The name of the album came after the songs. As with a lot of Beyette's improvised musical heart pours of songs, the name came with the conclusion. But the name "Textures" has a personal meaning,
"Back when I was doing music as "Tooth ", the final "Tooth" album, "In the Middle of the Road", was written after a much more deeper album was painstakingly written and then sadly destroyed in the course of 2 minutes. I had spent about 6 months on a record, it was some really good stuff, I even wrote a couple songs with vocals and my friends ACTUALLY liked them. I used to live near work and while I was on an hour-long break from work one day I came home to listen to my music on my Windows 95-based computer and eat a couple sandwiches. Neo-luddites and Mac-users can have a laugh on me, the album I spent so much time on was deleted when I moved it between two folders, when I went to PASTE in the new folder, paste wasn't there, and when I went to the previous folder there was nothing to CUT. It was a CD called "Textures", six months wasted is an understatement. I was using Winamp 3 and I remember the candy-cane style yellow boxes, some day I can publicize the only evidence of this album's existence, a screen shot of it's playlist that I took after the album was destroyed. My last "Tooth" cd, "In The Middle of the Road" has a track called "Textures remembered", it was a nod to it's palette of multiple emotions and textures with a dichotomy of happy and sad in one track."
INSPIRATION FROM A CLOSE FRIEND[]
Starting the two-disc instrumental compilation "Textures" was disc one, "Soft". The more lax feelings, the easy to slow vibe with, gentle songs.
"My friend Fox would listen to songs like Editation's "One Kiss" and more specifically "Regret Stories" and always said stuff like 'wow man, you have really relaxing slow songs'. That type of praise really nurtured the ability to keep writing relaxing stuff when I was relaxed, and often times when I, myself, was in need of relaxation."
INSPIRATION FROM A HUNDRED YEARS BACK[]
The focus, mentally, of "Textures" was somewhat inspired by world history. At the time, Beyette listened to an industrial band that had released an album that visually and thematically had a somewhat kitschy nod to a particular time in Germany. It got Beyette thinking to give his music some inspired flavor he'd research a specific time in history.
A quick read that brought Beyette back to early 20th Century.
After he read a musical book describing the origins of the word "Decibel", it inspired Beyette to skim a children's book on Alexander Graham Bell. After learning a great deal about how Bell, to Beyette, personally was seen as a vital source of electronic audio engineering inspiration on top of everything else he benevolently influenced, Beyette started researching strange and specific things in the early 20th century America. Elements of the said research can be found in songs on the "Hard" disc of "Textures", specifically "Canon Battle",
"the only song I can remember, that I've ever outright sampled anything from and called it an original work, which to me is tacky and morally deceitful unless you're talking about specific hip hop and electronic music that is honorable and delicate with the process. The song borrows the midi structures of a public domain ragtime song for the intro and takes pieces of the riffs in a very exciting completely different direction. That song was so fun to make, and the results of the track are ultrasonically and harmonically heavy in so many ways for me, I was completely out of my element basically remixing ragtime. If there ever became a time on Earth where there weren't more important things to do, I would love to see a music video of someone's interpretation of that song."
EMOTIONAL SUBSTANCE[]
A Google Maps street view of the waterfall in "the wretched place that is" Sanford, Maine where Beyette had, late at night, retreated to often and screamed and sang songs from the "May Tenth" project, while listening to them in his headphones. The "May Tenth" project was mostly written just before "Textures".
Thematically the subjects of the songs on "Textures" were things that weighed much on Beyette's heart and mind. In the early winter of 2004, Beyette left his hometown of Portland, Maine to move to Sanford to help a new found girlfriend to help with her family. The resulting culture shock of "the wretched place that is" Sanford, Maine combined with his eventual feeling of guilt towards how he left things with the group of friends he felt a sort of social distortion which caused a great deal of emotional songs.
"In Sanford in my nature-rich home state of Maine, I was intimately experiencing, culturally, a hypocritical dogmatic mentality that I was not very comfortable with, this caused a great deal of the darker sounds on this record. Sometimes, and maybe this is from listening to so much alternative music in the 90s, but when I'm in a bad situation with someone deceitful who acts in a bad way, I have found it beneficial to act the opposite way. I was raised that two wrongs don't make a right, and would connect with people through connections later in life, but using this alternative method, this made me feel almost 'gothic in Sanford."
"I think religion and spirituality can be a really good thing for people, and something really should be done about the hypocrites and manipulators that seem to draw far more negative attention to each seemingly organically peaceful religion. If we don't renew our driver's licenses so to speak, unfortunately nature laws show that the idiot drivers will crash into other cars, which maybe someone in the non-driving cultures would feel justified saying that no one can drive! But seriously, I'm not a preacher. This is just the perspective of a humble music producer..."
HEAVILY ORCHESTRATED MUSICAL STYLINGS[]
During the time Beyette wrote "Textures", their music theory learning had become a central focus.
The music theory understood in The Guitar Handbook proved most usable to Beyette in the creation of "Textures"
Their girlfriend's father had given them a book that was about guitar, but Dustin read it in terms of how things would apply to other instruments as well. This has caused a great deal of the classical music stylings and the orchestration-heavy songs.
"In music theory, I've found that intervals alone cause a lot of emotion, the blend of consonance and dissonance of everything and I exploited that with getting in the habit of complex chord creation. I would build and build and build, make 50-measure organic chord progressions in a couple of hours. I was probably feeling pretty good the day I wrote "Symphonic Iris" and that should be pretty apparent with the mood of the song. When I hear it, it sounds like I am very humbled and happy because of something. On songs creating a bad mood describing a bad day, it's always been less of a challenge. Music from the soundtrack of horror movies have long put to use the music theory that chaotic and exotic scales of music sounds dark and tense.
The Diminished scale was very effective for the darker songs on "Textures"
The diminished scale was very prominent in some of the dominating melodic themes of "Textures". You just can't get those dark emotives on the other scales!"
SEA OF PILLOWS[]
The opening track on "Textures - Soft" was a nod to a perspective photograph that inspired a day dream that would help Beyette to sleep easier on energetic nights.
"As far as I can remember, I took a picture one day at the Maine Mall (I still have it digitally backed up), I was in one of the big national stores with the furniture, and I focused the camera really far away and took a picture from the corner of a bed. And I imagined, for the song, what if the picture was of a bed the size of.. I don't know, haha ...a HUGE city? I'd just fall into a sea of pillows."
THE ALPHA "SCORES" THE OMEGA[]
"Before the CD got too big for one disc the song was going to act as a segue to the second harder side."
Before they had so many songs, they had originally intended to make one album twice, the first time presented softly, the second time presented, note for note, in a different harder way.
"The inspiration came from a chill remix I heard of an industrial song before months later delightfully hearing the extremely heavy original version of it. Waiting for that album got me through some miserable hours spent never being put to work at Burlington Coat Factory, which was apparently or is apparently a part of the Fortune 500, this is what the co-workers told me. Everyone was always talking about the Fortune 500, I still don't even know what that is."
The original plans were pushed aside when the album itself seemed to take over.
"There's no point in 'writing' anymore, these songs literally have a life of their own!"
The album concluded with a song written in [13/1 time signature], called "Score", of which the last note isn't heard until you listen to the first track of the second disc, "Textures - Hard".
ORIGINAL 2006 TRACK LIST[]
TEXTURES - DISC 1 - SOFT
TEXTURES - DISC 2 - HARD
The first 20 tracks of Textures is on the "Soft" disc. "Mostly mellow, mostly relaxing, a mix of light and dark sounds."
In late February 2014 Dustin Beyette independently released a remaster of the entire project and for the first time the project was 100% public. Up until this point, aside from various private sharings, the songs had not been public on a grand scale. The tracklist is virtually the same but all the segues that were previously impossible without mastering software were finally fixed and the songs feature a more continuous mix often slowly overlapping songs before the track switches to the next one. Track 11 of disc 2 was modified by being replaced by another song from the same project period. In place of "Way Out", originally track 11 was set to be a non-instrumental version of "Books Can Be Deceiving" but due to the lyrical content being deemed by Beyette "too alienating", the song was removed and will never be publicly released. Another modification from the more continuous mix is that any intros that were deemed more geared towards the individual desiring a complete album experience as opposed to the more casual listener are on the track before the song's tracks. The dynamics were compressed and maximized to create a generally louder mix to promote the project during the projected downfall of the "loudness wars". That is the songs sound loud and clear and require very little adjusting of the volume knob once the individual or individuals listening start their listening experience.
