THE INCLINE
Alec Davis
One of my favourite records of all time is NOFX’s The Decline. I first heard it in my early teens just before the turn of the century and it was my first conscious exposure to alternative album formats – The Decline is one continuous eighteen-minute track that weaves in and out of different musical themes, blending NOFX’s iconic skate-punk style with injections from more progressive influences. I always loved this format and decided to write a homage to it, which became Movement IX: The Incline. After completing Movement Zero: The Lives of Lucy and Lukas, I’d had enough of distorted guitars and had the itch to create some colossal brass arrangements, so I returned to my ska punk roots for The Incline.
Writing this record was not the real challenge, trying to get my cheap-and-cheerful, ageing, dust-ridden PC to hack the size of the project was. Without really thinking about the consequences, I overlaid twenty-six tracks of brass on top of eighteen tracks of vocals and seventy-five others. My computer was not happy. It got to the point where it took ten minutes just to open the project. Could I have just bought a more powerful machine? Sure. But where’s the challenge in that? So, I booted up my Windows Task Manager, murdered all those pesky background processes that only a handful of people actually understand what the hell they do, and begged my CPU to give me its all. At times, the lack of processing power forced me to ‘bounce down’ multiple instruments to individual stereo tracks just so I could play the damn song; but, strangely, I actually enjoyed doing this – it took me back to the first recording I was involved in, before PC-based projects were common place, where we recorded to track-restricted DAT tapes and everything had to be bounced down throughout to make enough space. After far too many bytes of digital sweat and tears, I managed to mix and master this beast.
I hope you enjoyed listening to this ridiculous space opera as much as I did making it.
Alec Davis.
January 2021.
Deathkat Media 