There seemed to be somebody in my building who at five o'clock in the morning was doing some housework, or at least moving furniture. On opening the email, my first thoughts centered around, which TV programme to choose. I decided the CD, that would lend itself best to what I would like to create, was a BBC wild life dvd, part of the David Attenborough collection. I liked the picture of the shark on the cover.

I like fish and fish and keyboards seem to match perfectly.

I decided on a piano Rhodes sound and began to write some chords. I randomly chose a tempo of 120 bpm.

I was quite frantic and at the same time I was taking photos of the images, which I watching on my lap top as I could not find the plug to my dvd player in the chaos of my apartment.

I thought after a while that some bass notes would work well. The programe however was not always as menacing as I thought it could be and there were also some delicate images of fish, which I think are represented by the higher octave notes, that rise.

I found that if I tried to hit really bass notes, the sound became non-distinct.

I wrote quite a long piece, but as instructed stopped short of the five minutes limit.

There were some gawky looking sea gulls and I think the music has it's gawky moments.

CHALLENGE #2: Write a haiku based on the photograph provided and record two non-vocal tracks to accompany the song provided. Study the photograph attached and write a haiku that captures the emotional essence of the photograph as you perceive it. Finally, record two non-vocal tracks with the instrumentation of your choice inspired by your poem.

the photograph attached - taken by Francis Powell

ERNESTO BURDEN:
I wrote several different versions of each of my tracks, looking for something that best fit the fluid modal structure the track provided. While I experimented with a variety of guitar styles and instruments (I even tried a percussion track with a drum kit), I ended up settling on a sparse backing guitar track using a southwestern-style guitar tone with amp-generated tremolo.

The lead guitar track is a heavily saturated, high-sustain David Gilmour-sort-of-sound, and utilizes a pseudo "bowing" technique created by picking most of the tones with the onboard guitar volume off and then bringing it up during the decay. Another big element of the project for me was devising the technique for importing the MP3 into my Fostex MR8 for recording along to. I had to convert it to WAV (wav-mp3.com) at 44100 Hz, single channel, and then import using the Fostex WAVManager, all of which sounds simple in retrospect but took some messing around with (and an update to my Fostex's core software) to accomplish.

Now that the technique is established, it should serve me well throughout the rest of the project.

Blue black wind of space,
Beneath cold solstice night sky -
God holds His breath; breathes.

CHALLENGE 3: Submit two tracks that compliment the attached song. The first track must be produced/processed from the sound of your own breathing. The second can be generated from the instrument of your choosing. The tracks must be inspired by the following haiku:

Blue black wind of space,
Beneath cold solstice night sky -
God holds His breath; breathes.

JESUS MARIO, THE MINTY:
Ok, so first I went to a friends house to record the vocal breathing sounds, he had a nicer mike setup than the one I have at home.

To start I re-checked the mission haiku, as to the inspiration, and I pictured images in my head, coldness, blue-ness, etc..and I heard the song a bunch of times. Then I started to breath, exhale, inhale, also making strange breathy-sounds. I did that for quite a while, experimenting with diferent types of breathing (I like doing Yoga, and a big part of it is the breathing-trip), lengths, rhythm and emotions. I also recorded my smoking, drags and exhales, I tried with a cigar too, huff-n'-puff, and finally (to complete the tobacco tryad, haha) some sniffing of tobacco-rapé (snuff). In between that I tried various improvisated filters, like putting the microphone inside a glass with tea (wich gives a nices echoey sound) and then recording, as well as putting a piece of plastic close to the mike (when you blow or exhale directly into a mike it gets this kind of distorted fuzzyness) to buffer the wind, and also putting the mike directly to my troath. Burned the sounds on a cd "to go".

Then later I chose, cut, and sampeld all the parts I figured nice and usable (wich took me various nights of workin' it) until I got about 114 samples of diferent lengths (and sounds). Some where nice normal breathing and lots of windish like stuff, some sea-wave-sounding, some howls, some revervarated-looped crazyness, space ape kinda sounds, breathing feedback, some chimes, and more bizarrenez. I was actually quite amazed to hear so many things, from common to bizarre, to fractal-like-naturish sounds, indeed vocal chords are awesome at producing lots of diferrent things (althought in the recording moment I do felt kinda silly, haha). Anyways, then I "effexed" some samples, and some I put on clean, and then very carefully sequenced (and panned) the whole thing to the song. I went for that ambientish-sound, as a reinforcer of the already existing instruments, in crescendo, decremento, to emphasize a chorus or fill a "gap" and otherwise complimentingthe song and other instruments in various ways.

For the other instrument track I went for the "minimal"-est approach. (I had spent so much time on the other part!). I kept it simple by adding a synthesizer (called Pentagon I), tweaking one of the presets and midi-effexing it with live's "chord" (so it played some) and "random"(so in addition to the programmed notes it plays some at random, in a determined range, actually making it diferent every time it plays, which can't really show in the wav.sample though), and also reverved-chorused that (i used 7 patterns of that).

So I ended up with this sort of mad-synthethized-phantom-pianist playing some unnerving stuff on the back of the song (I made it sound mellow so as to not opacate the rest of the sounds). Sequenced with the rest of the stuff in Live! et voila!

CHALLENGE #4: Record a vocal track for the ambient song attached. Use the following lyrics as well as additional lyrics of your own composition:

Blue black wind of space,
Beneath cold solstice night sky -
God holds His breath; breathes.

NATASHA DUCHENE:
I love dark dissonant stuff and this track was really fun to work with. I had no idea what the words were about either so I took a bit of freedom with regards to what I added. I felt that it had something to do with our spiritual connection to the Earth, and, once I'd improvised a few times over the track, realized I also wanted it to have something of an environmental spin.

Here is the original lyric:

Blue black wind of space,
Beneath cold solstice night sky -
God holds His breath; breathes.
And here's what I came up with:
Blue black wind of space,
Moves stars over.
Beneath cold solstice night sky -
God holds His breath; breathes.
Closes his eyes, sees.
Drum beats through the trees.
Voices rise to the beat
Smoke
Burning bushes
Flowers in december
We sing
Ground our feet in the earth
Feel the pulse
Moving through
Oceans rising
Islands lost
Villages covered with snow
We pray with our voices
Sculpt with our feet and our hands
Try to stop this destruction.

I like to think of art as an instrument for change without being preachy. Hopefully this achieves the result. I'm happy with it, and hope you like it too!

JON BRIGGS - ENGINEER'S NOTE: ALPHA is centered on a creepy keyboard part accentuated by a couple of guitar parts: one clean, one dirty. All of this is accompanied by two diametrically opposed vocal parts. One is a pristine female vocal, the other is what ends up sounding like a cut up, heavily effected whisper. Somehow, this all managed to fit together into a cohesive song. Towards the end of this song, things get a little crazy which was difficult to mix, but all in all it turned out well.