The Challenge

It was a Friday night, April 19^th, 2013.  I was enjoying a cold beer with Alex Wheill (head honcho of Wreck Age Recordings). He recorded a full CD-R (nearly 80 minutes long) of soundtrack material for his brother Phil. Phil was shooting `First Night `a short movie (under thirty minutes). His soundtrack was simply amazing. It sounded minimal, nearly ambient, with a song structure, dark and bleak at the same time. I was particularly impressed because he recorded all this in less than a week. How come your brother never asked me (Minimal Frank) to do the `First Night` soundtrack? Well, François, you never gave me any Minimal Frank stuff for my brother. I gave you a Minimal Frank 2013 – Demo CD-R about a month ago. True but it`s not soundtrack material. Can you record eighty minutes of soundtrack material in one week François? Hey I never studied music like you did Alex (thinking for a moment I had the perfect excuse there). Okay then. I issue you the following challenge François, you record at least forty minutes of stuff. It has to be multi layered, leveled, dimensional, with a sound structure (added quality and variety as well). The crunch time is right fucking now and the final results is may 19^th, this fucking year buddy. Think you can do it. Or are you gonna give me excuses and bullshit like a second hand Spike (en français dans le texte)? 

Well I don`t know if I can do it. This has to be more musical than Flesh For Frank (my solo noise project). Hey, get myself another cold beer and we`ve got ourselves a beer. Done deal François.

      There`s one thing my good friend doesn`t know about me. I`m like Jimmy Hendrix. No I`m not a guitar virtuoso, but I do record a lot of stuff (and I don`t throw anything away). The same night I started checking out old ideas, drafts, and various tests, hoping to find some stuff to salvage. And lucky me, I discovered nearly sixty minutes of raw improvised jam sessions. It was some pretty strange material. It sounded like electroacoustic music, sometimes noisy and other times minimal, almost like  darkwave ambient and \ or ambient noise. This will be my primary sound source. I just have to properly sample the good parts and keep the leftovers for future purposes i.e. Flesh For Frank material. I was doing lots of sampling while asking myself what the hell am I doing? How the fuck am I gonna pull this off? I didn`t want to do music that sounded like the usual Minimal Frank material. Then it hit me stop procrastinating and do something. I can tone down everything. I can also do some type of rhythm, add percussive elements and try to be subtle for a change, I could actually accomplish something here. The only way I could achieve subtlety is working with headphones. This proved to be a wise choice. Using headphones feels like I`m actually doing something musically dimensional indeed. I`m here, working on the first track and it sounds almost easy. To make a long story short I recorded eight music pieces between April 19^th up until May 15^th ( less than a month). Here`s the song listing in chronological order:

1- he came riding a pale horse (5.37 minutes).

2- forgotten technology 96.28 minutes)..

3-  the new frontier (Deconstruct) (7.21 minutes).

4- march of the stalker (6.35 minutes).

5- theme from psychic vampires on MDMA (1.23 minutes).

6- the arrival (2.24 minutes).

7- drifting in hyperspace (5.17 minutes).

8- Lillith rising (5.40 minutes).

This album is 40.45 minutes long (forty five seconds longer than expected and done under a months work). I`m surprised by the end results. I`m really proud of this mini album.. Upon the first listen Alex Wheill  liked it (he also told me he was impressed) and he wants to release it. I`m excited because this is the second Minimal Frank album. The first one came out almost six years ago. I also designed two preliminary album covers

So it might actually look like this:

Or maybe like this:

I have abandoned the concept of putting those songs in a chronological order. This is the new logical song listing.

Here goes:

1- theme from psychic vampires on MDMA.

2- forgotten technology.

3- the arrival.

4- drifting in hyperspace.

5- march of the stalker.

6- the new frontier (Deconstruct).

7- he came riding a pale horse.

8- Lillith rising.

During said time period I was listening to a lot of bizarre documentaries about (in no particular order): Heaven`s Gate documentary,  hauntings in America, Hitler`s stealth fighter (Horton 229), demons and gods from the ancient world, and 72 demons of the ars goetia. Musically I was (during the same time period) listening to a lot of netlabel material. Those mp3`s where all up tempo, beat oriented and it was your regular run of the mill IDM, electronica and light techno oriented material Maybe all of this influenced me one way or the other. It`s hard to know for sure. Anyways I`m really proud of the end results.