“
You have to turn it up so that your chest shakes and the drums get in between your ribs like a heartbeat and the bass goes up your spine and fizzles your brain and all you can do is dance or spin in a circle or just scream along because you know that however this music makes you feel, it’s exactly right.
”
”
Robin Benway (Audrey, Wait!)
“
The only time I can ever remember Steven crying over any of it was after my treatment, when I tried to use my foot on his bass drum pedal, and we realized I could never play a drum set.
”
”
Jordan Sonnenblick (After Ever After)
“
Boy you got my heartbeat running away, beating like a drum and it's coming your way..can't you hear that boom, badoom,boom,boom, badoom, boom, bass, he got that super bass..
-(right eyebrow raised)-
>>>>>
”
”
Nicki Minaj
“
And within the computer's innards, a spreading cancer. A self-replicating corruption. A B-pop mutiny of bass and drum and oscillating frequency. Inane quasi poetry glorifying a pointless act of intimacy.
”
”
Jay Kristoff (Gemina (The Illuminae Files, #2))
“
The stillness of the calm is awful. His voice begins to grow strange and portentous. He feels it in him like something swallowed too big for the esophagus. It keeps up a sort of involuntary interior humming in him, like a live beetle. His cranium is a dome full of reverberations. The hollows of his very bones are as whispering galleries. He is afraid to speak loud, lest he be stunned; like the man in the bass drum.
”
”
Herman Melville (Mardi and a Voyage Thither)
“
Anything with drums, bass, and guitars is under the pop umbrella. We'll continue to try new sounds as long as we're a band and just by growing up and moving on in your life doesn't mean you hate an earlier part of your life.
”
”
Patrick Stump
“
Anything with drums, bass, and guitars is under the pop umbrella. We'll continue to try new sounds as long as we're a band.
”
”
Patrick Stump
“
Kat: You can't just buy me a guitar every time you mess up, you know.
Pat: I know, but there's still drums, and a bass, and maybe even someday a tambourine.
”
”
David Levithan (Ten Things I Hate about You)
“
Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, once told me that when a brass band plays at a small club back up in one of the neighborhoods, it's as if the audience--dancing, singing to the refrains, laughing--is part of the band. They are two parts of the same thing. The dancers interpret, or it might be better to say literally embody, the sounds of the band, answering the instruments. Since everyone is listening to different parts of the music--she to the trumpet melody, he to the bass drum, she to the trombone--the audience is a working model in three dimensions of the music, a synesthesic transformation of materials. And of course the band is also watching the dancers, and getting ideas from the dancers' gestures. The relationship between band and audience is in that sense like the relationship between two lovers making love, where cause and effect becomes very hard to see, even impossible to call by its right name; one is literally getting down, as in particle physics, to some root stratum where one is freed from the lockstop of time itself, where time might even run backward, or sideways, and something eternal and transcendent is accessed.
”
”
Tom Piazza (Why New Orleans Matters)
“
When I lie back and close my eyes, this farthest lip of beach right next to the end of the ocean feels like being up close to an enormous breathing being, the bass drum surf thump reverberating through the sand. Living out here with no lights, alone, you would indeed become sensitive to seasons, rhythms, weather, sounds- right up next to the sea, right up under the sky, like lying close to a lover’s skin to hear blood and breath and heartbeat.
”
”
Paul Bogard (The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light)
“
Lying on her side, the warm fire at her feet, Helen's laughter died away as Lucas suddenly went from tuning to playing.
It was like an orchestra in an instrument.
He played with both hands-not one hand picking and the other holding down strings-but with both hands so that it sounded like more than one guitar was playing. Sometimes he hit the strings to make them hum like a harp, and sometimes he hit the body of the guitar like a drum to add bass and keep time. It was the most fascinating thing Helen had ever watched, like Lucas had a dozen voices in his head, all singing the same song, and he'd figured a way to make them come out of ten fingers.
Helen looked at his face and could tell why he loved it. It was like thinking for him, only this was a puzzle that he could share with her as he solved it.
He'd walked into her head when he'd come to her world. And she'd walked into his when she finally heard him play.
It was heaven.
”
”
Josephine Angelini (Goddess (Starcrossed, #3))
“
Guitar is for the head, drums are for the chest, but bass gets you in the groin
”
”
Suzi Quatro
“
The big bass drum in my head started booming again. Guilt made way too much noise.
”
”
Shelley Coriell (Welcome, Caller, This Is Chloe)
“
I was ten when I heard the music that ended the first phase of my life and cast me hurtling towards a new horizon. Drenched to the skin, I stood on Dunoon’s pier peering seawards through diagonal rain, looking for the ferry that would take me home. There, on the everwet west coast of Scotland, I heard it: like sonic scalpels, the sounds of electric guitars sliced through the dreich weather. My body hairs pricked up like antennae. To my young ears these amplified guitars sounded angelic, for surely no man-made instrument could produce that tone. The singer couldn't be human. His voice was too clean, too pure, too resonant, as though a robot larynx were piping words through vocal chords of polished silver. The overall effect was intoxicating - a storm of drums, earthquake bass, razor-sharp guitar riffs, and soaring vocals of astonishing clarity. I knew that I was hearing the future.
”
”
Mark Rice (Metallic Dreams)
“
Today you go into make a modern recording with all this technology. The bass plays first, then the drums come in later, then they track the trumpet and the singer comes in and they ship the tape somewhere. Well, none of the musicians have played together. You can’t play jazz music that way. In order for you to play jazz, you’ve got to listen to them. The music forces you at all times to address what other people are thinking and for you to interact with them with empathy and to deal with the process of working things out. And that’s how our music really could teach what the meaning of American democracy is.
”
”
Wynton Marsalis
“
At some distance down the corridor it seemed suddenly as if somebody started to beat on a bass drum.
He listened to it for a few seconds and realized that it was just his heart beating.
He listened for a few seconds more and realized that it wasn’t his heart beating, it was somebody down the corridor beating on a bass drum.
”
”
Douglas Adams (Life, the Universe and Everything (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #3))
“
Brian came in heavy at that moment on his guitar, the rapid, high-pitched squeal ranging back and forth as his fingers flew along the frets. As the intro's tempo grew more rapid, Bekka heard Derek's subtle bass line as it worked its way in. After another few seconds Will came in, slow at first, but racing along to match the others' pace. When their combined efforts seemed unable to get any heavier, David jumped into the mix.
As the sound got nice and heavy, Bekka began to rock back-and-forth onstage. In front of her, hundreds of metal-lovers began to jump and gyrate to their music. She matched their movements for a moment, enjoying the connection that was being made, before stepping over to the keyboard that had been set up behind her. Sliding her microphone into an attached cradle, she assumed her position and got ready. Right on cue, all the others stopped playing, throwing the auditorium into an abrupt silence. Before the crowd could react, however, Bekka's fingers began to work the keys, issuing a rhythm that was much softer and slower than what had been built up. The audience's violent thrash-dance calmed at that moment and they began to sway in response.
Bekka smiled to herself.
This is what she lived for.
”
”
Nathan Squiers (Death Metal)
“
We entered the cool cave of the practice space with all the long-haired, goateed boys stoned on clouds of pot and playing with power tools. I tossed my fluffy coat into the hollow of my bass drum and lay on the carpet with my worn newspaper. A shirtless boy came in and told us he had to cut the power for a minute, and I thought about being along in the cool black room with Joey. Let's go smoke, she said, and I grabbed the cigarettes off the amp. She started talking to me about Wonder Woman. I feel like something big is happening, but I don't know what to do about it. With The Straight Girl? I asked in the blankest voice possible. With everything. Back in the sun we walked to the edge of the parking lot where a black Impala convertible sat, rusted and rotting, looking like it just got dredged from a swamp. Rainwater pooling on the floor. We climbed up onto it and sat our butts backward on the edge of the windshield, feet stretched into the front seat. Before she even joined the band, I would think of her each time I passed the car, the little round medallions with the red and black racing flags affixed to the dash. On the rusting Chevy, Joey told me about her date the other night with a girl she used to like who she maybe liked again. How her heart was shut off and it felt pretty good. How she just wanted to play around with this girl and that girl and this girl and I smoked my cigarette and went Uh-Huh. The sun made me feel like a restless country girl even though I'd never been on a farm. I knew what I stood for, even if nobody else did. I knew the piece of me on the inside, truer than all the rest, that never comes out. Doesn't everyone have one? Some kind of grand inner princess waiting to toss her hair down, forever waiting at the tower window. Some jungle animal so noble and fierce you had to crawl on your belly through dangerous grasses to get a glimpse. I gave Joey my cigarette so I could unlace the ratty green laces of my boots, pull them off, tug the linty wool tights off my legs. I stretched them pale over the car, the hair springing like weeds and my big toenail looking cracked and ugly. I knew exactly who I was when the sun came back and the air turned warm. Joey climbed over the hood of the car, dusty black, and said Let's lie down, I love lying in the sun, but there wasn't any sun there. We moved across the street onto the shining white sidewalk and she stretched out, eyes closed. I smoked my cigarette, tossed it into the gutter and lay down beside her. She said she was sick of all the people who thought she felt too much, who wanted her to be calm and contained. Who? I asked. All the flowers, the superheroes. I thought about how she had kissed me the other night, quick and hard, before taking off on a date in her leather chaps, hankies flying, and I sat on the couch and cried at everything she didn't know about how much I liked her, and someone put an arm around me and said, You're feeling things, that's good. Yeah, I said to Joey on the sidewalk, I Feel Like I Could Calm Down Some. Awww, you're perfect. She flipped her hand over and touched my head. Listen, we're barely here at all, I wanted to tell her, rolling over, looking into her face, we're barely here at all and everything goes so fast can't you just kiss me? My eyes were shut and the cars sounded close when they passed. The sun was weak but it baked the grime on my skin and made it smell delicious. A little kid smell. We sat up to pop some candy into our mouths, and then Joey lay her head on my lap, spent from sugar and coffee. Her arm curled back around me and my fingers fell into her slippery hair. On the February sidewalk that felt like spring.
”
”
Michelle Tea
“
If you really want to know something about me, you should know this: I like my music loud. I mean loud. I'm not talking about the kind of loud where your parents knock on your bedroom door and ask you to turn it down. Please. That's amateur hour. When I say loud, I mean you-can't-hear-your-parents-knocking-and-the-neighbors-are-putting-a-FOR-SALE-sign-on-their-house-and-moving-to-another-block-because-they-can't-handle-the-constant-noise-anymore loud. You have to turn it up so that your chest shakes and the drums get in between your ribs like a heartbeat and the bass goes up your spine and frizzles your brain and all you can do is dance or spin in a circle or just scream along because you know that however this music makes you feel, it's exactly right. If you are not this kind of person, then I don't think we'll be great friends.
”
”
Robin Benway (Audrey, Wait!)
“
Bliss?” I called.
“Yeah?”
“Check the drawers of the nightstand! She was playing with it in the middle of the night, and I think I remember taking it away and sticking it in there.”
“Okay!”
Through the open door, I watched her circle around the edge of the bed. I walked in place for a few seconds, letting my feet drop a little heavier than necessary, then opened and closed the door like I’d gone back inside the bathroom. Then I hid in the space between the back of the bedroom door and the wall where I could just see through the crack between the hinges. She pulled open the top drawer, and my heartbeat was like a bass drum. I don’t know when it had started beating so hard, but now it was all that I could hear.
It wasn’t like I was asking her to marry me now. I just knew Bliss, and knew she tended to panic. I was giving her a very big, very obvious hint so that she’d have time to adjust before I actually asked her. Then in a few months, when I thought she’d gotten used to the idea, I’d ask her for real.
That was the plan anyway. It was supposed to be simple, but this felt… complicated. Suddenly, I thought of all the thousands of ways this could go wrong. What if she freaked out? What if she ran like she did our first night together? If she ran, would she go back to Texas? Or would she go to Cade who lived in North Philly? He’d let her stay until she figured things out, and then what if something developed between them?
What if she just flat out told me no? Everything was good right now. Perfect, actually. What if I was ruining it by pulling this stunt?
I was so caught up in my doomsday predictions that I didn’t even see the moment that she found the box. I heard her open it though, and I heard her exhale and say, “Oh my God.”
Where before my mouth had been dry, now I couldn’t swallow fast enough. My hands were shaking against the door. She was just standing there with her back to me. I couldn’t see her face. All I could see was her tense, straight spine. She swayed slightly.
What if she passed out? What if I’d scared her so much that she actually lost consciousness? I started to think of ways to explain it away.
I was keeping it for a friend?
It was a prop for a show?
It was… It was… shit, I didn’t know.
I could just apologize. Tell her I knew it was too fast.
I waited for her to do something—scream, run, cry, faint. Anything would be better than her stillness. I should have just been honest with her. I wasn’t good at things like this. I said what I was thinking—no plans, no manipulation.
Finally, when I thought my body would crumble under the stress alone, she turned. She faced the bed, and I only got her profile, but she was biting her lip. What did that mean? Was she just thinking? Thinking of a way to get out of it?
Then, slowly, like the sunrise peeking over the horizon, she smiled.
She snapped the box closed.
She didn’t scream. She didn’t run. She didn’t faint.
There might have been a little crying.
But mostly… she danced.
She swayed and jumped and smiled the same way she had when the cast list was posted for Phaedra. She lost herself the same way she did after opening night, right before we made love for the first time.
Maybe I didn’t have to wait a few months after all.
She said she wanted my best line tomorrow after the show, and now I knew what it was going to be.
”
”
Cora Carmack (Losing It (Losing It, #1))
“
I sing of those who cannot. To view human suffering as an abstraction, as a statement about how plucky we all are, is to blow air through brass while the boys and girls march in parade off to war. Seeing the flesh as only a challenge to the spirit is as false as seeing the spirit as only a challenge to the flesh. On the planet are people with whole and strong bodies, whose wounded spirits need the constant help that the quadriplegic needs for his body. What we need is not the sound of horns rising to the sky, but the steady beat of the bass drum. When you march to a bass drum, your left foot touches the earth with each beat, and you can feel the drum in your body: boom and boom and boom and pity people pity people pity people.
”
”
Andre Dubus (Meditations from a Movable Chair: Essays)
“
Cinta tak menafikan dan menghapuskan batas dan jarak di antara kalian. Batas dan jarak itu tetap ada. Namun batas itu tidak membelenggu dan jarak itu tidak memisahkan kalian. Elaborasinya serupa orkestra yang tercipta dari gabungan berbagai alat musik. Ada instrumen gesek; biola, viola, cello dan kontra bass. Alat musik tiup; flute, oboe, clarinet, dan bassoon. Alat musik petik; gitar, harpa, ukulele, kecapi. Alat musik perkusi; drum, piano, marimba, timpani. Namun demikian, gabungan dari semua instrumen yang berbeda beda itu bisa membentuk sebuah orkes simfoni yang indah, karena mereka tidak bermain sendiri sendiri. Mereka menyelaraskan bunyi dan nada dalam sebuah kesatuan harmoni yang padu, merdu, indah dan menyentuh hati.
”
”
Titon Rahmawan
“
Today Oskar says simply: The moth drummed. I have heard rabbits, foxes and dormice drumming. Frogs can drum up a storm. Woodpeckers are said to drum worms out of their hiding places. And men beat on basins, tin pans, bass drums, and kettle-drums. We speak of drumfire, drumhead courts; we drum up, drum out, drum into. There are drummer boys and drum majors. There are composers who write concerti for strings and percussion. I might even mention Oskar’s own efforts on the drum; but all this is nothing beside the orgy of drumming carried on by that moth in the hour of my birth, with no other instrument than two ordinary sixty-watt bulbs.
”
”
Günter Grass (The Tin Drum (Vintage War))
“
I'd have sunk in the car if Marcus Jetty hadn't been doing a little late-season beachcombing. Marcus runs Greenstone Salvage and Tinker, a famous local eyesore of bike frames, tube amps, hula poppers, oil drums, and knobs of driftwood. He was picking along the jagged strand in his raincoat, eye on a fat cork from somebody's herring net, when a car approached on the highway above. He later described the sounds of a whining V6 and thumping bass line before the barrier burst to shrapnel and the world for a moment muffled itself.
”
”
Leif Enger (Virgil Wander)
“
JIMI HENDRIX LEAD GUITAR JOHN LENNON RHYTHM GUITAR PHIL LINOTT BASS GUITAR KEITH MOON DRUMS
”
”
Stephen King (It)
“
March 6, 1961
I remembered a party in a house outside of Ann Arbor. There was a jazz band -- piano, bass, drums, and sax -- playing in one of the large rooms. A heavy odor of marijuana hung in the air. The host appeared now and then looking pleased, as if he liked seeing strangers in every room, the party out of his control. It wasn't wild, but with a constant flow of people, who knows what they're doing. It became late and I was a little drunk, wandering from one part of the house to another. I entered a long hall and was surprised by the silence, as if I had entered another house. A girl at the other end of the hall was walking toward me. I saw large blue eyes and very black hair. She was about average height, doll-like features delicate as cut glass, extremely pretty, maybe the prettiest girl I'd ever seen. When she came up to me I took her in my arms and kissed her. She let it happen. We were like creatures in a dream. Holding her hand, I drew her with me and we passed through rooms where people stood about, and then left the house. As we drove away, she said her name was Margo. She was a freshman at the university, from a town in northern Michigan. I took her home. It was obvious she'd never gone home with a man. She didn't seem fearful, only uncertain, the question in her eyes: "What happens next?" What happened next was nothing much. We fell asleep in our clothes. I wasn't the one to make her no different from everyone.
”
”
Leonard Michaels (Time out of Mind: The Diaries of Leonard Michaels, 1961-1995)
“
There were pauses in the music for the rushing, calling, halting piano. Everything would stop except the climbing of the soloist; he would reach a height and everything would join him, the violins first and then the horns; and then the deep blue bass and the flute and the bitter trampling drums; beating, beating and mounting together and stopping with a crash like daybreak. When I first heard the Messiah I was alone; my blood bubbled like fire and wine; I cried; like an infant crying for its mother’s milk; or a sinner running to meet Jesus.
”
”
James Baldwin (Going to Meet the Man)
“
The wild notes of tuba and trumpet and trombone rattled and hummed through the trees. In the first group of musicians, there were kids as young as fourteen playing the tuba and one kid who probably couldn’t drive banging a bass drum. They stomped together in rhythm to the music. Two ladies had dressed up in what looked like princess outfits. They wore white gloves and socks with tassels.
”
”
Hunter Murphy (Imogene in New Orleans (Imogene and the Boys #1))
“
I could’ve said a thousand things in that moment, and all of them would’ve been true. I’d like to travel—Florence and Thailand and Prague. I’d like to write books. I’d like to fall in love a thousand times. Live hard and desperate and full, my pulse pounding like a bass drum. And when I wake up one morning suddenly, surprisingly, a grown-up, I’d like to be sure in the knowledge that I enjoyed it. Every fucking second.
”
”
Megan Stielstra (Once I Was Cool: Personal Essays)
“
What you're looking for is power and force, without volume--an inner power. A way to bring together what everybody in that room is doing and make one sound. So it's not two guitars, piano, bass and drums, it's one thing, it's not five. You're there to create one thing.
”
”
Keith Richards (Life)
“
Silence descended on us. I turned the music on, my favorite playlist. The pounding bass of “Candy Shop” by 50 Cent filled the car. I drummed my fingers in rhythm to the sound. Gemma frowned. “This song doesn’t make sense. Why does a rapper sing about lollipops and rodeos?
”
”
Cora Reilly (Twisted Hearts (The Camorra Chronicles, #5))
“
You’re like a pair of jazz musicians, forever improvising. Or perhaps you are not musicians, but your love manifests in the music. Sometimes, your head tucked into her neck, you can feel her heartbeat thudding like a kick drum. Your smile a grand piano, the glint in her eye like the twinkle of hands caressing ivory keys. The rhythmic strum of a double bass the inert grace she has been blessed with, moving her body in ways which astound. A pair of soloists in conversations so harmonious, one struggles to separate. You are not the musicians but the music.
”
”
Caleb Azumah Nelson (Open Water)
“
I had memorised Deep Purple’s Made in Japan note for note. Every drumbeat, every thud of Ian Paice’s bass-drum beater, I had tried to replicate. Ditto the first Black Sabbath album, Aqualung by Jethro Tull, plus my eccentric collection of Van der Graaf Generator albums and treasured copy of Wild Turkey’s first offering.
”
”
Bruce Dickinson (What Does This Button Do?: An Autobiography)
“
and grays. The natural inclination to try and decode the image is thwarted by Kandinsky’s steadfast refusal to provide any identifiable clues to known subjects. Which makes the painting both exhilarating and exhausting to study. Remarkably, it succeeds in its desired effect: you do start to “hear” the paint, to put sounds to his brushstrokes. Colors crash together like cymbals; the jagged yellow lines are the noisy blasts from a trumpet; the black center evokes the intense whine produced by a bank of violinists. A big bass drum drones in the background. And then in the center at the bottom of the picture is one thin black line, exposed and alone.
”
”
Will Gompertz (What Are You Looking At?: The Surprising, Shocking, and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art)
“
All right; let's go!" Trot decided. "But where's Button-Bright?" Just at this important moment Button-Bright was lost again, and they all scattered in search of him. He had been standing beside them just a few minutes before, but his friends had an exciting hunt for him before they finally discovered the boy seated among the members of the band, beating the end of the bass drum with the bone of a turkey-leg that he had taken from the table in the banquet room. "Hello, Trot," he said, looking up at the little girl when she found him. "This is the first chance I ever had to pound a drum with a reg'lar drum stick. And I ate all the meat off the bone myself.
”
”
L. Frank Baum (The Scarecrow of Oz (Oz #9))
“
I remember a time when smoke filled the house. Not coughing smoke but smoke from a woman’s smooth-voiced singing, with piano, bass, and drums. All together these sounds made smoke. Uncle Darnell would say, “You can’t remember that. You were two. Three, maybe.” But I do. I still see, hear, and feel bits and flashes. The sounds of musical smoke.
”
”
Rita Williams-Garcia (One Crazy Summer (Gaither Sisters, #1))
“
Violence; violence, and power, in the context of yet somebody else walking up to the groaning boards of fantasy’s eternal wedding feast, still laden with the cold meats from Tolkien’s funeral, and cheekily joining everyone who’s trying to send the whole thing smashing to the ground just to hear the noise all that crockery will make. —But! Also: genderfuck, hearts broken cleanly and otherwise, the City of Portland, Spenser, those moments in pop songs when the bass and all of the drums except maybe a handclap suddenly drop out of the bridge leaving you hanging from a slender aching thread of melody waiting almost dreading the moment when the beat comes back, and the occasional bit of swordplay.
”
”
Kip Manley
“
The bass drum thumped loudly and the chairman of the dance committee, Jeff Garwin, rose to speak. “Your attention, please!” he said over the microphone. “I have an important announcement to make. The next event on our program is the presentation of a pantomime produced by members of the Emerson College Dramatic Club. “As you all know, it is our custom each year to select an attractive young lady to preside over the event. She will wear the Festival Robe and Crown. After careful consideration by a committee of faculty and students, a choice has been made.” A hush fell over the audience as the announcer paused a long moment. “Will Miss Nancy Drew please come to the stage,” he said, smiling down at the girl. The students clapped and whistled. Though startled, Nancy responded with poise and mounted the improvised stage. She donned a white robe, a golden paper crown, and accepted the seat of honor.
”
”
Carolyn Keene (The Quest of the Missing Map (Nancy Drew, #19))
“
Expanding further on his own observations of Prince’s writing style(s) during the course of the album’s recording, fellow Paisley Park engineer Eddie Miller, who engineered the recording of ‘Electric Chair’ among other Prince recordings during the Batman era, recalled that “he would write all sorts of ways. I have to admit that I listened to some of his cassette demos that he would sometimes bring into the studio to reference (as I remember, he would hold the cassette player up to his ear, so you couldn’t really hear it.). They were fascinating. His cassette demo technique was extremely crude but ingenious—it’s like something you’d do if you had no access to any equipment. He’d use two cheap cassette recorders. If he wanted to hear drums, he’d record a human beat box rhythm for the length of the song—and most likely, he’d have the form of the song in his head while he was recording this. By the way, it was the same in the studio when he’d do his one man band approach to recording a song. He’d know the song in his head, and start out recording the drums for the song (it would essentially become the ‘click track’—the way a click track should be). Back to the cassette demo—he’d then play his beat box groove over the speaker on the cassette recorder and sing the bass line while recording all this onto the second cassette machine. He’d build up a rhythm track this way, and then add vocals. And there’s your demo.
”
”
Jake Brown (Prince "In the Studio" 1975 - 1995)
“
Carl Franzoni perhaps summed it up best when he declared rather bluntly that, “the Byrds’ records were manufactured.” The first album in particular was an entirely engineered affair created by taking a collection of songs by outside songwriters and having them performed by a group of nameless studio musicians (for the record, the actual musicians were Glen Campbell on guitar, Hal Blaine on drums, Larry Knechtel on bass, Leon Russell on electric piano, and Jerry Cole on rhythm guitar), after which the band’s trademark vocal harmonies, entirely a studio creation, were added to the mix. As would be expected, the Byrds’ live performances, according to Barney Hoskyns’ Waiting for the Sun, “weren’t terribly good.” But that didn’t matter much; the band got a lot of assistance from the media, with Time being among the first to champion the new band. And they also got a tremendous assist from Vito and the Freaks and from the Young Turks, as previously discussed.
”
”
David McGowan (Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream)
“
You're like a pair of jazz musicians, forever improvising. Or perhaps you are not musicians, but your love manifests in the music. Sometimes, your head tucked into her neck, you can feel her heartbeat thudding like a kick drum. Your smile a grand piano, the glint in her eye like the twinkle of hands caressing ivory keys. The rhythmic strum of a double bass the inert grace she has been blessed with, moving her body in ways which astound. A pair of soloists in conversations so harmonious, one struggles to separate. You are not the musicians but the music.
”
”
Caleb Azumah Nelson (Open Water)
“
Surely an instrument is neither male nor female—they’re just things that make sound—strings and bows, brass and wood, mallets and cymbals and drumskins and little metal triangles. And yet all you have to do is look around at these musicians to see the way that even sound is gendered. In the middle of the orchestra is the brass section—tubas, trombones, trumpets, French horn, every last one of them played by boys. It’s not all that different in the woodwinds—where the boys play bassoons and clarinets, but all the flutes are played by girls. The strings are even more ridiculous—the deeper the instrument, the more likely it is to be played by a boy. So all the basses? Boys. Most of the cellos? Boys. The violas split half and half. All but one of the violins? Girls. Then there’s the harp, which I guess federal law requires be played by a girl. And the percussion and kettle drums, which are usually played by boys. How weird is this? Most of us decided to play our instruments in third grade, a bunch of little kids who made our choices without even thinking about them. But even at eight years old, we were already running the gender maze that the world had set for us, without even realizing it.
”
”
Jodi Picoult (Mad Honey)
“
Maiha
“Allow me to introduce you to the Children of Mars. On lead guitar and eight barreled Calliope Gatlin, Colonel Fujiyama. On bass and manning the double-barreled thirty millimeter PPC's we have Major Howard. Singing backup and key boards we have Fight Captain Benz with a lovely ten millimeter rapid fire gauss rifle. Her lovely partner Captain Martin on drums with her ten millimeter Hell-bore pulse laser rifle. And singing lead and front man, a true artist with a bang from the Castile sniper rifle, our Big Daddy, Papa of Death and Destruction, the one, the only, the man, the myth, the legend, Lord James Nakatoma- Bailey.” When I finished Alice was giggling out loud.
”
”
Jessie Wolf
“
Deming preferred Peter’s old headphones because they were a bigger buffer to the world. The blank streets and large trees became comical when paired with a soundtrack, made him an action hero instead of an abandoned boy, and Planet Ridgeborough blew up. Platinum flowers morphed into oscillating lines and dancing triangles, electric blue snare drums punctuated a chocolate bass line topped with sticky orange guitar, turquoise vocals whipped into a thick, buttery frosting. He played and replayed, played and replayed. As he walked down Oak Street he shut his eyes and pretended he was in the city with his mother.She looked like him, he looked like her, they looked like the other people they saw on streets and trains. In the city, he had been just another kid. He had never known how exhausting it was to be conspicuous.
”
”
Lisa Ko (The Leavers)
“
take tuna. Among the other 145 species regularly killed — gratuitously — while killing tuna are: manta ray, devil ray, spotted skate, bignose shark, copper shark, Galapagos shark, sandbar shark, night shark, sand tiger shark, (great) white shark, hammerhead shark, spurdog fish, Cuban dogfish, bigeye thresher, mako, blue shark, wahoo, sailfish, bonito, king mackerel, Spanish mackerel, longbill spearfish, white marlin, swordfish, lancet fish, grey triggerfish, needlefish, pomfret, blue runner, black ruff, dolphin fish, bigeye cigarfish, porcupine fish, rainbow runner, anchovy, grouper, flying fish, cod, common sea horse, Bermuda chub, opah, escolar, leerfish, tripletail, goosefish, monkfish, sunfish, Murray eel, pilotfish, black gemfish, stone bass, bluefish, cassava fish, red drum, greater amberjack, yellowtail, common sea bream, barracuda, puffer fish, loggerhead turtle, green turtle, leatherback turtle, hawksbill turtle, Kemp’s ridley turtle, Atlantic yellow-nosed albatross, Audouin’s gull, balearic shearwater, black-browed albatross, great black-backed gull, great shearwater, great-winged petrel, grey petrel, herring gull, laughing gull, northern royal albatross, shy albatross, sooty shearwater, southern fulmar, Yelkouan shearwater, yellow-legged gull, minke whale, sei whale, fin whale, common dolphin, northern right whale, pilot whale, humpback whale, beaked whale, killer whale, harbor porpoise, sperm whale, striped dolphin, Atlantic spotted dolphin, spinner dolphin, bottlenose dolphin, and goose-beaked whale. Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across.
”
”
Jonathan Safran Foer (Eating Animals)
“
Fifteen years had passed since I first learned to improvise by copying George Shearing records. From the beginning, the goal was to move beyond imitation and find my own voice, and I felt that that was finally happening. Miles had been the guiding light to my growth, encouraging all of us in the band to develop our own styles of playing, and during my five and a half years in the quintet I did start to develop my own sound. But it wasn’t until I got out on my own that I felt I could really explore it. Now that I had my own sextet, I started thinking analytically about what actually goes on within a jazz group. At every moment onstage players are making choices, and each choice affects every other member of the group. So each player has to be prepared to change directions at any given moment—just as Miles did when I played that “wrong” chord onstage a few years earlier. Everybody in a jazz ensemble has learned the basic framework of harmony and scales and how they fit. They know the basic song structure of having the rhythm section—piano, bass, and drums—playing together while the horns carry the melody. But apart from those basics, jazz is incredibly broad. There are really uncountable ways of playing it. For the pianist alone there are so many choices to make: what pitch, how many notes, whether to play a chord or a line. I have ten fingers, and they’re in motion almost all the time, so all of those decisions must happen in an instant. I’m reacting to what the rest of the band is playing, but if I’m only reacting, then I’m not really making a choice; I’m just getting hit and being pushed along. Acting is making a choice, so all the players must be ready to act as well as react. The players have to be talented enough, and confident enough, to do both. I had watched Miles surround himself with amazing musicians and then give them the freedom to act.
”
”
Herbie Hancock (Herbie Hancock: Possibilities)
“
Cochise Jones always liked to play against your expectations of a song, to light the gloomy heart of a ballad with a Latin tempo and a sheen of vibrato, root out the hidden mournfulness, the ache of longing, in an up-tempo pop tune. Cochise’s six-minute outing on the opening track of Redbonin’ was a classic exercise in B-3 revisionism, turning a song inside out. It opened with big Gary King playing a fat, choogling bass line, sounding like the funky intro to some ghetto-themed sitcom of the seventies, and then Cochise Jones came in, the first four drawbars pulled all the way out, giving the Lloyd Webber melody a treatment that was not cheery so much as jittery, playing up the anxiety inherent in the song’s title, there being so many thousand possible ways to Love Him, so little time to choose among them. Cochise’s fingers skipped and darted as if the keys of the organ were the wicks of candles and he was trying to light all of them with a single match. Then, as Idris Muhammad settled into a rolling burlesque-hall bump and grind, and King fell into step beside him, Cochise began his vandalism in earnest, snapping off bright bunches of the melody and scattering it in handfuls, packing it with extra notes in giddy runs. He was ruining the song, rifling it, mocking it with an antic edge of joy. You might have thought, some critics felt, that the meaning or spirit of the original song meant no more to Cochise Jones than a poem means to a shark that is eating the poet. But somewhere around the three-minute mark, Cochise began to build, in ragged layers, out of a few repeated notes on top of a left-hand walking blues, a solo at once dense and rudimentary, hammering at it, the organ taking on a raw, vox humana hoarseness, the tune getting bluer and harder and nastier. Inside the perfectly miked Leslie amplifier, the treble horn whirled, and the drivers fired, and you heard the song as the admission of failure it truly was, a confession of ignorance and helplessness. And then in the last measures of the song, without warning, the patented Creed Taylor strings came in, mannered and restrained but not quite tasteful. A hint of syrup, a throb of the pathetic, in the face of which the drums and bass fell silent, so that in the end it was Cochise Jones and some rented violins, half a dozen mournful studio Jews, and then the strings fell silent, too, and it was just Mr. Jones, fading away, ending the track with the startling revelation that the song was an apology, an expression, such as only the blues could ever tender, of limitless regret.
”
”
Michael Chabon (Telegraph Avenue)
“
Inside McClintic Sphere was swinging his ass off. His skin was hard, as if it were part of the skull: every vein and whisker on that head stood out sharp and clear under the green baby spot: you could see the twin lines running down from either side of his lower lip, etched in by the force of his embouchure, looking like extensions of his mustache.
He blew a hand-carved ivory alto saxophone with a 4 ½ reed and the sound was like nothing any of them had heard before. The usual divisions prevailed: collegians did not dig, and left after an average of 1 ½ sets. Personnel from other groups, either with a night off or taking a long break from somewhere crosstown or uptown, listened hard, trying to dig. 'I am still thinking,’ they would say if you asked. People at the bar all looked as if they did dig in the sense of understand, approve of, empathize with: but this was probably only because people who prefer to stand at the bar have, universally, an inscrutable look…
…The group on the stand had no piano: it was bass, drums, McClintic and a boy he had found in the Ozarks who blew a natural horn in F. The drummer was a group man who avoided pyrotechnics, which may have irritated the college crowd. The bass was small and evil-looking and his eyes were yellow with pinpoints in the center. He talked to his instrument. It was taller than he was and didn’t seem to be listening.
Horn and alto together favored sixths and minor fourths and when this happened it was like a knife fight or tug of war: the sound was consonant but as if cross-purposes were in the air. The solos of McClintic Sphere were something else. There were people around, mostly those who wrote for Downbeat magazine or the liners of LP records, who seemed to feel he played disregarding chord changes completely. They talked a great deal about soul and the anti-intellectual and the rising rhythms of African nationalism. It was a new conception, they said, and some of them said: Bird Lives.
Since the soul of Charlie Parker had dissolved away into a hostile March wind nearly a year before, a great deal of nonsense had been spoken and written about him. Much more was to come, some is still being written today. He was the greatest alto on the postwar scene and when he left it some curious negative will–a reluctance and refusal to believe in the final, cold fact–possessed the lunatic fringe to scrawl in every subway station, on sidewalks, in pissoirs, the denial: Bird Lives. So that among the people in the V-Note that night were, at a conservative estimate, a dreamy 10 per cent who had not got the word, and saw in McClintic Sphere a kind of reincarnation.
”
”
Thomas Pynchon (Inherent Vice)
“
SSL FXG384 Outboard Stereo Compressor—Same as in the G-Series Console; great for piano or submixed drums. Avalon AD2044 Stereo Compressor—Great on bass and guitars; difficult to recall. BSS DPR-901 Dynamic Equalizer—For vocals, it’s like cheating! DBX 902 De-Esser—Quite handy, but not for lead vocals. Drawmer DS-201 Dual Gate—Great problem-solvers.
”
”
Robert Wolff (How to Make It in the New Music Business -- Now With the Tips You've Been Asking For!)
“
The weighty sound of Skinripper’s doom metal rose from the basement. The slow, tuned-down heaviness shook the floorboards. Gretchen couldn’t make out all the growled lyrics, but she made out the word “crepuscular.” No idea what it meant, but damn if that wasn’t the metalest word she’d ever heard. She walked into the kitchen, ripped some paper towel off the roll, stuck it in her ears, and opened the door to the basement. The power of the big arena sound almost knocked her backward. Skinripper was a power trio. Amanda “Louder” Lauden on drums. Jose “Pepe” Marrero on bass. Which left Gretchen’s brother Kurt “No Nickname” Ucker on guitar and vocals. One hundred decibels of plodding dread that sounded like Chewbacca in a suit of armor slowly falling down a staircase. In a good way.
”
”
Johnny Shaw (The Upper Hand)
“
Its sound is the foundation of the rhythm of a band, often pounding out the basic pulse of the music or playing along with the bass player’s rhythm.
”
”
Jeff Strong (Drums For Dummies)
“
I'd been told that Catholic masses were stable and cold with dull organ music so I was surprised when the choir broke into song. They sang in Shona, with African drums and rattles, ngoma ne bosho. The women;s voices merged with men's bass producing an effect that was confusing but beautiful. At Forward with Faith Ministries we only used guitars, western drums and a keyboard, because Pastor Mavumba preached against using African Traditional instruments. He said that before the missionaries came, our people engaged in devil worship, so the instruments they used were the devil's instruments. We sang in English and he preached in English too, when he was not speaking in tongues. I was a bit confused; maybe the Catholic Church was the devil's church after all, but I couldn't stop my foot from tapping along to the music. [88]
”
”
Tendai Huchu (The Hairdresser of Harare)
“
At weekends we went to Jewish parties, where Jewish teenagers shuffled past Jewish bouncers and drank Jewish fizzy drinks and danced to drum ’n’ bass, waiting for the drop like accountants waiting for April.
”
”
Matt Greene (Jew[ish])
“
Zen is Buddhism made simple again. The robes worn by Zen priests are plain black affairs (unlike the colorful getups favored by the Tibetans and their other Buddhist cousins), and even after receiving Transmission, the Zen master's daily dress is a dull brown robe. You can sit anywhere; Dogen Zenji said that the heart is the real zendo. This informs temple architecture. Plainness here is neither false humility nor a facade. It is true to the bone. Skeletal beams and rafters are seamlessly joined; they are not nailed or screwed into place; they are made to fit together. Inside a zendo, there is mostly open space, dimly lit, with a small central altar and a tan, a two-foot-high wooden platform built around the perimeter, where meditators sit on plain black cushions, facing the wall. There are few ceremonial objects—the teacher's staff, a stick of incense burning in a bowl—and it is rare to run into more than one or two bronze or wooden Buddhas. Zen rituals are spare, too. Music is reduced to an isolated ding or bong of a bell, the flat report of a mallet tapped against a slab of wood, and a thrumming bang from a giant bass drum. Even the chanting is monochromatic; students pitch their voices toward the deep, dark end of the register and grumble in unison.
”
”
Michael Downing (Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center)
“
In a voice not his own, as resonant in this cell as the reverberations in a bass drum, Iroki said, 'Take better care of my gift this time, child. You're going to need it.' The sense but not the sound of an immense belly laugh, tidal, oceans deep. And then as vast as the presence, somehow vaster, absence. The emptiness left was like a room stripped of its very air. One would weep for the loss if one could only breathe.
”
”
Lois McMaster Bujold (The Assassins of Thasalon (Penric and Desdemona, #10))
“
Grant read my book, and he said it was good!
A tiny parade marches through my chest, filled with baton-throwing, tutu-clad dancers, people on floats throwing confetti, a full marching band with tubas and bass drums, and not a clown car in sight. Those are creepy and nothing about this moment feels the least bit creepy.
Grant read my book.
A sigh of contentment softly blows through my nose, and my grin feels like the first taste of summer after a long year of sitting in a stuffy classroom.
Grant read my book.
I sigh. Is this what swooning feels like?
”
”
Savannah Scott (Doctorshipped (Getting Shipped! #5))
“
You're like a pair of jazz musicians, forever improvising. Or perhaps you are not musicians, but your love manifests in the music. Sometimes, your head tucked into her neck, you can feel her heartbeat thudding like a kick drum. Your smile a grand piano, the glint in her eye like the twinkle of hands caressing ivory keys. The rhythmic strum of a double bass the inert grace she has been blessed with, moving her body in ways which
astound. A pair of soloists in conversations so harmonious, one struggles to separate. You are not the musicians but the music.
”
”
Caleb Azumah Nelson
“
Do you remember “Black Coffee”? Do you realize I wrote that just for you? Not the lyrics—I know that you hated those—but the heavy sound, the big drums, and the bass. I’d hoped you’d love it. I hate I never told you.
”
”
Dawnie Walton (The Final Revival of Opal & Nev)
“
She sits on the other end of the sofa from Walter and stares numbly at the football. She hates the sound of football—the dull bass monotone of male calls, the incessant up and down intonation of the commentators, the whistles and the drums; it sounds like the backdrop to a nightmare, an oncoming army of bloodless killers. It’s been the soundtrack of her weekends for twenty-seven years, since she first moved into Walter’s flat. She’d watched with him in the early years, professed her enthusiasm for the game, shouted when their team scored, pretended to be devastated when they lost. Although, no, not pretended. It had been real, at the time. Everything she thought, did, wanted, cared about back then had been through the filter of Walter. All she had wanted, from the moment they first got together, was to please him, to be the person he thought she was, to be his dream come true.
”
”
Lisa Jewell (None of This Is True)
“
How strange a life you and other Black people lead, forever seen and unseen, forever heard and silenced.
And how strange a life it is to have to carve out small freedoms, to have to tell yourself that you can breathe.
But how beautiful it is when those freedoms arrive, when you are breathing, when you're matching Phife word for word, or singing the refrain, We got the jazz, we got the jazz. How beautiful, when you're in a crowd, and you find your wandering gaze met by another, twenty, thirty metres away, both of you unaware that your shoulders and hips are moving to the bassline, because this is not something you have had to think about for once, this is something you just do, and understanding this, and the circumstances which brought you to this moment, you both raise a small hand of acknowledgement. How wonderful are moments like these, where you don't have to hide? How wonderful to realize, amidst thrum of a bass drum, that sometimes it is a joy to be alive?
”
”
Caleb Azumah Nelson (Open Water)
“
It had a mathematical beauty to it. I stood at the side of the dance floor as thousands of bodies moved as if they were merely reactive entities, subordinate to the music’s force. Unusually I understood this music instantly, and felt the collective love for it, golden and pure. Beneath the sound of keyboards there was a repetitive bass drum that kept perfect time. Doof doof doof doof. Heartbeat pacing. And then there was another beat, lighter, above it, twice as fast. And another even fainter one precisely twice as fast as that. Four beats per measure. A perfect ratio, dividing ranges of time into equal parts within each section. Euclid’s algorithm come to life. It is often said about music that it is the joy people feel when they are counting without realising they are counting. So that is what I realised I was witnessing, as I bobbed my head and scanned the crowd – the collective euphoria of experiencing mathematical harmony in an imperfect world.
”
”
Matt Haig (The Life Impossible)
“
Hallelujah! Praise God in his holy house of worship, praise him under the open skies; Praise him for his acts of power, praise him for his magnificent greatness; Praise with a blast on the trumpet, praise by strumming soft strings; Praise him with castanets and dance, praise him with banjo and flute; Praise him with cymbals and a big bass drum, praise him with fiddles and mandolin. Let every living, breathing creature praise GOD!
”
”
Eugene H. Peterson (The Message//REMIX Pause: A Daily Reading Bible)
“
I went inside and found a song on my iPod with a hard bass line and a whole lot of drums and I let the music rip a hole in the world, one that I could walk through and be somewhere else for a while.
”
”
Cath Crowley (A Little Wanting Song)
“
We stopped and listened. Just on the cusp of hearing I detected a rhythmic pounding, more a vibration in the concrete than a sound.
'Drums,' I said and then because I couldn't resist it. 'Drums in the deep.'
'Drum and Bass in the deep,' said Kumar.
”
”
Ben Aaronovitch (Whispers Under Ground (Rivers of London, #3))
“
He turned around to see the bass drum popping and the horn sections pointing their instruments to the balconies and sending glorious notes to the rooftops.
”
”
Hunter Murphy (Imogene in New Orleans (Imogene and the Boys #1))
“
I played a few songs over and over, trying to understand them. They didn't have an immediate effect. This was a new species of sound. Something entirely different. The shrill squawks from the guitars. The fuzzy bass guitar parts, and the caustic singing. It didn't make sense necessarily, but eventually I found the simple melodies sticking in my brain. The fast rhythms and thundering drums made my pulse jump. I could tell that something was happening.
”
”
Peter Bognanni (The House of Tomorrow)
“
As he and Beth hit the stairs, he called out to his brothers, “Thanks for having my back once again.”
The group stopped and turned to face him.
After a beat of silence, they formed a half circle around the foot of the grand staircase, each making a thick fist with his weapon hand. With a great whoop! of a war cry, they went down on their right knee and slammed their heavy knuckles into the mosaic floor.
The sound was thunder and bass drums and bomb explosions, ricocheting outward, filling all the rooms of the mansion.
Wrath stared at them, seeing their heads bent, their broad backs curled, their powerful arms planted. They had each gone to that meeting prepared to take a bullet for him, and that would ever be true.
Behind Tohr’s smaller form, Lassiter, the fallen angel, stood with a straight spine, but he wasn’t cracking any jokes at this reaffirmation of allegiance. Instead, he was back to staring at the damn ceiling.
Wrath glanced up at the mural of warriors silhouetted against a blue sky and could see nothing much of the pictures that he’d been told were there.
Getting back with the program, he said in the Old Language, “No stronger allies, no greater friends, no better fighters of honor could a king behold than these assembled afore me, mine brothers, mine blood.”
A rolling growl of ascent lifted as the warriors got to their feet again, and Wrath nodded to each one of them.
He had no more words to offer as his throat had abruptly choked, but they didn’t seem to need anything else.
They stared at him with respect and gratitude and purpose, and he accepted their enormous gifts with grave appreciation and resolve.
This was the ages-old covenant between king and subjects, the pledges on both sides made with the heart and carried out by the sharp mind and the strong body.
“God, I love you guys,” Beth said.
There was a lot of deep laughter, and then Hollywood said, “You want us to stab the floor for you again? Fists are for kings, but the queen gets the daggers.”
“I wouldn’t want you to take chips out of this beautiful floor. Thank you, though.”
“Say the word and it’s nothing but rubble.”
Beth laughed. “Be still, my heart.”
The Brothers came over and kissed the Saturnine Ruby that rode on her finger, and as each paid his honor, she gave him a gentle stroke of the hair. Except for Zsadist, who she smiled tenderly at.
“Excuse us, boys,” Wrath said. “Little quiet time, feel me?”
There was a ripple of male approval, which Beth took in stride—and with a blush—and then it was time for some privacy.
”
”
J.R. Ward (Lover Avenged (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #7))
“
And here I’m learning one of the secrets: that good stereo sound is a psychedelic experience. I’m not just seeing Satchmo’s horn, I’m seeing the shape of the notes and the color of the sound. When he sings, I’m looking deep down into his throat while the drums and bass push me from behind. So now I understand why a lot of record collectors don’t do drugs—when they crank that stereo up, they’re already doing one. Every vinyl junkie has a moment like this, when the sound hits you between the eyes and you’re hooked for life.
”
”
Brett Milano (Vinyl Junkies: Adventures in Record Collecting)
“
Up top, we saw a party on the verge of a breakout. The three respectful men were, in fact, security guards. On the far edge of the plot, four scraggly dudes were fiddling around with a PA. A guitar and a drum set lay in the grass behind them. A stand-up bass had been propped up against a gravestone. Surrounding a folding table stocked with handles of Costco booze were six or seven men with fuck-you-Dad piercings—septa, cheeks, foreheads—and tribal facial tattoos. I counted seven, maybe fifteen dogs running around, yapping at one another, and at least twenty or so old hippies, each one dressed in his or her referential, Harold and Maude best, smiling and drinking out of red plastic cups.
”
”
Jay Caspian Kang (The Dead Do Not Improve)
“
Using a double bass drum in rock came about as a way to emulate what John Bonham of Led Zeppelin managed to do with one bass drum. His foot was so fast that it took most drummers two kick drums and both feet to mimic it.
”
”
Paul Stanley (Face the Music: A Life Exposed)
“
My body is engulfed with flames, and my hands are trembling not from nerves, but anticipation. When I picture his mouth pressed against mine, my heart races faster than a drum-and-bass track.
”
”
Elle Kennedy (The Deal (Off-Campus, #1))
“
One sublime example of a song winging in from the ether is “Happy.” We did that in an afternoon, in only four hours, cut and done. At noon it had never existed. At four o’clock it was on tape. It was no Rolling Stones record. It’s got the name on it, but it was actually Jimmy Miller on drums, Bobby Keys on baritone and that was basically it. And then I overdubbed bass and guitar. We were just waiting for everybody to turn up for the real sessions for the rest of the night and we thought, we’re here; let’s see if we can come up with something. I’d written it that day. We got something going, we were rocking, everything was set up and so we said, well, let’s start to work it down and then we’ll probably hit it with the guys later. I decided to go on the five-string with the slide and suddenly there it was. Just like that. By the time they got there, we had it. Once you have something, you just let it fly.
”
”
Keith Richards (Life)
“
The Composition of Death Upon Your Breath"
About the Song:
The Composition of Death Upon Your Breath delves into the dark and haunting theme of a lover poisoned by a sinister concoction found in the medieval Grand Grimoire. The song narrates the tragic tale of love tainted by the cruel hand of death, where a forbidden potion is meticulously prepared with arcane ingredients.
The song's lyrics evoke a gothic atmosphere, intertwining elements of medieval alchemy and romantic tragedy. The potion's ingredients—Red Copper, Nitric Acid, Verdigris, Arsenic, Oak Bark, Rose Water, and Black Soot—are transformed into metaphors for the slow, inevitable demise of the lover. This deadly recipe becomes a symbol of both the destructive power and the twisted beauty of forbidden love.
The music captures the essence of gothic black metal with its somber melodies, eerie harmonies, and intense, brooding instrumentals. Each note and lyric serve to illustrate the dark journey of love poisoned by betrayal and malice. The song's atmosphere is thick with melancholy and dread, inviting listeners into a world where passion and death intertwine in a tragic dance.
Copyright Notice:
The Composition of Death Upon Your Breath © 2024 Umbrae Sortilegium. All rights reserved. Unauthorized copying, reproduction, or distribution of this song or its lyrics is prohibited.
The Composition of Death Upon Your Breath.
(Verse 1)
In an ancient tome of shadowed lore,
A secret poison to settle the score,
A lover’s whisper, a deadly art,
The composition to tear us apart.
(Pre-Chorus)
Red copper gleaming, nitric acid's burn,
Verdigris and arsenic, from which there’s no return,
Oak bark and rose water, a fatal serenade,
Black soot to bind it, in darkness, it’s made.
(Chorus)
The composition of death upon your breath,
A kiss that leads to the silent depths,
In your arms, I fall to eternal rest,
Poisoned by the love that you professed.
(Verse 2)
A new, glazed pot, the spell's design,
A potion brewed, in shadows confined,
Your lips, a chalice of cold despair,
In each embrace, a whispered prayer.
(Pre-Chorus)
Red copper gleaming, nitric acid's burn,
Verdigris and arsenic, from which there’s no return,
Oak bark and rose water, a fatal serenade,
Black soot to bind it, in darkness, it’s made.
(Chorus)
The composition of death upon your breath,
A kiss that leads to the silent depths,
In your arms, I fall to eternal rest,
Poisoned by the love that you professed.
(Bridge)
In your gaze, the twilight's fall,
A lover's kiss, the end of all,
The Grand Grimoire, its secrets told,
In every kiss, the poison’s cold.
(Breakdown)
A potion brewed from darkest sin,
Your breath the gateway, let death begin,
A recipe of doom, our fates entwined,
In your arms, I lose my mind.
(Chorus)
The composition of death upon your breath,
A kiss that leads to the silent depths,
In your arms, I fall to eternal rest,
Poisoned by the love that you professed.
(Outro)
The final breath, a lover's sigh,
In your arms, I’m doomed to die,
The composition, a lover’s theft,
Death upon your breath, my final bequest.
Lyrics and ALL Vocals yours truly.
Lead Guitar & Symphonics Raz Wolfgang
Drums Alexander Novichkov
Bass Auron Nightshade
Guitarist Kael Thornfield
”
”
Odette Austin
“
I've been trying so hard," I mutter, almost to myself. "I can't stop thinking about you. Do you know how difficult it is every day?"
Her lips curve. "Probably about as hard as it is for me."
"You did not just say that."
She can't say that, because that means she wants me too, and that means... I can't go there. My breaths seize in my chest, my heart thudding like a bass drum in my ears. I'm turned on and confused, and fuck. I want her.
”
”
Sophia Travers (One Rich Revenge)
“
We returned to the possibilities of musical instruments, and used a very soft beater on a padded bass drum, which strangely sounded far more lifelike, although the average heartbeat rate of 72 bpm was too fast and we slowed it down to a level that would have caused any cardiologist some concern.
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Nick Mason (Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd (Reading Edition): (Rock and Roll Book, Biography of Pink Floyd, Music Book))
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Ian Stanley: “We got a Prophet-5 in ’84, for the band, you know, me and Roland Orzabal. And the big story is that, you know, when you first buy a keyboard or you try it out in the shop or whatever it is, it can either inspire you or not. Pretty immediately, you’d either go, this is great, or not. And I think we bought the Prophet-5, we ordered it, and Roland took it back to his house and the next day he phoned me up and said, ‘Come and listen to this.’ So I went down to his house and he played me ‘Shout’, the bass line, which is the drone all the way through the song, and the middle bit, which was all Prophet-5. So he just had a drum machine and the Prophet-5. You know, that was a major turning point in our career. Because ‘Shout’ went on to become number one in 20-odd countries. These things, you get inspired by the sound of it, and it was purely this bass-note drone that created the whole song.
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David Abernethy (The Prophet from Silicon Valley: The complete story of Sequential Circuits)
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Something sparked in the darkness of one of his own windows where he’d been just now, and a shot thudded heavily out around the-quadrangle-enclosure like a big bass drum.
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Cornell Woolrich (Rear Window)
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Around 1976, 12" dance and DJ singles emerged. Because the grooves on these oversize singles could be wider, and because they were spinning as fast as a 45, they were louder than LPs that spun at 33 RPM. I remember in the late seventies hearing how the low end (the sound of the kick drum and bass) could be brought forward on this format and made louder. Discos had speakers that could accommodate those frequencies, and they became a world of throbbing, pulsing low end—an experience that had to wait for the CD and digital recording to be experienced outside the club environment.
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David Byrne (How Music Works)
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My poor head is pounding out a questionable drum and bass track while my throat feels like I’ve deep-throated a cheese grater.
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Katy Brent (The Murder After the Night Before)
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We ripped off anyone who made a record, whether it was dripping paint on our clothes, sticking zips on our T-shirts… even down to our first drummer, Craig Newnham (whose brother Shaun was briefly the very first singer for the band), having a rat in his bass drum. It wasn’t that punk tho’, ’cos he told his mum it was a giant African mouse or she would have thrown him and it out of the house!
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Ian Glasper (Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984)
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At one particular moment, with my eyes closed, I was crying and asking the question over and over aloud, „Does true love exist? Does true love exist in girls? Does true love exist? Does Sabrina love me? Does true love exist? Does true love exist?” - I had suddenly seen a flash.
As if I was poking the Devil in the dark, staring too long into the darkness until it looked back at me as they say. I have never told anyone about this before.
I try to describe what I had seen that night in that windowless, dark, and cold place deep inside under that big, old building, with my eyes closed.
It made a half turn, flashing one of its eyes at me for a moment before disappearing again into the dark. As if it was nodding to me, I still get goosebumps years later when I try to describe it.
As if it had been standing there all along, and just tried to reassure me that it had heard my question and would answer. Quite close. Just to make me be quiet finally.
His eyes were yellow and red. I'm not actually sure if it had two eyes; I only saw one of them.
One Evil Eye.
Perhaps he had lost an eye, that's why I had seen the light of only one of them.
His eye was malicious, but not particularly. It was more tired and angry yet understanding, as if he had heard this question over a billion times before from fools like me and I did not amuse him with my question and demand. As if he was about to show me a trick he had known for a long time.
As if Satan had seen it all already. He knows all the tricks, he invented them, he inspired them all. As if he was bored of humanity already.
(There is only One Evil Eye. The planet Saturn.)
I was cuddling with Adam's cat, crying a lot, asking the darkness, about Love, and reflecting on Sabrina.
Perhaps it was merely an optical illusion. I leave it up to the reader to decide what they believe about what I was facing and how I miraculously survived, as an atheist goy, as well as who truly supported me throughout the ordeal. If anyone or anything supported me in Spain at all.
I had seen an advertisement somewhere saying that Miss Kittin would be playing on Saturday night, November 16th, 2013 in Barcelona at The Marhes.
Satan. Saturn. Saturday.
Coincidence?
Maybe. So far. Perhaps.
I knew I had to see her again after such a long time; she had been playing drum and bass in the early 2000s across the globe, and also in Budapest. I checked the map; The Marhes was next to Camp Nou, the FC Barcelona stadium. I thought of buying a bottle of champagne, which I didn't like, unless it’s Italian, but I wanted to celebrate, and I would walk along Avenida Roma to get there straight. I knew I'd get drunk; I didn't want to drive, I wanted to arrive intoxicated. I re-posted the Miss Kittin party’s flyer, on Instagram, writing underneath it :
‘All roads lead to Rome.
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Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
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How wonderful are moments like these, where you don’t have to hide? How wonderful to realize, amidst thrum of a bass drum, that sometimes it is a joy to be alive?
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Caleb Azumah Nelson (Open Water)
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Like a war drum thumping out a raging surge, hearts thundered with the deep bass that tempted.
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Eva Dresden (Broken (Omega's Destruction #1))
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a bass drum thumped like the pulse of some living collective creature down there.
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Thomas Pynchon (Against the Day)
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Jungle came about because there were so many of us out there who loved reggae, loved hip hop and were on the edges of the rave scene and liked a lot of it. But moving forward into what became jungle and drum’n’bass, it was a sound-system thing, because in that situation what separates you from the next man is your beats and how you lay them down – you’ve got to know when to shift.
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Lloyd Bradley (Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital)
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…if the sounds of musical instruments could describe a place, Namba would have four—the rollercoaster slides of a trombone…the unexpected tinkle of a triangle…a tuba’s jovial oompah pah…and that suspended thrill in the firework booms of a bass drum.
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B. Jeanne Shibahara (Kaerou Time to Go Home)
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In most genres, we can think of the “bottom” of the music as being the low-pitched or purely rhythmic instruments, such as the bass and drums.
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Dennis DeSantis (Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers)
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Bowie’s five best albums came all in a five-year rush: Station to Station (1976), Low (1977), “Heroes” (1977), Lodger (1979), Scary Monsters (1980). What do these albums have in common? The rhythm section: Dennis Davis on drums, George Murray on bass, and Carlos Alomar on guitar.
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Rob Sheffield (On Bowie)
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She watched with envy as dancers bobbed and swayed to the raging music like an undulating wave in an angry sea. Pungent odors of sweat and incense mingled with the less obtrusive smells of whiskey and flash pots from the stage. Laser lights and strobes flashed like lightning in time to the thunder of heavy bass and drums. The whole place thrummed with energy as if on the brink of an explosion. Any other time, she might have felt out of place in her conservative cream silk blouse and knee-length taupe skirt amidst the metal-studded leather and ripped denim. The women frowned at her attire while the men gave her a wide berth as if she might burst into religious sermon if they came too close. With a resigned shrug, she raised a hand to pat the sleek French twist in her hair lest one of the unruly locks escape its prison. Satisfied that every hair held its place, she turned her gaze to the crowd around her. “Hey there, pretty girl.” One of the bartenders set a gin and tonic with two slices of lime in front of her before she had spoken a word. She tried to hand him a ten-dollar bill but he waved it away with a shrug and a wink. “Your drinks are on the house tonight.” As he returned to the other end of the bar, her gaze followed him. This particular broad-shouldered bartender was the reason most females came to Felony, and she was no exception. His name was Jack. They had a passing acquaintance limited to brief discussions of the weather and sports, mingled with occasional flirtatious remarks. Although she had a huge crush on him, she’d never admitted it to anyone including herself. Jack represented everything that was absent from her life; spontaneity, promiscuity… adventure. He was the green grass on the other side of her self-imposed fence, a temptation that she coveted but would never taste.
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Jeana E. Mann (Intoxicated (Felony Romance, #1))
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The flute suggested things and the bass drum agreed.
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Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi (The First Woman)
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I loved the sound he could get on tape for my drums. In rock music, getting this right is still one of the great tests for any engineer. Since the drum's original use was to spur on troops to warfare, rather than winning over a maiden's fair heart, it is hardly surprising that many a battle has been fought over the drum sound.
The kit - virtually the only remaining acoustic instrument in a standard rock context - consists of a number of different constituent parts which insist on vibrating and rattling through a remarkable range of sounds and surfaces. Worse, hitting one element will set up a chain vibration in the others. In the days of four-track recording, the engineer needed to capture, but keep separate, the firm impact of the bass drum and the hi-hat for marking the time, the full fat sound of the snare drum, the tuned tones of the tom-toms and the sizzle or splash of the cymbals. Setting up the mikes to capture this is one of the black arts of the business, and is a pretty good way of detecting the best practitioners of them. Alan's full range of engieering skills were self-evident as we began to piece the record together.
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Nick Mason (Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd)
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Matt’s Creation Room was a wide, colorful space dedicated to music. The walls were splashed with bright orange paint, green sofas, and cushions, which contrasted with the serious, dark upright Yamaha piano in the center of the room. There were other instruments in the room: several guitars, a violin, several drums, a bass guitar. The walls were like a private Hall of Fame covered with posters and even relics of famous singers. One wall was covered with pictures of Matt and his three platinum albums Matt, Superstar, and Moving On. The room was bathed in light entering through the wide windows. It was Matt’s Creation Room and he had obviously decorated the room according to his own tastes. After finishing her scales while waiting for Matt, she posted herself next to the windows to practice her audition song for La Cenerentola that Saturday evening. It was a beautiful, sorrowful song that Cinderella sang in the first scene about a king who looked for true love not in splendor and beauty, but in innocence and goodness.
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Anna Adams (A French Girl in New York (The French Girl, #1))
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Sousa, I believe they can do better. If you can’t, it’s okay. I’ll believe for you. I’ve seen a lot of awful things in my time on this planet, but I have never, not once, thought that anyone was beyond saving.” She thumped the bass drum to emphasize her next words. “I’m not going to start now.
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Christiane Knight (In Sleep You Know, a Story of the Eleriannan)
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The second Sterling session saw the birth of one of Hank’s trademarks, the “crack” rhythm: an electric guitar keeping time on the deadened bass strings. Without drums in his lineup, Hank used the electric guitar to emphasize the pulse. It was the sound that Johnny Cash later made into a trademark, adding a little rhythmic flourish to make “boom-chicka-boom.
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Colin Escott (I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams)
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would like to see the medley competition starting without two three pace rolls. If it starts with a solo piper followed by the rest of the band then that works for me. If the band wants to start with the drummers playing a jig groove then that’s fine. If the drum corps wants to use snare drums with rope tension or have two or three bass drummers that’s okay as well. If you have your pipers cutting out half way through the medley and let the drummers take it away then do it. If
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Fergus Muirhead (A Piper's Tale: Stories From The World's Top Pipers)
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My attention was temporarily thrown off course, because of the possibly decent band name. Hot Underwear: Jesus the Thong Burglar on guitar and vox, Hellerman Schmellerman on bass and vox, “Phil Rudd” on drums, first album Wet and Loaded. The album cover possibilities alone would … But I digress.
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Frank Portman (King Dork Approximately (King Dork Series Book 2))
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It was people sitting in their little studios going plink, plonk, plink, plonk on one track, and then putting a vocal on the other or making a bass drum sound out of a synthesizer. Plus, we all started to listen to Europe rather than America, as that was where all the electronic experimentation was coming from, from Kraftwerk to Jean-Michel Jarre, from Telex to Yello, even the Yellow Magic Orchestra from Japan.
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Dylan Jones (Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics)
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I really wanted the backing [track] to be burning the balls off the whole thing,” said Paul. “We came to do it and we had a lot of trouble, actually, with the drumming. We ended up with Jimmy overdubbing a track and he had much more of a dirty feel—he was out of his skull at the time—but he helped to give it a dirty feel.”14 While McCulloch was making his recording debut as a drummer, Paul sat in the control room, his bass plugged into the console, and played along. By the end of the session, ‘Rock Show’ was complete.
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Allan Kozinn (The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80: A comprehensive look at Paul McCartney's life and work post-Beatles.)
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The arrow imagery evokes Cupid’s arrow, but with a darker turn: “Ooh baby, you couldn’t have done a worse thing to me / If you’d have taken an arrow and run it right through me.” Its most striking aspect is that it sounds as though it was built around a bass guitar riff, but that full, rounded bass tone is actually a Fender Rhodes electric piano. Paul recorded the piano track and a rough vocal with Steve drumming, and then, at Chris Thomas’s suggestion, Steve added a second snare part, recorded at half speed—a trick from the Beatle days—so that when played back at normal speed the drum is pitched an octave higher and has an unusual timbre.
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Allan Kozinn (The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80: A comprehensive look at Paul McCartney's life and work post-Beatles.)