October has Inktober, where artists are challenged to draw one ink drawing every day throughout the month.
November, therefore, has Novembeat, making one short song every day.
This is the second such album I have done, and I feel that it is some of the best music I’ve ever made. It also follows the emotional arc of the month, due to some rather unexpected setbacks.
Think of it as a musical diary spanning one month in a not so great year.
I really liked Stranger Things, or at least its soundtrack.
It was cold out and my leg was hurting and I had a cat sleeping on my lap, so I decided to have some fun with a sonic soundscape that captured the feelings of winter cuddles.
The dark days were getting to me.
The depression was getting to me.
On Black Friday weekend I upgraded to KOMPLETE 11 and decided to play around with some of its presets.
This came out.
I started composing a tango song but it just wasn’t coming out very well. So I scrapped it and worked on a second take for the day.
The pain from the previous four days turned out to be due to a clot in my leg that was growing rapidly, and part of it broke off and went to my lungs, giving me a pulmonary embolism. Because of the clot I had to cease taking my HRT and start taking blood thinners. I was told I may not be able to get back on HRT ever again.
I was happy to still be alive but not looking forward to the impending hormonal crisis.
But I am still around, and defiantly making music.
My leg was hurting even more and my other cat wanted to get in on the action, so she wrote a song with me.
At this point I was just completely falling apart, due to basically going through menopause and feeling worthless, useless, and futureless.
I had been without hormones for a week and a half and my emotions were all over the place. Everything would set me off and I would cry and I was not in a good spot. So I wrote this thing to capture my feelings.
Without HRT I was losing track of time and my mental state, and every day was running into each other. I wanted to be kind to myself after my near-death experience but I also wanted to be productive. And everything felt the same as everything else.
I attempted to self-medicate my ongoing depression with some THC.
I may have used a little too much.
Hello, the Internet Hello, the Internet Hello, the Internet Hello, the Internet
I had trouble sleeping due to the increasing pain, and this music wafted into my consciousness.
I was spending way, way too much time reading Twitter instead of doing anything productive. The senseless repetitive noise of everything around me was more than I could take.
This is a song about a pawn shop bunny
going around as if it’s made of money
trying to buy some milk and honey
but it doesn’t quite care.
Just a little introduction to the album.
I woke up barely able to breathe, and went to the hospital.
It was an embolism, from a DVT in my leg that threw off a clot.
I composed this track from a hospital bed, using GarageBand on my phone.
A little scrap I had lying around, which was begging for a fuller orchestration.
It seems like every album of mine these days needs at least one semi-algorithmically-generated weird-time-signature experimentation.
And Werner just wouldn’t shut the heck up while I made it so I decided to record him meowing.
Oh and there’s scissors for percussion.
The first song I wrote on this day was not very good, but then I was noodling around and came up with this better song. It made me think of a wood elf in a forest grove or something.
The lack of hormones was really starting to get to me. Constantly tired, constantly struggling to wake up in the morning, but this music project kept me going.
Shout out to the Cupcake Royale in Capitol Hill, Seattle, WA, and the restroom cooling fan that was making this really cool grinding noise.
(It has since been fixed.)
This day didn’t go so well, so I was looking forward to a better one.
feeling like drowning, no escape
Met up with some friends at a coffee shop, took up way too much table space while I composed this attempt at making something Lemon Jelly-esque.
I was feeling aimless from my recent health issues, and felt like nothing was going anywhere and nothing was worth doing anymore.
I decided to make some disorganized fun.
My leg was still hurting. Really, really bad. And I was starting to have a pain in my shoulder as well. The pain was getting to be unbearable. So I wrote this track that captured the agony I was in.
Just a little tune that popped into my head that morning.
Ga ga dabba gagabagada baga Da ba baga dadabagada bada Ba ba bada bagagabada baga Ya ba bada yabadabada baga Ba ba baga dababadaba bada Bum ba bada bagagabada bada
Bum bum bum, ba Bum bum bum, ba Bum bum bum, ba Bum bum bum, ba Dum ba bum, ba Dum ba bum, ba Dum bum bum, ba Dum bum bum
I took a little trip down to my platonic cuddle-buddy’s home and I composed this while lying on his lap. It was nice.
Back in the early days of Song Fight! there was an occasional contributor who entered under the name Mouth Reliant. I felt like doing a tribute to his style for some reason.
I didn’t have the energy to clean my home but I made a piano-and-cello tune to help me clean myself, at least.
Pachelbel’s Canon is the bane of every cellist’s existence.
Inspired by the name of the previous track, I decided to go on a spelling spree.
The notes of the musical scale can spell words.
Not very many, though.
dead cabbage dead cabbage dead-ead, dea bae d dead (dead) cabbage dead-ead, ea bae d dead cabbage dead cabbage dead
#CD #Novembeat #Soundtrack #Instrumental #Lyrical ]]>Throughout November 2016 I recorded one short song every day. Because why not.
I went downtown to buy me a stapler So I could put together a couple pieces of paper Office Depot was shutting down They had all the best deals in town For the low, low price of 27 bucks I got a bunch of stuff, who cares if it sucks Anyway I completed my task, it Is great they even let me keep the shopping basket
He actually said “proggy as fuck” but I didn’t want this song to get marked explicit on the streaming services.
For Global Game Jam 2016 I decided to spend all weekend making as much music and sound effects as I could. Here are the resulting musical tracks. Some of them are even kind of okay!
The pitch from the game’s creator:
Landlord Simulator is a game about being the landlord of an apartment. Every tenant is adamant about their particularities and rituals, and when they’re overly stressed about these obsessions not being fulfilled (e.g. neat freak seeing a mess, guy sees toilet paper roll facing in instead of out) they would go on a tantrum, break a bunch of things, and then leave. The tenant is then immediately replaced and your apartment rating drops a star.
Given an environment predisposed to chaos, I’d like a touch of irony with some very homely music. Almost to corporate muzak territory. This is a wonderful 3.5br/8ba to live in, after all.
Omnia sonat satanica Dum cantatur Latine Lucifer adduxerunt nobis lucem miseratiónum
(Everything sounds satanic when it is sung in Latin. Lucifer brought us the light.)
#GameJams #GlobalGameJam #OST #Instrumental #Lyrical ]]>This album represents a return to our roots as an electronica and experimental band. Not a permanent reversion, of course; just think of it as a vacation to the homeland.
It also is was slowly being turned into a series of video games, although that project is on indefinite hiatus.
Official music video at https://youtu.be/ybxZcpc_0EA
In my house In my house What is this person that I do not think I know Doing in my house
In my house In my house He must have snuck in through the bedroom door Living like a mouse
He says he is my husband I’ve never seen him before He knows everything about me I’ll have to show him the door
Not my spouse He’s not my spouse I think I would remember having brought him Into my house
It’s my house He’s in my house Why is this person laughing right at me Sitting in my house
So many pictures of us together The room is starting to blur He says he’s beginning to worry about me But I just can’t be sure I can’t be sure
In my house In my house What is this person that I do not know Doing in my house
Originally composed for Project Imperative, which was meant to be a multiplayer Pong in which the rules change every 20 seconds. This ended up not really happening during the original jam, but I revisited the idea when using it as the first track of the game album.
This song came to me in a dream about love and loss and growing up.
I didn’t know this song was about having undiagnosed ADHD when I wrote it, because it was not yet diagnosed.
I’ve been told this one’s super relatable, on that note.
Your head is in the cloud You don’t know who you are Try to do everything you can Spread yourself too far
Everything that you want to know How to come undone Boiling over, time to kill In the frozen sun
Everything that we used to know Has a zero sum Ice cubes in the goldfish bowl Where we’ve come undone
Nerves of tissue, lung of steel Sleep until we’re dead Warm the soul with antifreeze A frozen mind instead
1 2 4 5 10 20 25 50 100 125 250 500
hello, hello hello, hello hello, hello hello, hello hello, hello (hello) goodbye
two times two times five times five times five two times two times five times five times five two times two times five times five times five five times two times five times two times five
Official music video at https://youtu.be/JsYEAtGJ1YY
Originally composed for a game soundtrack.
#CD #GameJams #GlobalGameJam #OST #SongFight #Vinyl #Popular #Ambient #EDM #Ambient #Electronic #Electropop #Instrumental #Lyrical ]]>Oh god this album is old and terrible but I still have a soft spot for it.
It’s a collection of songs I made over the course of several years in the late 90s and which I finally released sometime in 2000 (although the exact date is lost to the sands of time). I did everything in Impulse Tracker, and many of the samples were made by interpreting non-sound files as raw PCM data and trimming out interesting-sounding parts of it. Some of the songs were also built from corrupted mod files in my collection. So, it’s arguably an early example of what is now known as “glitch art.”
I only really present it here as a historical artifact. I still listen to it from time to time though, mostly to remind myself of how far I’ve come.
Impulse Tracker doesn’t use traditional musical notation; instead, it divides measures up into fairly arbitrary time periods, and you can place notes within those time periods. For this one I set the time divisions to be 1/5, 1/25, and 1/125 of a measure, and composed a jazz song on it. Little did I know that this song bears an uncanny rhythmic resemblance to Take Five by Dave Brubeck! So everyone thinks I ripped him off, and also think I’m clueless about music theory (which I studied fairly intensely once upon a time) because there’s “no such thing as 5/5 time, surely you mean 5/4” and so on. Oh well, I still like it.
This was also an entry into hornet.org’s Music Contest 5 (the numerical connection being a coincidence). It came in 12th place in the intermediate division. For a while I had that awesome achievement listed on my resumé.
I had a pretty massive collection of .S3M (ScreamTracker 3 Module) files. One day they all got corrupted. Most of them were unrecoverable but one retained the pattern data, but lost all the sample data which was replaced with noise. It sounded cool enough that I kept it around, figuring I could do something neat with it. A few years later I decided to make a new song out of it.
This was an entry in hornet.org’s Music Contest 6. It didn’t do too well, but it was a pretty good representation of how I feel when I have a bunch of pent-up energy which I don’t know how to direct anywhere — I end up just going in circles.
This song is very personal to me. I started composing it without any speakers hooked up, just letting the music come without the sound getting in the way while my partner at the time slept beside me, and I liked it so much that I built up what I think is my best instrumental song ever around it.
One morning I woke up to discover that the power supply on my computer caught on fire (the fan had failed a while ago and I never got around to replacing it). That was just the beginning of what turned out to be a pretty bad day overall. So I wrote this song to cope. This is my second-favorite on the album, behind Softspoken.
For some reason, this is the song which most consistently gets high reviews when other people hear the album, when really I only put it in as filler. Go figure.
Impulse Tracker lets you use any arbitrary file as a sample, even if there’s no header information on it (it lets you specify how to interpret the data, as long as it’s some form of linear PCM). Although all of the songs on this album have at least one sample created by using a non-sound file as a sound in this way, for this song I used nothing else. The best one by far is the drum loop: COMMAND.COM from MS-DOS 6.22.
I originally wrote the first part of this song for an intro for a demogroup which never got off the ground. I think what it came to become a part of was much better anyway.
I needed some way to wrap up the album, so I wrote this quick little chiptune based on motifs from Softspoken and intro, with a few other elements from other songs thrown in.
This song came to me in a dream on a particularly humid morning.
For a while I was obsessed with the workings of the demi-unconscious mind, and was having regular hypnagogic hallucinations due to my somewhat irregular sleep patterns. For this song I stayed up late until I was started to have fatigue-induced hallucinations and then started recording whatever random crap came to mind, then in the morning I pieced it together into this mosaic.
Once upon a dream I heard you were right
I sang
Are as they aren’t
The children around me are turning to flowers The children around me are turning to flowers To flowers
Is that so
Once upon a dream I heard you were right
I sang
Are as they aren’t
t'nera yeht sa erA
gnas I
thgir erew uoy draeh I maerd a nopu ecnO
This was another song originally written for a demogroup intro (I forget which group now, but we had this idea that we were going to resuscitate demos for low-spec hardware). The song was originally written for the AdLib soundcard, though I later converted it to digital samples (but used Impulse Tracker’s resonant filters to try to maintain the analog sound).
#Abstract #Chiptune #Electronic #Instrumental #Lyrical ]]>