To help announce the opening of our pre-sales fundraising campaign, we released a track I (mostly) wrote, called Razorblade Keychain. You can listen to this track at: https://zxevery.bandcamp.com/track/razorblade-keychain. This is a bit about how this piece evolved.
I had this idea of two guitars panned hard left and right playing on and off the beat at a quick tempo, with no indication of meter/time signature. I mocked it up at home, working title “Numetal,” and it sat there as a cool sounding idea for a long time. Eventually, in our periodic ritual of my playing fragments for Richard, he perked up at that one and strongly suggested it become a ZXE piece.
So, how to flesh it out? Bass and drums come crashing in, in a long 7/4 (4x5 + 8). But more sections and some contrast were needed. So, guitars playing rhythmically off each other but in 7/8 and different harmony - that took a little while to find - and with a little more space for the bass and drums, and a tacet bar of 5/4 for a break. So far, all Pietro and me.
But something was still missing. So I went to Richard and asked him to create a spacey ZXE middle section, so that the piece would kind of encompass the entire world of Zero Times Everything, from the raucous noisy side to the ambient, spacey side. An experiment, who knew if it would work? He delivered a perfect middle section: ambient and slightly disturbing synths combined with Pietro’s and my spacey guitars he had recorded in some session or other - he is a tireless comber through hours of recorded and filmed works to find the bits of value. To that he added some ominous slide guitar of his own for that extra last bit of dark, almost country-ish feel.
Then Pietro comes pounding back in on the left, the drummer counts the band back in and we’re off again, leading to an unabashedly proggy 7/8 guitar riff ending.
Next step: a real title. I’d had this image of a keychain with a bunch of keys and old rusty razorblades, and the title “Razorblade Keychain” seemed to fit the piece better than “Numetal.” Amazingly, Richard found a keychain with a razorblade on it and made the image that accompanies the piece. Not something I’d want in my pocket, though.
I did have a mixing concept for this piece. I wanted it to sound as if it had been recorded inside John Bonham’s ear canals.
Tony Geballe