M. Fisher
Music
All the music shown below is available for publishing or licensing.
All music copyright Michael Fisher. Please email for further info.
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Style: Alternative The musical seed around which this song was built came to me 5 days before my father passed on. I was visiting him, the last time I saw him, and I had brought my guitar. He wasn't able to sustain conversation by this point, but we connected very well through the music. It is this magical afternoon that gives me peace in his passing. The song that this became is not so peaceful. THis song is a form of personal catharsis for what happened after my Dad's death. Sad and angry. |
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Style: Trance Electronica This song was built around a number of samples I grabbed from an NPR listener call-in program after the 2005 State of the Union speech. The outrageousness of some of the statements made by callers from the religious right was amazing to me...in their own words, this is a sobering look at what some people in this country actually think and believe. |
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Style: New Age The basic melody line for this piece came to me in 1996 at the Guitar Craft Level 1 course in Argentina, and in 1997 I did a very sparse and Eno-esque treatment on guitars. The version posted here was produced at the computer, with just one hand, during the week I was off work after my hand surgery in 2006. Although it's all sequenced synths and samples, the tabla loops give it a human feel. There's also a track of just my breath mixed very low starting 3:00 into the piece. |
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Style: Rock This piece first emerged as a little two-part NST guitar idea called "2s and 3s"that emerged during one of my morning practice sessions in San Jose. Some time later, it was expanded into a performance instrumental called "Snark Hunt" at a Bay Area Guitar Circle weekend. In the last couple of months it gained words and grew into the full song you hear here. The words use the image of a wrecking crew demolishing a carefully designed and constructed home as a metaphor for the self-destructive choices we make on a daily basis. |
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Style: Ska This is yet another song that was originally written in 1978, and existed for years as a rarely-played nylon-string-and-voice number. Sometime in January I had a flash of intuition that this song was in fact a Ska tune at its soul, and quickly set about building this version, in the style of Sublime or Fishbone. |
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Style: Trance, Electronica I've long been acquainted with "Recuerdos de la Alhambra," and at one point in time made some progress on learning to play it on the guitar. But when I heard a Balinese Gamelan-tinged interpretation of the piece over the closing credits of (I think it was) "The Killing Fields," the seed for my eventually doing this interpretation of the piece was planted. Most of this interpretation is sequenced in Reason. There are, however, a number of prominently live-played instruments...the bass guitar which comes in with the (sequenced) drums about halfway through, the Ebow guitars that build and layer from that point forward, and the doubled electric guitars that come in for the coda. |
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Style: Acid Jazz I first encountered this Erik Satie piece in high school, and was dazzled by its other-worldly grace -- it was Brian Eno before I was remotely aware of or even ready for Brian Eno. Later, I was in a band that worked with a version of this piece, although it was never performed live. When I began looking for classical repertoire to rework, this Gymnopedie suggested itself, and somehow the ethereal feel spoke to me of smoky bars late at night, which was the main aesthetic I sought to achieve. (Running across the tenor sax samples with the prominent breath noise also helped.) |
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STYLE: House, Electronica This is a piece of music with which I have a long history. I learned to play the C major prelude from Bach's "Well Tempered Clavier" while studying classical guitar as a boy, and have always loved the piece. In a college voice class I prepared and performed (quite badly) the Ave Maria that Charles Gounod composed over the setting of that Bach prelude. And back in 1982 when I had my first cassette portastudio, I did a version of the piece with crudely layered synthesizers. In the late '90s I came across a version of this Bach prelude by the League of Crafty Guitarists, in which they used 5 guitars to layer the recurring arpeggios (using the technique known as "circulation.") I set out in December 2004 to record such a setting myself, with the idea of producing a stark and quiet version of the Ave Maria, but somewhere along the way it picked up a thumping house beat beneath it. From there things took a profoundly different direction than I had originally intended, but I find this result to be quite fun. The Ave Maria melody is a sampler playing a female "Ahhh" sound, channeled through a vocorder to give the words shape -- so an unheard component of this mix is a track of me speaking the words in Latin. |
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Style: New Age Started in December 2004 and completed in January 2005, this is an interpretion of the famous piano-and-cello piece by Camille Saint-Saëns. I used three NST-tuned electric guitars to cover the piano part, with the right hand's 16th notes circulated between two guitars. The melody, strings and percussion are all in Reason. Smooth, basking, floating. |
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Style: Trance Electronica This is the most blatantly political thing I've done. I took excerpts from George Bush's 2004 State of the Union message, the one in which he had such trouble pronouncing the name "Abu Ghraib," and wove it into a trance electronica groove. A stylish beat with a blatantly blue-state political subtext. |
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STYLE: Techno, Pop This song emerged over the course of a week or so in late October/early November 2004. It's built around a guitar finger exercise I had come up with years ago, in which I always heard the seeds of this pounding, driving groove. (Here the original finger exercise is heard as the recurring Mellotron melody. The same melody also appears in "Voltage.") The words, about various common slaveries and bondages into which we all enter willingly, were written while riding public transportation to work over the summer of 2004. |
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STYLE: Techno The arpeggiated line that forms the backbone of this song came to me on guitar in 1979, at the age of 19. A year later I received the words, when after 6 months of being in the Air Force and drinking a greatly increased amount of beer, I noticed the first beginnings of a pad of fat on my abdomen. From there came this lyric. This production was started in Reason during February 2004, and completed (guitars and background vox) in Logic Pro in December of that year. The spoken vocals were recorded on an airplane flying from LA to NYC; I held my notebook computer up to my face and dictated the words directly into the system's little built-in mic. Good fun. |
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STYLE: Trance, World This is probably one of the most cinematically expressive pieces I've got, combining elements of electronica, orchestal swells and Kurdish vocal samples. The melodic part that sounds like a slide guitar is actually a synthesizer, to which I carefully added some pitch wheel bends to simulate the slide guitar bend and vibrato. "Red Nile" is a journey. |
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STYLE: Trance This piece has been through more permutations than anything else in my bucket. It began with the electrical sound that opens it, which I assembled in 1996 on my home PC (running Win95!), culled from an electrical sound fx CD I picked up in the Variety newsroom. In the weeks just prior to traveling to Argentina for Level 1, I wrote and recorded a simple, 3-part guitar setting built around that electrical sample, using the melody that here is played by the logdrum. The base idea reappeared in a few other settings during the intervening years. Finally in 2003 I ported the melody into Reason, and over the course of the year this recording was the result. |
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STYLE: Trance, World Another piece whose earliest origins were found in the rhythmic implications of sound effects samples I had on hand, in this case the burp-with-distant-echo sound. This one, however, soon went to a different place, and with the inclusion of the Tambura drone and the Rai vocals from North Africa became another world music exploration. I freely admit to influences from both Peter Gabriel and Dead Can Dance, but there is also much of my own ear in this piece as well. |
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STYLE: House This groove first showed up at an airport bar at LAX while I was waiting for a flight. The bar featured prominent Rhino Chaser posters, and from that the piece's name was derived. I did most of the finishing of this unabashed house music number over an idle business weekend spent in Scottsdale. Thump, thump! |
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STYLE: Trance, Acid Jazz This idea first appeared in 1983 as a guitar piece. I had read about a guitar chord shape used by Steely Dan, which they termed the "μ Major" chord (pronounced "mew" major.) The μ major chord itself is essentially a major chord with an added second. I experimented with the same trick applied to a minor chord, and this wonderful, haunting guitar piece emerged. Some twenty years later, I experimented with entering the guitar part into Reason and having it played by vibes...and within a couple of weeks, this recording emerged. |
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STYLE: House A techno groove that was about a year in the making, visited and revisited in fits and starts until it was finally done. The addition of chanting Russian monk voices was the crowning touch...Rasputin hits the dance floor with Lionel Hampton in tow. |
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STYLE: Instrumental One of the few finger-style pieces I've done in the New Standard Tuning that's the basis of all Guitar Craft work. GC is primarily about playing with a pick, so fingerstyle work is relatively rare in this tradition. This piece was composed in the first weeks after Dana and I became romantically ignited. Reviews |
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STYLE: Trance, Ambient Another piece that introduced itself in-flight, while traveling between San Jose and Phoenix. Ethereal clouds. Cool trance groove. Less is more. Reviews |
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STYLE: New Age, Instrumental This piece was built around a keyboard idea that has been with me for years. The immediate work was motivated by the loss of the Columbia shuttle in February 2003...I find that musical work is cathartic for me in times of great public sorrow. The full orchestration on this one (strings, brass and woodwinds) is rather a departure for me...charming and lovely. Reviews |
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STYLE: Trance, World Smoldering and exotic, blending plaintive North African voices with Digeridoo and Kalimba. Feel the sweat. Reviews |
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Built around a guitar sound I was playing with during the summer of 2002, with drums and various other elements added in. Very noir, very cinematic, and just a little bit creepy. Reviews |
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I wrote this song at the tender age of 19, about a former high school girlfriend who had moved away to the country and found herself at home there. (This song was also the first copyright I ever registered, way back in June 1981.) I used to perform it until about my mid-20's, when it went into a long hibernation until the summer of 2002. So here it is again, with a much more contemporary drum part and thumpin' bass. Melodic, rhythmic and evocative. |
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This song was built around some sound bites I pulled from a home video of my stepdaughter's high school graduation party. Her 4-year-old brother was scarfing down cookies, and his mom was trying to stop him, instead offering him a banana. His bleat of rage and frustration, and his mom's assertion that "Bananas are good!", form the backbone of this one. |
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This piece, composed and recorded in the spring of 1997, came out of a period of late-night improvisations and explorations in the New Standard Tuning with which I had begun working at a Guitar Craft course in Argentina the previous November. As time went on, this piece eventually migrated from the electric guitar featured here to acoustic, and also gained a badly-needed bridge section...but somehow there's a quality present in this recording that I haven't been able to match or reproduce. The clean Stratocaster guitar sound reminds me of Mussel Shoals R&B from the '60s. |
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Another late-night texture exploration from the spring of 1997, this time incorporating the low, smooth fade of an Ebow on an Ovation. |
All words and music copyright by Michael Fisher. All Rights Reserved.