2012 ► "MADE IN AMERICA" ! +cathy+eric

In the early 90's, I was working together, with a french progressive rock band, called WARM ! Though it wasn't quite successful ( progressive, and 90's, and France... see the issue here ? ), I had the opportunity, beside the sound pro- duction, to share a couple of songs with them, and you'll find some of these, totally or mostly reshaped, through this album.
One of them, I feel I could run it today, without loosing some original intensity. So, here it is !  And no, you'll NEVER see the original video footage... it's cal- led MADE IN AMERICA, and you can listen to it, by clicking right there !

I used a lot of Native Instrument PRO-53 in here, for the bassline, the intro gimmick, and various riffs... The Sequential Prophet 5 was (and still "virtually" is...) a brilliant versatile synth. But it needed very sharp settings, and suffered from a lack of this new "MIDI interface" thing, at the time... not an issue today, neither is the initial five notes polyphony limitation.
All the vocoder parts were built with the TAL-Vocoder, a free but very effective vintage-style VST plugin, though I tried more complex and expensive vocoder softwares, and came with some disappointments, about flexibility, sound tex- ture... and too many out of subject features, hm hm.

 The little brass section is played with some real acoustic samples, and would you assume it's a huge E-MU bank in action, you'd be wrong ! It's a bunch of old samples, I took from a cheap CD, in the early 90's ! They didn't even match perfectly with each other ! I didn't know any real horn section to perform it, any- way, and after a terrible experience with a bagpipe ( ! ), truth is I'm not too found of recording live acoustic instruments in my little living-room...



There's a lot of Emulator X around, beside this brass stuff, like the usual fil- tered soft pads, treated electronic percs, etc... The voice samples are all John F.Kennedy, from his famous Houston speech in 62', about the space program, and the goal to send a man to the moon before the end of the 60's... which has been an exciting and successful adventure. Unfortunately, we know history didn't end so well, for the fate of the young american president.

This song is not about demeaning America (as any french normaly would...), and not about to be naive either, that's probably why it goes through a different mood, towards the end... You can see it as a metaphore, about the search for a promised land, this kind of iconography humanity's always seeking out. Plus, I indeed owe a lot to american culture, as opposite to a lot of european people, I won't deny it for some ideology purposes. My life wouldn't be the same without Star Wars, Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg, without jazz, blues and rock'n'roll, without Superman, The Fantastic Four and Jack Kirby, without Frank Herbert, Ernest Hemingway, Prince, George Gershwin, without the Silicon Valley and the internet... May I just say, we learn a lot about a civi- lization true values, from its culture and creativity.
 
Since it would be fun, to get one of the few people who ever did perform this song, Erick Giordano, WARM's original singer (and now, a modern celtic pop- man ! ) did a nice recording, and performed the smashing "Make in America" backing vocals ! 
And, the cheering ad-lib vocals to the end, were done by Cathy Monin, from the french funk-soul band Jack Robert. As they are charming people, she was kind enough to perform on my ugly non-funky electronic pop-rock ( lol ! ). Plus, she did this "vocal countdown", going up to 240 ! Of course, we did all this by distance, using internet and shared applications, exchanging audio tracks and datas... All that 21st century cool stuff, again.