Palace Guard

This is an early example of my use of the Serial Vignette style, which involves the laying out of  musical "scenes" in a quasi-cinematic way. Due to this being an earlier composition, "Palace Guard" was mostly aligned with the classic heavy metal style, however it's interesting to hear how the building/lead guitar part stops on a dime and goes into a far more lush, lovely orchestral setting. At first I worried that people would be permanently put off by the abruptness of the transition, but I left it like that because...well, we're talking about black-armored Mer-men and women plunging headlong into battle, singing their song. Some degree of recklessness should be allotted :)

I've had Lyraka friends ask me about that cockeyed, abstract solo after the symphonics, and a few heard Allan Holdsworth-isms in it (maybe for its "outside" sound). Count me as a fan of Allan, but I think it was more a shared, Bartokian headspace. Bartok's compositions were really being played a lot by me at the time (String Quartets 2 and 4 in particular), and wanted to play something quirkily expressive on the guitar. I notice now that section's backing sounds a bit like the Assault Attack/Into the Arena slow arp, pretty obvious how that happened...and how strange to have such an "off" solo over that backing.

But that one, abstract solo was the foreshadow of things to come: intensified self-expression and thinking-outside-the-box.