Chroma Key - You Go Now (Fight Evil Records) www.chromakey.com
The songs: 1. Get Back In The Car (5:02), 2. Another Permanent Address (5:03), 3. Nice To Know (4:28), 4. Lunar (3:14), 5. When You Drive (5:24), 6. Subway (4:34), 7. Please Hang Up (1:58), 8. Astronaut Down (4:56), 9. You Go Now (4:20).
Produced by Kevin Moore and Steve Tushar. Engineered and mixed by Tushar. Keyboards, vocals and bass by Moore. Guitars by Dave Iscove.
What makes a man leave the blustery fan-mad astounding sounds of a band like Dream Theater? What makes him move out to New Mexico, then L.A. and finally (yet nothing is ever final for the nomad), Costa Rica? What makes him create glimmery, shimmery, contemplative, cinematic music that quilts womb-like the concept of solitude? The answer can be called Chroma Key, a bandshell of a name which houses protectively the mind and body of Kevin Moore, a man alone, astonishingly peaceful yet not quite at peace, a man with a plan to slide modest sonics into mental jet streams you never knew you could perceive.
But back to the first question, for that really demonstrates Moore's dreamy unearthliness. Essentially, Moore systematically discovered through the course of three increasingly successful albums, that he was outside himself, writing to a formula that had gotten easy and at the same time illogical. "As difficult as it was to perform, that kind of approach to writing was becoming a crutch. It was knee-jerk. It was something that just was not difficult any more and I was feeling less and less creative. It was just a matter of piecing together these difficult parts in a cut and paste fashion. And at the same time I was working on music that is sort of like Chroma Key is today, sort of more laid-back, more open, more room, more space and more songwriting-oriented than performance-oriented. I was leaning more toward this music that I was learning how to write and away from this music that I knew how to write."
Thus Chroma Key was born, Moore assembling a first album called Dead Air For Radios, with guitarist Jason Anderson and Fates Warning members Mark Zonder and Joey Vera. Released in 1998, Dead Air For Radios was a surprisingly ethereal and spiritual collection of songs that truly lived up to the cliché "defies categorization". Evoking the likes of Peter Gabriel, Mark Hollis, Pink Floyd, The Cure, Midge Ure, Eno, and a pitter-pattered scatter of top-notch soundtrack productions, the album quickly garnered quietly intelligent reviews all over the world, most notably in Europe, where the album was also a welcome sales success.
Chroma Key's new album, You Go Now, takes the enigma further and deeper, becoming a distillation of an already remarkable and unique emotional palette. "I'd say this is more of a collaboration than the first one," begins Moore. "There were more musicians on the first record but I did most of the writing whereas on this one I did a lot of the writing, arranging and recording with my co-producer, Steve Tushar. I started out with a bunch of piano ideas just over the summer. I went to this piano room and for a few months, just sketched out simple ideas, thinking that the album was going to be more acoustic than the first one. But I knew I was going to do some more programming and electronic stuff too and that's when I met with Steve and we got the studio set up. So I just presented some of these ideas and he started laying down grooves for them, programming the drums, layering loops. And that was going so well we never got around to doing the acoustic stuff (laughs)."
But the fascinating thing about You Go Now is how creamy and acoustic it indeed does sound. Tushar's drum programming is some of the most organic and realistic you will ever hear. As well, the album is softly touched by acoustic guitars, electric guitars, bass and of course Moore's array of visionary keyboard tones. Overtop like some sort of foreboding, sardonic, hypnotic sentry, Moore adds his vocals, which in total, evoke and confront a tangle of legendary, reclusive, solitary images, the man touching upon the likes of Brian Eno, Roy Harper, Peter Gabriel, Roger Waters, Peter Hammill, John Cale, even Colin Newman from Wire.
Moore speaks on the album's deliberately unobtrusive guitarwork, an element that adds to the textural '70s feel of these accomplished arrangements: "Dave Iscove came in with a really simple set-up, a wah pedal, volume panel, distortion and delay. He has a really atmospheric approach, sort of like David Gilmour. So he's just sort of playing a lot of lines between the verses."
Tushar emphasizes the collaborative yet solitary vibe on the record. "Both of us prefer to work alone on certain parts. Kevin likes to do a lot of the recording by himself and I like to program beats and synths alone. Kevin usually shows me a piano line and then I bring in a lot of the dark/weird/trippy elements and textures."
So indeed, all signals are designed to cohere and diverge upon this feeling of profound calm, but a calm bordered by the dark possibility of collapse. Both extremes can be found within Moore, as well as his record's cover art, its lyrics, and of course, it's threatening, yet barely audible, barely dressed disposition. Moore himself, considers himself a bit restless, settling in Costa Rica once this album was purged and delivered. "I think it was more of an escape than going anywhere in particular. I sort of move around a lot. I get bored of places quickly. I started in New York and kept going further and further west and then I just ran out of land I guess. Now I live in Monteverde, Costa Rica, which is in the mountains. It's actually a cloud forest."
Moving to the record, one will note a similar yearning for the outer edges, in particular, a space theme, space including the concept of terrifying calm, as well as the point-blank obvious idea of spaces, You Go Now thriving on the deafening silences between instruments and ideas. "The cover, all the astronauts, and that name go together somehow," notes Kevin. But You Go Now was just a phrase that we were throwing around the studio when we were recording the record. Basically it means, 'please leave, because I want to record this'. It was just used so much. Space seems like an overall theme for the album but I never planned it that way. I had picked up this LP, basically recordings of NASA transmission. It was really strange. It wasn't like incredible moments in space, but more like, 'OK, the astronauts are trying to get to sleep now and they're almost asleep but they're not asleep yet', really mundane kinds of things. It sounded really lonely and I thought it would fit well with the album. So I made a whole song with those samples which is 'Lunar' and incorporated it into another song, 'Astronaut Down'. And at that point I realized there was this picture on the studio wall that had been up there since we started recording, and that's the picture that's on the cover, again, this strange, unheroic NASA photo, a picture of this guy getting his mic adjusted, although it looks like he's getting his teeth pulled or something."
"These songs describe me better than I could describe myself," reveals Moore. "And just the act of working, recording, and coming into the studio everyday is sort of like a ritual. I'm sort of in a spiritual place when I do it. I don't know; I just think of it as... empty. That's a terrible way to describe it (laughs). I'm just trying to create this five minutes of space where you can just not think about the five minutes before and the five minutes after. I think that's one of the good things about music, for me anyway. It just sort of marks time for me in this way that removes responsibility like nothing else does."
There is also a cinematic, film noire element to You Go Now, which fits with the name of the band (a video term), and the fact that Moore is indeed, college-trained in video (Moore studied video at California Institute of the Arts during his stay in Los Angeles). Hence the liquid feel of soundtrack music. "I like the space that is left open in soundtrack albums," notes Moore. "It doesn't command so much of your attention. It doesn't direct you as much. It's sort of visual; all that space is left open. And I try to accomplish that at points in my writing."
'Another Permanent Address', with its stunning yet somewhat regal and progressive melody, might be considered the most accessible song on the album. "Remember, I thought this album was going to be acoustic," notes Moore. "And this whole song started out as a really slow, simple piano idea, pretty much based on half note chords. And when I showed it to Steve, he put this beat to it and it just went in this completely different direction. Lyrically, that's the big break-up song. It's also the biggest contradiction between the lyrics and music: optimistic music, tragic lyrics."
Technology played quite a role in this track as well, notes Tushar. "On 'Another Permanent Address' I ran Kevin's piano through three different crazy plug-ins during the chorus, the main one being a Waldorf D-Pole. It almost sounds as if it's broken. You can really hear the effect at the end of the track."
'Please Hang Up' is like classic Another Green World-era Fripp and Eno. Ethereal, organic, spiritual and darkly humorous, its sample charts an agonizing slow motion 911 call pattern, one that disintegrates without resolve. "I did that because I have a vague fear of the telephone," laughs Moore. "I've always had dreams about talking on the telephone, recurring dreams of somebody holding a telephone out to me. And I think that those recordings you hear, those operator recordings, they're really creepy. It's this cheery, authoritative voice that's always giving you bad news. And it's is part of your everyday life. I tried to get that feeling across in that song. I took it and chopped it up and tried to make it even more terrifying (laughs)."
"It's a song about doing nothing," explains Moore on the track 'Subway', which sounds like an underground tape from a despondent Peter Gabriel session slashed and trashed with psychological wounds. "Basically it's about a guy waking up on the subway at night, realizing he's missed his stop, and going go back to sleep. It's got something to do with the state of mind you're sometimes in when you wake up late at night or very early in the morning. Sometimes your mind is very clear and you don't want to move, and you just lay there and think for a while, and then you go back to sleep."
Again, even though the tracks comprising You Go Now wind, dissipate, spread, and essentially tangle the listener in the spirit-bound world of the non-linear, there is a river that flows, a deliberately organized and designed calm, mischievously undermined by Moore's eerie samples, the astronauts and NASA staff, the phone operators, as well as Buddhist meditative instruction and female chanting.
All converges on the closing title track, which serves as a microcosm for the record, the album's quietest moment, yet still one edged with the always imminent idea of catastrophe, symbolized by astronauts going about their business despite the merciless science that might snuff their lives at any moment. Final word, appropriately, goes to Kevin: "That's really a soundtrack kind of song. It's the song where I left the most amount of space for the listener. I think it's a good closer in that sense. I think I do envision people listening to this album in bed. I mean, there are two ways: I picture people driving in their cars at night, and I also think of people wearing headphones in bed. So that closing song is kind of like saying... goodnight."
Source: http://www.chromakey.com/
