Traversing a Twisted Path
The first album in a single take using a 4 track

Music || Ordering || Animation


History and concept

Traversing a Twisted Path is a music project that really began in November, 1994, when I got my own 4-track, a Tascam 464. The album was constructed the following way: each month, I'd put up a couple of full length MPEG-encoded versions of songs that I had recorded on my www page (I had been making music available on the www even before Traversing a Twisted Path, starting as early as July 1993, but not in any organised manner). People would then download either the full length versions or excerpts and be able to instantly make comments and rank their opinion of the tune. Future compositions would then be recorded taking into account these comments, and other considerations (mainly feed back from the various music making newsgroups and reviewers). This process went on for more than a year, and I finally had enough material to release a full length album (a demo version on cassette, which was constantly updated, was also floating around during this time (see the TWISTED HELICES discography for details).

The album has over 70 minutes of twisted, experimental, and highly self indulgent music. Most of it was recorded and produced on the Tascam 464 4 track recorder, though there was a bit of hard disk recording involved. Almost all of the individual tracks are first takes, and some of the tunes were composed and recorded on the spot. Almost all the music in the album can be gotten online without any restriction, and I encourage (commercial and personal) copying and distribution of the album, in accordance with the Free Music Philosophy. The online versions are unmastered versions of the tracks (the difference is barely perceptible).

As frequent visitors to the TWISTED HELICES page might've noticed, that when I kept adding songs regularly, I also added a little graphic image to represent each song. The image is a representation of an organic molecule. Specifically, it represents one of twenty amino acids, which together are the building blocks of proteins. As I wrote and recorded each song, I found that they could be considered to represent the characteristics of an amino acid. Thus there's a pseudoconcept interwoven in the different songs, all of which are held together by a common link which is symbolised by a peptide bond (which holds the amino acids together). See the lyrics page for each song to see which amino acid it characterises and is characterised by.


TWISTED HELICES || Ram Samudrala || ram@twisted-helices.com