Written by Mike Hovancsek, David Badagnani and I for a 1999 performance by our group Pointless Orchestra for the WRUW Folk/International Festival.

Back in the day, we had access to these Indonesian (Balinese) metallophones called "gender" -with a hard "g" (I actually like to spell it "ggender" to help with pronunciation). They utilize a unique seven-tone tuning (called "slendro") which doesn't conform to western 12-tone tuning at all. So we built this tune around the ggender, some gongs, and a specially-tuned electric guitar.

Has a really catchy melody I think.

In arranging for piano, I really had to decide if I was going to commit to the slendro tuning. I decided to do the first two-thirds in western tuning and switch to slendro for the final part.

Which was quite a task!

Recording these digitally as I did, I had to essentially score the thing as an ensemble piece for seven pianos where each piano plays only one note - and export each part as a separate audio file. From there, I shifted the pitch of each part by the appropriate microtonal increment before combining them as one stereo track. A very messy process, but I got it done!

Pointless Orchestra usually developed its material for single use - performed once then never again - so we rarely invested much energy in titles. I remember a three-word working title for this tune where the first word was "Denpasar" - after the major city on the island of Bali. Can't for the life of me remember the other two words, hence "something something."

You can view the WRUW-FM 91.1 Cleveland performance from 1999 here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2R3Bb7pihk