Music

This is my rearrangement remix of Subbubbling, which I crunched out a few weeks ago to submit to Music for Sleep. It has since been released as part of the compilation.

I wondered if I'd like it with fresh ears, and it turned out I did not. So, here is a cut that I think leads better and has levels that are more balanced. (Cutting two tracks did half the work.)

It's based on a field recording of a rainy day in Bijilo in Gambia by Michael Lilley. I added a trombone part (which is not recognizable as such because I chopped it up with Graphback).

This is Moving Walkways. It's a tribute to moving walkways throughout the United States and all over the world.

Here is The Orb, Ascending. No one said ascending was going to be easy. (There's a lot of low humming in this, so it may be hard to hear without headphones or with computer speakers.)

This is Imagined Scandinavian Dance. I thought this sounded interesting, so I recorded it on my phone, then recorded backing chords. I thought maybe I'd develop and use the riff later.

Arbitrarily, though, I decided I should keep some things spontaneous and picked this to fill that spontaneity quota! So, instead, I retrofitted a drum beat to it, and here it is.

I have no idea what Scandinavian dances sounds like, but I thought this sounded vaguely like Elegy-era Amorphis and what I remember of Romanian Folk Dances by Bartok.

This is Scrambled Plea. It turned out less musical than I would have liked, which was a known risk, but I think it's interesting for now. I wrote Scramble to make this.

This is Ghost Banquet Speech and Award Presentation. It's a dungeon synth piece mostly, except that it has a beat.

I started it around Christmas of last year or earlier, and came up with most of it in a a day. Then, I got stuck around January trying lots of solos.

I've been stuck on two other pieces for a while, so I came back to this yesterday and edited the solo a little, and I thought it was good that way. But again, it's probably mostly my perception changing over time.

This is Middlesex Fells. The song, not the forest preserve. It was made using a two-second sample I recorded there last weekend, though, along with a version of my graph-controlled granular synth tool that I added a delay feedback loop to. (This is what that ugly character looks like.) This is my response to the Junto prompt to use a field recording and feedback.

This piece is called In a Bomb. I wrote a crude granular synthesizer (a thing that plays piece of samples, usually fast enough that it doesn't sound like the sample anymore). It lets you draw graphs that control how many pitches to play, where in the sample it should start, how much of the sample should be played, and how long each event should last. So, all of these things change over time in the piece.

It's a response to the "surf" "music" Junto prompt. I originally tried to use water drop samples to see if I could make something that sounded like the surf. (It usually sounded like peeing.)

What I ended up with gets very noisy, but in a way that I think isn't totally off-putting.

Here's Pressures Accumulating, a piece for (synth) strings, trumpet, and drums. The solo was put together partly via guitar and via this script. I think it turned out fairly heavy for a string piece.

So, this is Grow Together with the Miasma. I put it together for this Junto challenge about evolution.

I worked on the web app that generated it to and from the train to New York and felt like I was almost done when I sat down to "finish" it Monday night. Very very predictably, I was not almost done when I sat down to finish it Monday night. I ended up finishing it at 5 AM.

It is a fork of Flooding, hacked up to 1) make a stack of five riffs with random choices from a 15-limit tonality diamond and play them twice 2) see how close any of the resulting dyads are to ratios in the 5-limit tonality diamond (which generally sounds more consonant) 3) cull the notes that aren't close "enough" 4) play the resulting stack of riffs twice 5) fill in the holes in the riffs with random choices from the 11-limit diamond. Then, it repeats 2-5 as many times as you like.

I never got it sound the way I hoped it would. The problem is a core of pitches that fit the 5-limit diamond gets established and very rarely gets displaced. So, every 12 bars a bunch of random notes shows up and mostly get bounced. Which is more or less how evolution works, but I hoped it would sound more exciting.

Here is some Sunday comfysynth for you. It is called Rabbit's Shop.

I had to give up on some things to keep it comfy! The NES-style RPG dialogue wouldn't fit in, nor would the harp glissando. I also had tempo changes that sounded good but would probably prevent people from moving this to the background part of their listening.

Here is Landing. Parts of it were originally made for a client, but they found it to be too intense for their needs. Since it no longer needs to be a chill podcast intro, I have added a couple of middle sections and made it a touch more intense.

This is Eighth Gear, for which I brought back my robots. This time, I directed them to change keys every four bars for a total of eleven key changes per this Junto challenge. This time, there's two guitar parts and bass, along with a concrete theme that I had them come back to instead letting things be all random choices within patterns.

This is The Uneven Staircase, which I did for the Disquiet Junto challenge #567. It requires you to write a piece that uses 5/8, 6/8, and 7/8 time. I did that by writing a riff that has a 5, 6, and a 7 part glued together so that it has a total of 18 eighth notes worth of time. So, the drums just play in 3/4 most of the time (9 quarter notes or 18 eighth notes can fit in three bars of 3/4.)

I also did the Spinal Tap Big Bottom thing where I just have all basses and no guitars. (I tried way too hard to wring out a guitar part last night because I forgot a lesson which otherwise saves me a lot of time: I can't come up with riffs on the spot by jamming. I can come up with stuff on the spot by sequencing sometimes, though.)

The whole thing ended up too normal so I have a section in which some of the parts change tempo, but some don't.

There's a lot I wish was better here, but I still find the ending funny.

I fit one more loop into Looptober: A Ninja Weighing the Pros and the Cons, which you can loop as many times as you want. I'm pretty sure that it is in some part derived from Ninja Gaiden, which is hard-lodged into my brain. You can listen to it if you are a ninja that has some hard decisions ahead of them of if you just want to think about a ninja in that situation.

This Looptober loop is called Outcropping of Death. Wonky end-of-day chugging and chaotic drums.

Today's Looptober loop is Preparing Lapsang Souchong. It has a sample I recorded while making tea.

This is Stockholm, which I made for Looptober. It's actually three 3.5 second loops repeated 25 times. There's two dryer parts and one bass part. It's one of those attempts to make the irregular seem regular through repetition.

Here is Tower Climb, a song that may help you if you are ascending platforms while beating up foes. This is one of those songs whose first 70% comes together in couple hours, then the rest comes together in three weeks. Part of it was that I feel that a solo like the organ solo in that song must go a Certain Way, but I don't play enough solos to know exactly how to describe that to myself, so there were a lot of iterations of it.

While trying to come up with the solo for another song, I made this commercial jingle for a Cool Breeze Product.

This is Howling, a piece I made accidentally when I messed up an app that I'm using to make another piece. I somehow made all of the event lengths way too long, but it sounds great somehow, though very different from what I intended.

This is my summer jam, Pyroclasmic Slooch. I'm not an avid listener of summer jams, so I probably don't have all the hallmarks of the summer jam. This more like "what I imagine summer jams" are like. (Greatly informed by Strong Bad, now that I think about it.)

I had more robot voice in it before, but the guy pointed out it didn't really fit in.

For the "minimal viable music" Disquiet Junto prompt, I made Hull Ruptures, which is a piece built entirely from a recording I made of popcorn popping.