Hagsgate
1996- ?
Its title obviously owing to Peter S. Beagle’s cursed village, this is a project similar in age to the “Dread Hip” Phase, but headed for a completely different direction. Many of these songs have indeed been songs – songs I used to play on my guitar while sitting with friends and beer in public parks, LARP taverns or other unlikely locations. They usually have little to no percussions and rely heavily on harpsichord or piano patterns that form the basis for the melodies. Many of these songs still survive, but have undergone drastic changes over the years – I will upload newer versions where available.
“Lenore (The Fair and Radiant)” is one of my most ambitious arrangements of that time. I never was 100% satisfied with it, and the song only survived on tape. Originally it had been recorded for one of my earliest Vampire Live meetings; I would be playing Alain Montserrat, a young Toreader (of course) and childe to the prince of Heidelberg. And hey, I had to present something! The “Lenore” of the title is of course E.A. Poe’s.
I can’t say much about “Brightlighted” except that it is another song based on those – supposedly – Star Trek chords of “Depart Sans Regret”. A simple piece that came out just like I wanted it, and I still like it a lot.
The “Cassiopeia” Songs are a different story. Cassiopeia has been a RPG character, and later also a novel character of mine. This songs are dedicated to her earliest incarnation, in which she was a proud-hearted noble-woman along with magic sword & cape and what not; her story however was always intended to be a sad one. As naive girl, she sets out to be turned into a tough warrior on the dreadful island of Crandt in order to take revenge on the murderer of her father, but eventually she will fall victim to his manipulative skills and her own vanity. I still have to write another novel about her life.
These songs are mere stations in her story, all of them adapted from guitar pickings I still like to play for relaxation (except for the harpsichord theme of the main part, which still makes my fingers bleed). The Death Song is probably THE ubiquitous theme that showed up again and again in my life. This is its earliest recorded version.
“Doubt”, unlikely as it might be, is one of my most rewritten, self-cannibalized tunes, including an unfinished fifteen-minutes arrangement (with various midparts) and the back-to-the-roots “Song for an un-doubting lady” edit, a short guitar piece with lyrics. But since there aren’t any finished recordings of any of these, this version, the very first one, will have to suffice.
“A Wedding In The Rain” – well, not much that I can say about this. I think of it as a kind of grotesque: the image I have in my head when I listen to it being its title.
“A Journey Below” marked the beginning of my experiments with unusual time signatures (9/8 in this case) but never really led anywhere; also, the strings caused some overload in my poor Yamaha, so here is only an excerpt of it.
“The Princess’s Song” has a similarly long history as the “Cassiopeia” pieces or “Doubt” – I did several covers of it, including a sung version I will upload at some later point. It started out as a guitar piece and soon developed into one of my most complex arrangements at that time. Originally, it was the adaption of a poem in Peter S. Beagle’s “The Last Unicorn” (the one Lir’s anonymous fiancée uses to lure a unicorn), but it soon got mixed up with some private mythology and RPG stories, so there are at least three different sets of lyrics for it today, and the piece is divided into two parts: A) The Promise and B) The Lone Rider. But more about that later!
