mobiUS What's it all about? - Make the Promise
So the music should be complex, imaginative, personal and compelling. Not the pulp that's churned out to an all too receptive mainstream radio station. It should have nuance, light
and shade. It should inspire, enlighten, lift and sadden. It should be a reflection of emotion with each track given the time to breathe, rather than be squashed into little there and a half minute processed segment.
Well that was the idea. the inaugral mobiUS album "Make the Promise" seeks to begin that journey. A journey to a destination that I suspect we'll never reach, a concept that I find surprisingly pleasing as the journey is the embodiment of that idea rather than the city of gold beyond the horizon. And who knows what twists and turns the journey will take us on. That is the joy of creative music.
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And so the tracks:
Odyssey: A track that leaves the listener with the sense that they have indeed embraced a quest. Set out from the comforts of home, flirted with danger, crossed oceans, lived and loved and returned home sated. It was written as the bands first venture and is an allegory of the retreat from a safe established templated musical process, breaking into a world of layered sound, changing rhythms and tempo and an escape from the bonds of what is considered to be popular music production.
Rain Another Day: This is a very personal track to me, being about my mother - Christine Margaret Newcombe, who died from ovarian cancer at the age of 62 in 2005. There's references throughout the song about her life. As an example, she worked as a nurse at a hospital in Stow Bardolph Norfolk in the East of England. My family lived in Downham
Market which is a village a few miles from the hospital and Christine would commute daily on her bicycle. I was very young at the time and my bedroom overlooked a gravel drive. I remember one night, I was in bed and the rain outside was tumultuous. It was dark and my mother was cycling home. I must have been four or five years old and I remember worrying and straining to hear my mother returning. The sound of the rain thumping on the gravel drive kept fooling me in thinking it was the sound of her returning bicycle. This added to my fears until suddenly I heard an unmistakable sound of tyres on gravel. Safe in the knowledge she had returned, I fell to sleep. If you listen closely, you can hear the sound of the bike on the gravel at the end of this track.
So They Tell Me: Mental health is an issue that's very much either ignored, or shunned in modern society. Things are getting better and not only have advances in care and treatment become more sophisticated and efficacious, but public attitudes have improved though
media campaigns, pressure groups and central and local government schemes. This track tries to grasp and encapsulate the experiences of real sufferers of multiple personalities. It doesn't try to judge or sensationalise. It just observes and reports on 'what is'. This was a difficult track to write, both from a perspective of sensitivity, but also technically, with many changes or departures of rhythm, testing the concept of distance based collaborative music production to its limit!
Spider: Wherever we go, whatever we do and whatever we aspire to, there will always be obstacles. Or I suppose challenges. Obstacles are rather a negative way of looking at it. Challenges should be embraced as the inspiration climb to achievement, rather than a blocker to aspiration. This track however, is based in realism. The reality that to achieve our
dreams, we have to make sacrifices. Life is and always has been a balance. If the way is hard, if the challenges seem unsurmountable, if everyone is sceptical if the road is not clear, and in spite of all this, if you succeed, the you have won. And that reward is sweet, triumphant and fulfilling. This track is at that point of choice. Would you dare to take that final step, to sacrifice all for your destiny? Well maybe we'll find out in the forthcoming album!
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mobiUS sincerely hopes you enjoy Make the Promise. It has been a quest to make, and I hope it brings you as much pleasure as it did in its composition