Frameshift: Unweaving the Rainbow

The CD features 15 tracks, which are basically 14 songs, framed by Above the Grass Parts I and II.

The underlying idea was to achieve three goals:

1. Produce an album featuring James LaBrie in ways that no one has heard him before
2. Combine the elements of progressive rock, film scoring and very modern production
3. Use the work of Richard Dawkins (one of today's most influential neo-Darwinist writers) as a concept that connects all the pieces on the album

Who is Richard Dawkins?

Richard Dawkins (see unofficial website here, or the introductory site from the BBC) has written several books which have made a major impact on the evolutionary biology scene.

When Douglas Adams (author of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy) was asked about the book that changed his life, he said, "The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins". Incidentally, the same book was a major influence in Henning Pauly's life and his journey through the vast lands of Darwinism.

Books by Dawkins include:

• The Selfish Gene
• The Extended Phenotype
• The Blind Watchmaker
• River Out Of Eden
• Climbing Mount Improbable
• Unweaving the Rainbow
• A Devil's Chaplain

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Unweaving the rainbow: the metaphor

His latest book, Unweaving the Rainbow, is less about evolution and more about the position of science in general in our culture. The title comes from Newton's discovery that the rainbow is not a mystical bridge to a pot of gold, but light split up into its elements. People blamed Newton for taking away the beauty of it by explaining the science behind it. Dawkins makes the point that understanding something and seeing it for what it really is does not diminish the experience, but makes it even more beautiful. Why can't the fact that white light contains the full spectrum of beautiful colors be amazing? Do we have to leave the world unexplained to appreciate it?

Douglas Adams also addressed the issue, he said: "I will take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day."

This is what this album is about. Understanding where we come from, who we are related to and how this vast, complex gene machine works does not make us less human or special. All it does is bring us closer to the world around us.

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The songs

1. Above the Grass - Part I
   This short track serves as an introduction to the album.
2. The Gene Machine
   What are the world and its inhabitants like from the gene's point of view? For a gene we are survival machines: machines who have to survive in order for the gene to survive them.
3. Spiders
   In Climbing Mount Improbable, Dawkins shows the evolution of spider webs and the spiders that build them. Most people don't like spiders, but once you start to understand them a little bit better one cannot deny their fascinating design.
4. River out of Eden
   This is a metaphor for the river of information that kept flowing through generations, from the first replicators on our planet to today. Just as the Amazon does not know that it will flow into the ocean, this river of genes does not know what it will turn into -- it just keeps on flowing.
5. Message from the Mountain
   Mount Improbable is a metaphor for highly evolved life-forms. You stand at the bottom of the mountain and look up. In front of you is a sheer unscalable cliff. There is no way one could reach to top of the mountain in one big leap. Once you walk around the mountain, you see many shallow platforms, each of which is very easy to climb -- and they lead right to the top.
6. Your Eyes
   How good is half an eye? This question is often asked by skeptics of evolution theory, and has been answered many times by many authors. This songs deals with the eye in the physical sense in its verses, but then the song shows what the eye means for us in modern society -- because the eye has become much more than just a useful organ. We use it to connect with each other.
7. La Mer
   Dawkins goes into great detail when he talks about shells. Their mathematics, their uses, their purpose and their development. One might think that reading about shells of ammonites is probably the most boring thing imaginable, but Dawkins succeeds in making it entertaining. He illustrates a very good point: of all possible forms evolution could lead to, only a very few are practical.
8. Nice Guys Finish First
   This song is about the iterated prisoners' dilemma game theory (The Selfish Gene). The game is modeled after a real life situation: two players are faced with a decision which might result in an advantage for them and a disadvantage for the other player. They also have the option of making a decision which might result in mutual advantage for both players. In all studies of this situation the result was the same: the mean strategies id not do as well as the nice ones...so...nice guys finish first.
9. Arms Races
   Also referred to as co-evolution: one species develops an advantage over their prey, and the prey retaliates by developing an advantage that counteract their predators' improvement. Both sides keep getting stronger. We humans do the same thing, but our weapons are artificial -- and we can react much faster than evolution does. We also use them against our own species.
10. Origins and Miracles
    If you put a monkey in front of a typewriter and let it bang on the keys, how likely would it be that it would write Shakespeare's Hamlet in its entirety by accident? Not likely at all. How about two monkeys...how about three. It would take an infinite number of monkeys to achieve this. The point is that randomness is only one factor in the evolutionary process. This is very often misunderstood. First comes a random change in DNA, then comes the test of this new combination. This essential testing is something often forgotten...natural and sexual selection.
11. Off the Ground
    How good is half a wing? This is another question often asked by skeptics of evolution. Here's a simple answer: If you are falling from a tree, half a wing is better than no wing at all!
12. Walking through Genetic Space
    Genetic space is the vast imaginary plain of all possible life-forms. Each one is connected to a mutation of itself. The plain stretches into infinity in every direction. Evolution is hard to understand and accept for most people because of its scale: so many possible variations, so much time for small changes to happen.
13. Cultural Genetics
    Dawkins gave birth to a new term which is now part of the Oxford English Dictionary: Meme. A meme is like a gene, but it is man-made. A recipe, for example, is a meme. If it is good, it will be passed on to the next generation. It will undergo mutation over time. Each mutation has to stand the test of time and survive to be passed on into the next generation. Poetry, books, songs...these are all memes. This album is a meme.
14. Bats
    The first topic covered in The Blind Watchmaker are bats. How did their echo location evolve? How do they see the world? How did we discover radar? Did we go through the same stages of evolution in the development of this technology as the bats did?
15. Above the Grass - Part II
    This song is the one not based on a chapter of a Richard Dawkins book directly, but it is related. In the beginning of The Extended Phenotype, Dawkins explains that what he is trying to do is to give the reader a perspective: a different view of the same object. He mentions the Necker Cube, the famous optical illusion where a two-dimensional drawing of a cube changes after you look at it for a while. The drawing stays the same, but the way you see it changes. That is what thinking about evolution does: it changes your perspective of the things you see around you. The title for this piece comes from the Douglas Adams book Life, the Universe and Everything, in which a race of people live on the planet Krikkit. This planet is surrounded by a dust cloud, so its inhabitants can not see the stars and therefore are not aware of anything but the planet they live on. They sing songs about walking above the grass instead of under the sky. "The sky" simply is something they never thought about. The day a spaceship crashes on their planet, their world is literally turned upside-down. They build a spaceship of their own to find out where this thing might have come from. Once they penetrate the dust cloud and see the universe in front of them, they turn back, singing songs about destroying the whole universe, because in their minds there is no place for it. They simply have not accepted its existence -- they were not prepared for it. Evolutionary concepts help you to tilt your head just a little bit and see the world from another angle.

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The musical concept

Composer Henning Pauly has worked in a wide variety of styles. Shortly before he started working on Frameshift, he wrote a film score -- and suddenly it clicked. Modern film music combines elements from a lot of different styles. They are a mix of metal, ambient, techno, orchestral, rock, pop, loop based music. The way these elements come together in a film score lends itself perfectly to the genre of progressive rock, so Henning decided to use this approach for Frameshift. He did not want to limit the music on this album to what is possible with a rock band lineup, but to what is possible with the tools a film composer has at his disposal. This didn't mean that he would forget about all the elements that make progressive rock what it is, he would simply take a slightly different approach to arranging it.

Knowing that James LaBrie would be singing the whole album, he wanted to offer this outstanding vocalist an opportunity to sing in ways he has not performed before. James is a huge Queen fan, and Henning frequently uses large vocal arrangements in his songs. The plan was simple: Leave a lot of space for vocals, make them the most important element on the album. So the songs were written with several a capella parts, and even some counterpoint passages, in the tradition of Gentle Giant and Spock's Beard, of which both Henning and James are big fans.

Because the album is about looking at a a familiar subject from a different perspective, Henning decided to bring in a second writer for some of the songs to step outside his normal way of writing and expand his options.

He invited Nik Guadagnoli to join him on some of the songs to lend him his experience and different point of view. The result is songs that Henning would not normally have written by himself, and the collaboration was fruitful. Nik is a very talented musician with a wide variety of skills. Henning and he connected immediately because both of them play touch style instruments: Henning plays Warr guitar an Nik plays the Chapman Stick. These instruments would find heavy use on "Unweaving the Rainbow".

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