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.
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 ]]>