Music

Barbaric Silence is my entry for the Disquiet Junto Isolation Room challenge. It asks you to take something you made in the past, isolate one aspect of it, then build something new around it.

I picked a primitive black metal song I made twenty years ago and used just the guitars. I tried to make something out of it with horns and strings, but it just wouldn’t mesh, and I only had a couple of hours a night out on vacation, so I had to pivot to something simpler.

I decided to make it even more barbaric. I added some tense strings and also several copies of the original guitar parts, manually creating delay. The delay creates the dominant rhythm for most of the song, but fades back to the original toward the end.

While I was at it, I made a more natural mix that's kind of how I imagined I actually wanted it back in the day. It's just guitar and drums, but the drums are more Bathory-like than in the original. Back then, I had to use 808-style drum samples, which sound techno-ish.

For completion's sake, here is the original 1998 version. You already heard about the drums. The vocals are awkward, and the lyrics are dumb. At that time, I felt I had to have funny lyrics that my friends would like. Otherwise, why would anyone listen to my music?

My 1998 self has a point, but things you make just because you think they're good make for better future listening. To flip flop back again, though, it's better to make dumb joke songs than to not any songs at all, and that was all I was willing to make back then because of weird ideas I had about how perfect and how trailblazingly original music had to be.