Hastang of Yesteryears

I got mugged the other day.

The jerk took my wallet, my Bic ballpen and my blog entry.

So now I’m writing a new one.

But who am I kidding? Nobody really believes this story (I can just picture YanYan raising an eyebrow, Makoy suppressing his classic “ahhhh t*ya!”, and Tessa emitting a faultlessly delivered, perfectly pitched “aaaaaaahh”). So much for excuses.

Well here goes.

We’re currently busy working on two new compositions and we’re hoping we could play both in our upcoming gigs (we’re playing in Post No Bill version 5 on August 5 at Handuraw and another gig at the same place on August 8. For more details, check out our myspace account). By the way, Murray Suson (formerly of Squirrel Talk) is standing in for Roy Tutor who is off to China for three months (huhuhu we miss our Kuya Buhok and his maniac jokes, among others). Until Roy’s return in November, Murray will be playing lead guitar for Hastang as well as work with the other members in arranging the songs. Moi, we’re glad you’re back, bai.

Now back to the songs. The first new song “So Hard, So Deep” “Deep Descent” (written by the prolific Tessa) is a decidedly up-tempo number and it’s safe to say that it’s half-finished as of this writing. Although I suppose we still have to work on arranging some bit parts like the intro, outro, guitar fill-ins, and break-ins. I guess Murray’s fingers are going to be busy in the coming days. Personally, I’m excited to play the song for the first time in the upcoming PNB gig.

The second new song “Mid-flight” is not actually “new”. YanYan (as usual, injecting some of her sublime poetry in the lines) wrote the lyrics late last year and I tried to craft a catchy melodic structure for it (I failed miserably waaaah). It went dormant for a few months until Tessa resurrected it by giving a more mysterious and emotional feel to the song. Although I must admit that arranging this song will be tricky. It sports three different time signatures and it’ll be quite a challenge to fuse all of them into one coherent whole (I should know, I went nuts figuring out the transitions when we played it acoustic in last Saturday’s Kahayag gig aaargh). Be that as it may, I believe the song’s got potential. And it’d be nice to have a song that doesn’t abide by the usual “modern rock” time signatures :).

~Guile

guile loves his girlfriend, adores (er, adored) Michael Jackson, and wants "to be complete". When he's not playing bass for Hastang, he creates thingamajigs for icomm and writes gibberish in his not-so-secret diary.
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