| Keep things simple. They have a tendency to get complicated all by themselves. When it comes to musical things, keeping it simple means only as many notes as necessary. I am very impressed by the ending of many Burt Bacharach songs. It is a loop of a few bars that gets repeated until the song has faded out. What is a musically satisfactory statement? While working, I go with the minimum until things become dense when they are all happening at the same time. At this point of maximum density I stop and then stretch out or build up the elements in time. For each track on this album entitled “Parallel,” I worked in an 8-bar loop until it was dense enough and then arranged the whole thing. Start with a few instruments, rotate them, build up and break down the instruments. All tracks here are just a stretched-out and repeating 8-bar phrase. This is the sort of formula that worked for me on “Parallel”. Sounds complicated? It’s really simple.
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