Origin and Mutation

A few of you have already heard how this project came about, but for those of you just joining us, here's the back story of the And It Hurts project.

In 2004 I was unemployed and uninspired for the most port. But one evening, I had a bolt out of the blue find me and I started writing a song. As I wrote the parts I would record them and edit as I went. 12 hours later I had (what I thought at the time was) this amazing, epic piece. It was almost 7 minutes long and had three distinct movements. After a while, I decided I didn't care for the recording and the whole song was shelved.

Now jump forward to 2009. The 'demo for the solo listener' EP was in the final stages before I started making copies to the CD release show. A glitch in my audio software had slowed down one of the tracks, Come See, making the mp3 about 26 1/2 minutes long instead of 4. When I listened to the track, what I heard was fascinating. Rattling. Rumbling. Groaning. Clanking. It sounded like a demon detuning the bass strings of a piano. An alarm immediately went off in my head. I need to sample these sounds!

The samples started to form this mechanical rhythm and I knew exactly what to do with it. I started recording guitar parts and vocals from the '04 AIH track and quickly realized this was going to be longer and more complex. It turned into three movements and had this rich underlying emotional drive. The same emotions I felt when writing the song but amplified and expanded to 15 minutes and more instruments.

Parts 1 and 2 came together pretty quickly but Part 3 was eluding me for some reason, so sometime in the fall last year I put the project aside to work on a live album. Now it's 2010 and about a week ago I decided to get back into this music. After three days and 10 or so hours of work, I was about 80% finished with the track. But the software crashed and erased every shred of audio in Part 3. Luckily I had exported an mp3 of what I'd done so far right before this. So I'm in a tough spot as far as that goes. It's either start over trying to rebuild and recall everything I'd done so far, start from scratch completely, or work with what I've got and add to the mp3 to complete the track.

Since I started this up in 2009, I've felt the need to do some sort of videos for these tracks. From there it seemed to want to be one continuous, short film. Animation seemed like a good way to go. Now, I'm not going to give hints about plot or anything yet but the style is going to be steampunk. If you have heard of it yet, check out that wiki link. The music will be the soundtrack to the film. There won't be spoken dialogue, but there will be sound for sure. I'm shooting for somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes long.

Ok so that's the history of the project. More to come, soon as there's something to post up!