2024-Aug-24 - The Descent
The Descent is song #9 from disc #1 of my latest triple album It Was All Just a Dream. This song has quite a story behind it, so get comfortable!
Back in the mid-1990s while I was still finishing up my undergraduate degree in music, I was hanging out with a group of friends who were also still in school finishing up their respective degrees. We were a creative bunch with aspiring film makers, animators, actors, and musicians among our ranks. A member of our group wanted to produce a short film for a class project, and of course we were all in. The piece was a short sci-fi thriller inspired by the William Gibson short novel The Neuromancer. My role of course was to compose the music (along with helping out on set).
The Descent was written to accompany the visuals of the main character descending into cyberspace. The original version for the film was all synthesizer-based, which reflected the cold, lifeless vision of cyberspace.
My music never made it onto the final project (long story), but both The Descent and my song Zero were written for this short film. Despite my songs not being used, I still thought that they stood on their own, so I completed them by adding guitar parts and recorded them for inclusion on my first (unreleased) album Kosmos in 1998.
Several years would pass, and a web community came along in the early 2000s called GarageBand.com. It was a really cool space for indie musicians to share music and receive community feedback. Part of being a member -- whether as a musician or just as a listener -- was periodic A/B listening sessions where you would basically choose your favorite between two songs randomly presented to you, and their internal algorithm would take this data and use it to push popular songs to the top of genre-specific charts on the site.
I submitted The Descent and it did very well on the site. In fact, there ended up being a contest on the site for the winner's song to be included on the soundtrack for the Adam Sandler movie Little Nicky. I entered The Descent not expecting much. There ended up being over 9,000 entries into the contest, and week by week, The Descent kept climbing up the charts, all based on users selecting it in A/B listening tests. By the final week of the contest, and beyond my wildest beliefs, The Descent had climbed all the way to #9 out of over 9,000 songs!!! Wow!!!
Unfortunately on the closing day of the contest, The Descent slipped down to #13 as its final place. Since the contest holders would be selecting from the top 10, I was out of the running. Still super cool. The GarageBand community ended up eventually being bought out by Apple, who took the name for their entry level music software, and the web community vanished into thin air. 😢
The Descent would end up undergoing quite a few iterations before its final version on It Was All Just a Dream. For this final version, the song would get brand new drums, a melodic guitar arpeggio theme during the bridge of the song, a brief quote from my song Zero, and a fully improvised guitar solo at the end of the song.
I used my Ibanez Guitars S5521Q and my Solar Guitars S2.6 for all of the chunky metal-inspired rhythm guitar parts, and my Sully Guitars 625 US Custom for the lead parts. The guitars were recorded through my Mesa Boogie Mark VII amp, with the rhythm parts using the absolutely killer sounding Mark VII voice and the lead tones using the IIC+ voice.
You can listen to this song as well as the entire 44 song collection right here on the website! If you love what you hear and want to support the music I make, please consider purchasing this album on CD or digital download. I will gladly personalize and autograph your copy.
https://chrisstark.com/it-was-all-just-a-dream
Keep an eye out for next Saturday's song spotlight, and as always, thank you sincerely for all of your support!
Love, Aloha, and Rock!
❤️😎🎸