Additional Goodies -- - - ---- - ---- - - ----- Main Menu Song(The Focus Stone) B-Sides (Rejected Songs) Artwork and Materials for "The 4 Winds" Original Promo music Original Disk Comments . . . . The ....4 Winds.... . a music disk by. El Blanco . . ........ ....... .. . . . . . .... ...... . ........ N o matter where one may be there are four directions, North, South, East and West, and from these directions come four winds. These winds can be thought to represent the Earth. ........ ....... .. . . . . . .... ...... . ........ T h e North Wind carries with it the mind of the earth. The earth dreams of herself and her place in the heavens. Her thoughts carry neither malice nor love, only progression of time. ........ ....... .. . . . . . .... ...... . ........ T h e South Wind brings forth the word of the Earth. And the words of the Earth are both good and evil, peaceful and warlike, representative of contradiction and compromise. For without evil there can be no good. For without chaos there can be no order. ........ ....... .. . . . . . .... ...... . ........ T h e East Wind brings word of the past to the Earth. A past of tradition and harmony. And if one were to listen and follow the East wind for long enough and far enough one would find The West Wind. ........ ....... .. . . . . . .... ...... . ........ T h e West Wind brings word of the future to the Earth. It is this wind that reveals the possible future. It shows new ideas and new failures, new hope and shattered dreams yet to come. ........ ....... .. . . . . . .... ...... . ........ T h i s project was officially started in December of 1996. It is the representation of more than a years worth of work. In December I was approached by a friend who belonged in a local band. He had heard some of my old music and liked it and wanted to get together over a couple of weekends and try some ideas out. He was so impressed by what I was able to coax out of my computer using tracked software that he immediatly decided he wanted to produce a CD with my music on it. So plans were drawn up and the music for the album was begun under the title "Seasons". Over the next five months I worked on several tracks and received some very positive feedback from some of the locals in neighboring cities. Over these months I found my resources and knowledge of tracking being stretched to the limit, but I also found myself opening up under this new freedom. I wasn't limited by channels or sample size, no one would care if I used a drumloop or had a 20megabyte song. I wasn't being reviewed by other scene members, I had gone "outside" of the scene and the freedoms presented were great. I no longer was writing music for some 16 year old with a 90Mhz Pentium and a Gravis UltraSound. The limits of Jeffrey Lim's great tracker Impulse Tracker and his Stereo WAV writer were mine to try and reach. About 8 months into the project I realized the CD would never work. I was making songs too fast, I was too hyped about not limiting what I could do, the CD would have easily become a 4 CD set. I needed to change direction. So I discussed the situation with my "producer" and we both decided that the songs I was producing at that time were heads above the ones I was doing 8 months ago (when this whole thing started). I told him I wanted to refine my technique and improve my sample collection to include more high quality samples and that I could do much better than what he had heard. He agreed and we mutually decided to hold off on the CD until a later time, but that he would like to put one or two songs on a demotape that he was putting together from a small number of local bands and was going to circulate it around to several labels that he had had some success with. After that meeting I quickly changed directions toward a music disk. I came up with the concept of "4 winds" and was off. I finished off the songs I had and started a whole host of new ones. By this time the initial explosion of writing had settled down somewhat and I was able to pace myself and regularly create songs. And because of techniques and ideas I had gained in the past 8 months the new songs were (in my opinion) the best I had ever done. Wanting to see the differences in writing styles from a year ago till now I set about remixing some of my old songs (ones that when I had done them were my "best"). So I have included in this disk several remixes of both released and non-released music as well as several origional 4 winds tunes and most of the "seasons" songs.