So, in the last post I talked all about us wanting our music to be unique, creative, energetic… now I’ve got to put my money where my mouth is and actually discuss the route we’re planning to take to (hopefully!) encourage that to happen.

First up, a bit of dreaming about the future…

Genre by genre

Eventually – should God see fit to grow our little gathering and bring musos along for the ride - I’m hoping to run multiple bands on a rotating roster, which is not a new concept in itself! However…

Ideally, each band would represent a different musical genre and contain musicians for whom that genre most reflects their interests. This means that we’d get diversity from week to week at church, and hopefully we’d see the musicians developing a much stronger creative synergy with each other.

I’m aware that this is a little reminiscent of the way Mars Hill Church do their music. I’ve only heard about what they’re doing at a high level and haven’t yet explored the ideas behind what they’re doing, but I’m glad someone else has trod this territory before!

But back to reality…

Right now, however, we most definitely do not have enough musicians for multiple bands (we have 2 musicians total!) – and the concept of spanning multiple genres with our limited resources would keep us busy far above and beyond the workload of any sensible fulltime job! This left us in a position where we had to make the deliberate (and nerve-wracking) decision to focus on one genre only.

Here’s the thing though: we didn’t want to revert back and do yet another piano-and-acoustic-guitar driven band. Don’t get me wrong – there are plenty of unique, creative ways you can use these two instruments combined, but if we went down this route it’s more than likely that we’d end up becoming no different to any other church band.There’s nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but it’s not the outcome we’re hoping to achieve for this particular project!

So – we wanted a genre that lends itself to a diverse sonic palette and was accessible to a wide range of people. Oh, and we still only have two musicians. What to do?

Electronic music in church

Electronic music, eh? In church, it’s exactly the kind of thing that could either be fantastic, or jaw-droppingly awful. But the possibilities presented themselves pretty clearly – it does have the potential to be exciting, dynamic music, and it seemed completely feasible that it could be carried out by two musicians (plus singers, of course)

The first problem with electronic music is defining what it is: “electronic music” actually isn’t a genre at all. It refers to the process in which music is made – by using synthesizers, drum machines, samplers and other technological gadgets to produce music. Anything made largely or entirely with these devices is electronic music – from synthesizers attempting to play entire orchestral works in the early 70s (they were generally awful at it) through to the hardest variants of dance music.

As a result, finding a genre within electronic music that is most accessible to a large number of people becomes a priority (this is all about serving the body remember!) I know plenty of people can’t stand Kraftwerk, and likewise even more people who find trance music utterly banal. That doesn’t rule out electronic music – it just removes two options.

So how do we find out what people like?

A mixtape

When the ideas for doing church music with synths and laptops emerged, I sent a mixtape out to our core team. Along with it I explained that we wanted looking to try a new sound in church and that the mixtape contained music that I thought had similar stylistic elements to the music we could potentially pursue.

The mix contained secular music from my own collection – fairly diverse so I could gauge what people did and didn’t like. Here’s what it contained:

1. Gotye – Hearts a Mess (3am remix) – have a listen here
2. Parades – Invaders
3. M83 – Don’t Save Us From The Flames
4. Bjork – Unravel
5. Fujiya & Miyagi – Ankle Injuries
6. The Cure – Closedown
7. Underworld – Beautiful Burnout
8. Apparat – Arcadia
9. Frou Frou – Let Go
10. Talk Talk – I Don’t Believe In You
11. Matthew Dear – Deserter
12. Radiohead – Videotape
13. Qua – All Body, No Breath

(I’d love to post a link to the mixtape itself, but can’t for copyright reasons. you should be able to find nearly all of these tracks on iTunes or the artist’s Myspace pages)

FYI, the first track is one of my own (a remix of a Gotye tune). I added this because I figured the best way to give people an idea of what sort of music they might get is to add my own music. Also, a couple of the tunes aren’t technically electronic music – but they contain an aesthetic that I felt would be good to represent.

The result was generally good – people responded to some songs better than others, which was a positive thing. As a result, we’re hopefully fashioning a sound more around what people are more likely to enjoy and connect with.

The result so far

So what did we actually end up with? Thus far, we seem to have gravitated towards a downtempo, textural, beat-driven sound which has emerged organically from jamming – some might call it a synth-pop take on trip-hop (if that means anything…?). Thus far it seems to have worked well with the songs we’ve tried it on, but I’m sure we’ll be refining our sound and approach as time goes on. Already exceptions to the general sound have begun to appear – some songs have ended reminiscent of Berlin techno, others have turned into electro-funk groovefests, while others have discovered roots in hip-hop origins. Plenty of potential – and hopefully something for everyone.

Attempting to work with instruments and sounds like this, I’m fairly certain that there will be plenty of revision that needs to be done over time – adjusting the sound in response to feedback, in particular – bearing in mind of course that this is music that we want people to be able to sing to without inhibition.

And now?

Practice! Substantial amounts of practice – in some senses it’s a terrifying thing working in completely unfamiliar territory (for church music) and not having a safety net, but the signs at this point seem to suggest that there’ll be a good outcome at the other end.

I would ideally like to have 20 songs at least sketched out with the skeletons of the arrangements sitting on our respective hard drives and ready to pick up and massage into the structure of our services on a week-by-week basis. We’ll be adding to this over time, of course.

At the time of writing, we have 6 weeks until launch. There will undoubtably be some hiccups along the way, along with the wins. Hopefully we’ll be able to blog about both realistically!

A couple of FAQs

I’ve already been asked a number of questions about this, so I’ll try and answer them here:

• How do you sing to electronic music?
  Like any other church band, we’re having to build our approach to this music with the congregation in mind. For example, there are a few musical features that you’ll often find in electronic music that we’ve decided to limit use of as they can make the music more difficult to sing to:
  • A lack of clear cues that make the rhythm of a song ambiguous
  • Polyrhythms can confuse matters
  • Excess bleeps, bloops and other ear candy can detract or distract from lyrical content
• Isn’t electronic music just “doof doof” that you’d hear in clubs?
  In a word, no. Explore the mixtape tracklisting above if you’re interested, as none that music could really either be classified as dance music nor played in clubs (Matthew Dear being an exception maybe?)
• How do you include other musicians that aren’t into this kind of music?
  If and when other musos joined Soma, we’d go to great lengths to find ways to include them if they had interest in being involved. For a start, I would love to add a live rhythm section to this band, but the human resources simply weren’t there. I’m interested in exploring all sorts of interesting combinations for this – there’s nothing set in stone.
  Ideally, though, once we had enough musos on board we would switch to having multiple bands and styles – depends on what God has in store!
• Won’t this be a little like karaoke? Lots of backing tracks, little musician interaction?
  There won’t be any backing tracks, in the sense that there will be no predefined arrangements within the computer (i.e. it won’t be like most church overhead PowerPoint slides where the song structure is defined before the service) and most of what we do during the service will be completely live, including playing synths/keybaords, triggering samples and starting/stopping/interacting with loops. Oh, and there’ll be some guitar. Most of the preparation is creating beats, loops and defining our own sounds. Along with all the normal things church bands do of course!