dorothy’s finger is the closing track to entropy begins at home, the album i put out in april last year. its a track i started early in 2005 – before faux pas was even invented – and it took me a year to finish it. this track just never sounded right, it needed tweak after tweak after tweak. it was laborious and frustrating. i don’t want to make music that way ever again, tweaking and tweaking and adjusting over a period of 12 months. nonetheless the end result is something i am proud of.

below is a version of dorothy’s finger from around about the time i put my EP out, so thats about 6 months before the ‘final’ version appeared on the album. i guess you can call this a demo. also below is a link to a place on the internets where you can listen to the ‘final’ version if you want to get all comparison-like on it.

i still feel a little uneasy about posting things on here that aren’t finished, but you know what, theres something kind of fun and honest about posting something like this online. i see it kind of like putting a crowbar into what i already perceive as the cracks of vulnerability in my music, and just wedging open those cracks to expose the flaws more openly for all to see! this is the track before the shiny mastering that made it all pretty, but perhaps more importantly, this is what the track sounded like before the final bursts of ‘inspiration’ (if you can call it that – i don’t) that turned the track into something more than what it is here.

a lot of sample-based music is built piecemeal like this, ad hoc, piece by piece, and sometimes i wonder what it would be like to listen to some of it while it was in progress, whether peeking behind the curtain so to speak might somehow destroy whatever it is that makes the final thing special. when collage/assemblage-ish type music is made to sound like it sticks together, with the edges smoothed, i wonder whether it becomes like a magic puzzle, take a few pieces out and it all crumbles. ahhhh most sample-based music sucks anyway. i don’t know really what i’m on about, lets get on with it.

oh hang on, one final point of trivia – while its pretty obvious to most avid soul/funk/whatever trainspotters out there that this track heavily samples famed ‘afro-harpist’ cum underground jazz icon dorothy ashby (and hey, if it wasn’t obvious to you, well, it is now – go check out her stuff!), it is perhaps not so obvious that this track also contains a sample from darwin’s own pop wunderkind blastcorp, previously mentioned on this blog… actually, to be exact its this sample. you see kris from blastcorp has had free samples available from his site for a while now, and i downloaded this one way back in 2005 and had my way with it. it made its way (quite audibly) into dorothys finger.

it is, appropriately enough, some kind of a harp sample. i’ve never publicly thanked him. thanks blastcorp.

MP3: Faux Pas – Dorothy’s Finger (demo) (2005)

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Listen to the final version of Dorothy’s Finger at last.fm here

previously:
009 - Faux Pas – Into Trevor Jones
008 - Aleks and the Ramps – Pisces vs Aquarius (Faux Pas remix)
007 - Faux Pas – Coach (demo)
more…