As is tradition I tried to record one short song every day in November. I didn’t get every day this year and some of the tracks really sucked but a lot of them were a lot higher-effort than usual for Novembeat so I’m satisfied enough I guess.
binaural microphone experiment
I don’t know what I’m saying But I’ll say it to you
I don’t know what I’m saying But I’ll say it to you
I don’t know what I’m saying But I’ll say it to you
I don’t know what I’m saying But I’ll say it to you
I don’t know what I’m saying But I’ll say it to you
I don’t know what I’m saying But I’ll say it to you
I don’t know what I’m saying But I’ll say it to you
I don’t know what I’m saying But I’ll say it to you
The Song Fight! version of Lumetri
try me you want to fall to sleep try me i’m better than counting sheep
try me you’ll finally rest at last try me don’t think about the past
try me it’s time to tuck you in try me you’ll be asleep again
what it says on the tin
smooshing keys until something interesting comes out
I needed a new outgoing voicemail message
[dial tone] [DTMF tones spelling out NOVEMBEAT#]
I can’t take your call right now Or I’m not picking up anyhow I will try to get back to you If you leave a message at the beep
I can’t take your call right now Or I’m not picking up anyhow I will try to get back to you If you leave a message at the beep
I can’t take your call right now Or I’m not picking up anyhow I will try to get back to you If you leave a message at the beep But I’d rather text
A song I wrote while waiting for the bus
it’s a bit long innit
an ode to what keeps me functional
i don’t know what i’m doing
this is problematic and appropriative
more garage than garage
like something from a vidya game
It all goes downhill from here
I don’t know what I’m doing But I’ll do it to you
images of childhood
A song done to celebrate the birthday of my friend Heather “moboid” Kelley.
Specific works referenced:
What’s going on there is nothing to do Everything I have makes me think of you What’s on the TV please give me a clue Maybe I’ll try to find something that’s new So I try to play a game But they’re all just all the same
Throw me some blocks flying through outer space Wearing a helmet that’s strapped to my face Something artistic, something with grace Something experimental that takes place In a world I call my own Makes me feel at home
I think that I’ve played that game I think that I’ve played that game
I think that I’ve played that game I think that I’ve played that game
Experiment with all the feelings inside Help me to find something i can provide Give me ideas, try not to hide from the Animals concrete the organs implied (I wanna pet the rabbit) (please help me pet the rabbit)
Look around corners that no-one could see Making a difference quite expressively Craving rapport as we drift to the sea What are we saying, let’s talk about me, ‘cause I’m Valid and I’m proud Quiet scream out loud
I think that I’ve played that game I think that I’ve played that game
I think that I’ve played that game I think that I’ve played that game
Falling down through space Make friends with a place Keeping a straight face Save the human race
I think that I’ve played that game I think that I’ve played that game
I think that I’ve played that game I think that I’ve played that game
I think that I’ll play that game I think that I’ll play that game
I think that I’ll make a game I think that I’ll make a game
Sort of a fitting conclusion to the month I guess
another video game soundtrack in my head
#Novembeat #SongFight #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.
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 ]]>