Sorry about the aural overload today. I’m digging into the archives for other reasons and realizing that some of this is in only one place without backups. I’ll start saving it elsewhere and spare you the additional overload, but I stumbled on this and thought it was interesting in terms of quaintness.

First, this was recorded back in 1992 or 1993 as an all-nighter impromptu music writing session. Mike, former lead singer/drummer for the goth band I was in back in 1987-1989 came over with a top of the line Korg (at the time) synth/sequencer one evening without warning. I had planned to just hang, maybe watch a movie, throw in the original Sonic the Hedgehog on the Genesis — but I hadn’t planned on writing music. As the former bass player for our previous act, he had me tap out some bass line on the keyboard with the clicker to give me tempo to show me how we could sequence it and stack the bars. Then, he added drums, following a similar routine.

triptych ~ quandry::umbrage::ascension is another tune from the same period as the last piece. Also sequenced using Sony Acid, it used more of the bundled loops and less found sounds than what I shared from earlier, but I still did my slicing/dicing/modification bit with the loops to try and make them my own, including pitch changes and effects. The inspiration came from Delerium during the Spheres era (space music inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, with samples of HAL in a few songs) and by Synæsthesia’s Desideratum album. I treat them as separate bands, but the two are just different projects by Bill Leeb and Rhys Fulber, who also went by about eight other monikers over the years (Front Line Assembly being another).

I was way into these kinds of ambient artists at the time.

As you can probably tell by the name of the song, it is a three-part piece — a three-panel song. For each section, I attempted to use at least a few melodies and instruments from the others to give it a sense of continuity.

• Quandry is intentionally, airy and disjointed, meant to elicit confusion. What am I seeing? Why does something seem off? Why do I feel outside of events?
• Umbrage is meant to exhibit anger at the discovery of betrayal. The things seen in Quandry were not imagined, and there is a reactionary rage. If I were to redo this, I think I’d add the sound of smashing bottles as percussive elements. In fact, I think I tried that, but I couldn’t find any satisfactory samples to use.
• Ascension is overcoming the anger and confusion, acceptance of things as they are, rising above, moving on. Vocals are modified bundled loops, again: sliced, modified, reorganized, and blended to get what I hoped was a personalized sound.

It was loosely inspired by the divorce of my first marriage (ten years earlier). But I was also at the beginnings of my worst peak with alcoholism, so it is hard to recall the exact motives. Essentially, was putting away a six-pack of strong ale a night, at least (that would be a “sober night”). And that wasn’t even close to how much I drank at my peak. Yeah… details are a bit fuzzy.

Another one of those “whole five CDs sold”. Probably with good reason, although I didn’t do much to promote the CD.

Remember CDs?

Haŋblečeya is a song I wrote when I should have been studying for my chemistry finals. It was fueled by copious amounts of alcohol when I was not in school to cope with the demands of my University’s chemistry department, which were not geared towards “non-traditional” students holding down a full-time job, already past his 20-somethings, had an internship with a crime lab, and trying to just get by financially.

I had picked up one of the early DAWs that wasn’t too demanding on PCs (Cakewalk made my middling laptop melt and FrootyLoops was still an Apple thing). Sony had put out a DAW called Acid that was more for loop artists than it was for recording (it was always a challenge to get it to record anything live without… you guessed it… melting the laptop). But it was portable and I would sit in the University library with my headset and pretend to be studying for chemistry finals when I was really doing things to samples and loops than hadn’t really been intended to be done in Acid. The tools were there, but there was no instruction on how to use them in the way that I used them (they were tools intended for the live recordings, not for the loops). So, I turned loops into a makeshift virtual instrument by slicing and dicing individual notes out of sample sequences and pitch-adjusting them to be in key, as well as changing the order of notes in the samples to get the desired effect. And I’d steal from samples all over the place to fill in the sound. I don’t think anything unadultered would be recognizable as a song anyone would know (it’s hazy 16 years later), but it is possible that I stole notes here and there. The vocals are a combination of publicly available chants in a number of traditions (call to prayers and drum dancing at pow wows, mostly). I couldn’t source them to save my life now, so forgive me.

Anyway, I think I sold a whole 5 copies of the CD back in the day. It’s past time to assume no other sales will be forthcoming.