Dance Charybdis

Awhile ago I read a prose translation of the Odyssey by T.E. Lawrence. In it Odysseus has to sail between Scylla, a multi-headed giant snake/lizard thing, and Charybdis, a sea monster who sucks ships into her maw by creating a giant whirlpool. I got it into my head of a modern day ship encountering Charybdis which inspired my new song, Dance Charybdis.

Musically it's quite simple. It starts out with two notes back and forth, D and Bb, then goes to a four note sequence, D, Bb, G and A. (Near the end I add F# and Eb for some dissonance). Sonically, it's complex because there is so much sound and I'm using a lot of reverb, phase and amplifier effects. It was tricky to get the balance right and not get too much clip distortion.

It's a horror tune, I suppose, and the idea was to be ominous and scary. I've been pecking away at this thing for three months and I'm still not sure it's right but I decided I needed to put it to bed. The narrative image of the song is a freighter chugging along, encountering Charybdis's whirlpool and trying to escape its current. I use quite a few different intermingled voices representing the ship and the monster.