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2022-08-15 (Week 2228): Staying the Course

I'm making progress with the sample refining, and I'm about halfway through constructing the foundation for the fourth track, so I should finish all the background layers by the end of this month.

The album's name is currently "As the Noise Builds." It may be too literal of a title or a little too on the nose. It's a metaphor for how things build to a climax, and once they're over, they fall away with only echoes remaining.

It feels like there have been a lot of endings over the past few years, and it's a lot harder to get invested in new beginnings. Even though I put out a demo-quality album at 21 (Week 1146) called "A New Beginning" and believed in new beginnings up until a few years ago, I no longer have that feeling as a 42-year-old.

I feel that you can't ever really leave behind what came before - you can only choose to pay attention to it/give it weight or not. That could be why it feels like life moves in cycles, though not uniform ones.

Uh-oh, I can tell I'm starting to philosophize too much - hopefully, I'll have enough progress to share some of it next time.

Until next week!

2022-08-08 (Week 2227): Up Winding Hills

In creating anew, I go through old ideas to see what still resonates, and I ran across this gem: "The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between."

That comes from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and while I don't listen to much of his music, I find it agreeable when I do. Some of my interest in using aleatoric elements in music comes from Mozart's musical dice game.

It led me to realize the way that I'm working is too constricted. So, I've added 20-second intervals of silence after each 2-minute and 40-second buildup. I'd post a sample, but I haven't added any delay or reverb to the tracks yet, so it'd be a wall of sound and then random stops. Yawn.

That also led to the realization that if I keep things with the same amount of layering in each of the three parts per track, it will also end up falling flat.

So, I'm layering double and triple the number of sounds for each piece's 2nd and 3rd parts. That will require combining the samples from the 1st part of each piece for the 2nd part and the 1st and 2nd parts for the 3rd part.

I'm going to change the octaves of the samples to keep things exciting, and I'm planning to add drums increasing in velocity using the automatic drum preset I created some weeks ago.

These plans likely sound like madness, but they will make sense once I get further along. I can also tell after this madness, I'll probably make an album sans drums and with sparse notes, something akin to Morton Feldman's work:

I had a plan to finish this album before the end of August, but with the extra layering involved, I think it'll be sometime early in the fall.

I want to be as productive as I was during the 2017-2021 stretch of eight ambient albums and fifty video game covers. Perhaps this slowdown and retooling is a necessary development in my musical process and stage of life growth, so I guess this is growing up.

Until next week!

2022-08-01 (Week 2226): Driving Through the Barrens

It recently occurred to me that I may be trying too hard to find ways to be unique with my sound.

Even though I'm many hours deep in refining samples and putting together an ambient noise album, it's leading further down the rabbit hole with noise blending and using aleatoric presets for drum patterns. It's also giving me pause.

I'm going down the road I've gone before with making plans for tens of albums and getting excited to do them, though realizing the amount of time to knock all of them out would be difficult to come by even if I wasn't employed full-time.

I had an idea late last week to make heavily layered chilled-out music - an intense level of calmness. I'd pick up a pennywhistle and record many improvised tracks directly into Reaper. After that, I'd drench them in delay, reverb, and whatever other effects sound cool - painting with sound, as it were.

The above idea sounds like the path of least resistance, in opposition to editing 500+ samples. I've already done a lot of work in editing and experimenting with these samples (as the earlier blog entries can attest), but maybe it's time to let them go and be spontaneous.

I often write of the path of least resistance, or Wu wei as it is more commonly known. The current path is not one of least resistance - it's one of throttling the listener with chaos and noise. Is that the best use of my time?

I try to be a calming or positive influence in life, so why is the music I'm producing so dark and chaotic? Could it be because the samples I collected were from a darker and more confusing time in life?

After thinking about it, sifting through all these samples separates the wheat from the chaff. I'm looking for the best sounds to fit in with the eventual pennywhistle barrage, so I must go through everything at every octave.

It's also a symbolic exploration of the past since these samples came from chaotic and confusing times. I'm trying to find the best parts of those times and move forward. I'm doing that with my music, and I'm doing that with my life.

Sometimes I think I have too much time on my hands.

Until next week!

2022-07-25 (Week 2225): Driving Faster Than I Can See

After more tinkering with the sounds I've developed recently, I hit a wall. I'm happy with the place I got to, but I was clueless about how to go further.

So, I changed lanes at a breakneck speed.

I took the 60 synth samples I created recently, let them play out in various octaves, and now I'm randomly piecing together noise tracks with the results.

I'm digging where it's going.

I have a plan for a six-track noise album with the tracks around 8+ minutes a piece, comprised of the samples that I created.

Taking that detour gives me a better idea of how to proceed with the first demo, but it's also an entirely separate project.

Instead of creating new project names, I'm going to do album series like Volume 1, Volume 2, etc.

I tried to do that with the Days Gone By, Volume 1 album, but there never was a Volume 2.

I'm okay with only one volume of that because there may only be one volume of other planned series - that means that the sound I sculpted ran its course with the first installment.

I don't imagine a second installment will happen with Days Gone By because I am no longer interested in reinterpreting old material. It feels like cover material since I'm no longer the person I was when I wrote those songs.

It also makes me wonder if songs have a certain shelf-life for the artists that create them, and to continue to revisit them can only be detrimental for the artist.

I know we as listeners want to hear the songs we love from years and years prior, but I guess that's why we pay the artists to perform them and why it is considered work.

To return to the original topic, I'm going to create an album series instead of doing new projects - it seems more straightforward and still accessible for the listener to differentiate between the varying sounds of each album series - the path of least resistance.

So, expect albums that sound like both of the above demos down the road. I'm working on the project for the 2nd one pretty fervently now, so it may come first.

That said, my creative whimsy can be highly erratic but takes me where I need to be (even if I don't appreciate it at the time).

Until next week!

2022-07-18 (Week 2224): 2000 on the Neocities Odometer and Progress

First off, thanks for the 2k views on Neocities! I'll keep up the work of talking about the new tunes I'm working on, posting old ones I've done, and linking tracks on Spotify that I'm digging. It's the path of least resistance, and it seems to be working for me, so I'll keep on keepin' on.

As for what I've been working on, a key piece fell into place last week. There's a band from the shoegaze realm called Seefeel that I'm familiar with, as I've had Filter Dub on playlists for a while:

However, I finally decided to dive deep and listen to the album that Filter Dub is on (Quique) and Seefeel's early/mid-90s work before they disbanded and reformed in 2011. It's the feel and sound I've sought. Bass and drum vamps beneath hypnotic loops - it's what I've been trying to do for many years, and they came out with these pieces before I even knew what I was doing with a guitar.

No matter, because now that I have a blueprint of what I'm trying to do, I can better aim for what I'm trying to accomplish musically.

Here's what I've got so far, and while it doesn't sound much of anything like Seefeel, it's definitely in the realm of what I'm trying to accomplish:

It's a little looser than what I'm going for, but I'll get it dialed in before too long. I probably need to tighten up the chords, so it's not an eight-bar repeating phrase and is something a little more immediate and hypnotic, but I haven't figured out how to make that work yet. I'm okay with the bass & drums, even if the drum sounds are weird and the beat feels random in 19/16. I'm getting there.

As far as the naming and projects go, I'm not going to worry about that until I get further along with creating things. I have elaborate plans but lack the time and desire to see them through. Again, following the path of least resistance. Things will unveil themselves as I go along. Such is life.

Until next week!

2022-07-11 (Week 2223): Dubbing the Engine

My anchor is changing, mainly because I forgot the actual anchor, which is bass. The previous anchor was bass-heavy, but it was a massive low-end blur.

Anyway, I came up with a dub-like bass tone, added my field recording samples to it, and something is starting to form.

A lot of this came about by listening to "Ghosts of Ladbroke Grove" by Killing Joke again after Absolute Dissent was released on Spotify a couple of weeks ago (it was originally released in 2010):

The bassline in the demo is from "Ghosts of Ladbroke Grove," so I'll be changing that, but I wanted to use a bassline I liked to build the tone.

As for this sound, it came about after canning at work on Thursday. My coworker had put on some early 90s rap, and all I could hear while we were canning was bass, hi-hat, and industrial machinery. Many of the field recording samples I have come from industrial machinery, so off I went.

I want to make dub bass presets for all my previous tracks that are applicable (and some old demos if I can find them), but I also need to make some new basslines for whatever the next album will be. I haven't given up on calling it "The Long Road Here," but I also think that could be the name for this blog.

I've developed a new project that this music would fit under, but I'm not pulling the trigger until I get my samples squared away. I've got the first round of drum samples figured out, and I'm sifting through my machinery synths, so I'll see where I stand once I get more writing done.

I want to dig my bass guitar out and start composing, but time will tell. I'm not there yet. Hopefully soon.

Until next week!

2022-07-04 (Week 2222): Key in the Ignition

Finally, something is starting to happen. I still have questions about where to go, but at least I have my anchor set.

The anchor uses the method of drum experiments I've posted demos of, which I've detuned, distorted, and turned into a wall of chaos.

I'm also working with a windchime sample in the higher frequencies, the same one I used for my "Everything in Chime" project that I tinkered with and put away in an earlier iteration of this website. I may unzip the work I did for that project again for more insight.

I feel the sample fits into the wall of noise, but I need to layer it with at least another sample in a similar frequency range. I'm thinking of a pennywhistle or a keyboard sample from some of my older works. There's a piece I'm thinking of titled "Pico Gets His Groove On in Port Town," which is a cover of the Port Town music from F-Zero for the SNES that fits the bill remarkably well:

I could also use some of the metal drum samples I recorded from this time (2005) in the current material because I think they would fit well with the proceedings.

I'm not quite to where I want to go yet, but with the noisewall anchor to work with, I have some sort of direction. I'm finding myself digging on a couple of tracks from an old favorite album lately, so that might be the direction I head:

I've visited this territory before with the title track from the "Dragons of Putrescence" album under my Cyanidic Rapture project from 2008, but I think I can do it more justice now with another 14 years under my belt:

I wonder if my musical directions over the years are a pastiche of everything I've listened to or an homage to which ones I'm connecting with the most at the time I make the albums. It's hard to say without more internal digging.

Until next week!

2022-06-27 (Week 2221): Back to the Station

I've realized that what I've worked on recently is a side project that will be under the umbrella of a new recording label. The label will be centered around Neocities and Bandcamp, as will most of the projects.

I'm still going to release music under my name, but it will stem from guitar arpeggios instead of abstract sounds. It'll be easier to make music in various time signatures with arpeggios as the base. Again, I'm following the path of least resistance.

I'm also unsure how much time I'll have to work on music with the summer ramping up. I've got responsibilities to be responsible for, places to go, and fun to have (outside of creating music). I like to imagine my music is of more import than it is, but looking at my Bandcamp and Spotify stats brings me back to earth. Still, I create.

The label will take some time, but it's what I want to do so that things will move along more naturally.

Until next week!

2022-06-20 (Week 2220): Tuning the Radio

I've managed to come up with something short over the past week, but I can already tell it's not quite right.

For one, it's way too short. I'm still looking for that long, more encompassing soundscape feel; at two minutes long, I come nowhere near it.

Also, a few of my samples are of two of my cats, and the "meow" you hear is from Kirk (aka Cookie), which is the large black & white cat below.

My other cat Barclay (aka Bark or Barkie), is the grey fuzzball, and he's sampled in the noise background (though that's harder to pick out).

I'm randomly selecting the samples for the pieces, but I think I need to be more discerning in the future. Random sampling is acceptable for the noise wall, but I need more drum-like samples for the actual beats.

I also need to leave less of the pieces up to random chance and have more of an idea for structure, which seems to be leaning towards no-wave/industrial metal/anti-music of bands like Swans (the earliest works), Godflesh (the longer pieces), and Halo (barely rhythmic noise walls).

I've thought about starting up a new project since this is a bit more industrial than my previous ambient works, but it's close enough to Shattered Memories that I think I can roll with it. Plus, I'm working towards following the path of least resistance and starting a new project adds more resistance.

There's also the thought of changing the album's name, but I'll keep working with what I have and see if "The Long Road Here" still works with the material. I have the alternate name ready, but I'll wait a bit before deciding.

Until next week!

2022-06-13 (Week 2219): Figuring Out Paths

I finished equalizing all of my drum samples at the end of last week, so I still haven't had time to do any more compositions.

That said, I'm noticing the drum samples sound like ones I created years ago for a couple of different projects: Forfallen and Concrete Mutant.

I've listened to many Godflesh songs lately, and I did Godflesh covers using the previously mentioned drum samples years ago, so I'll post those.

Here's a cover (and the original) of Godflesh's "Mothra" that I did in 2005 for my Forfallen project:

And here's a cover (and the original) of Godflesh's "Avalanche Master Song" that I did in 2007 for my Concrete Mutant project:

The drum samples I'm working on now aren't entirely as distorted as the ones above, but they could be. That's part of the issue I'm having.

I'm wondering how far to take the modification of the drum samples. I converted the original field recordings into beats (titled Round 0 -> Round 1), and I'm going to texture those beats with some distortion and mastering (titled Round 1 -> Round 2a).

I'm calling it 2a because I may want to remaster the beats differently for another project, which would be Round 1 -> Round 2b. I may also want to keep adding different effects with the drums from Round 2a, which would take them to Round 3a, or I may want to break off and do another project with those beats, which would make the new beats Round 3a1.

I'm likely getting ahead of myself with the labeling, but that's how my brain works. No wonder I haven't finished much of anything recently!

In any event, I'm going to get all the samples squared for Round 2a (which entails adding effects and saving each beat individually while mastering them to -6dB) and figure out where to go from there. I'm leaning towards either making pads out of the field recordings to use with the drum samples or adding electric guitar to the proceedings somehow. Or both.

I may add some other samples as well, so it looks like it's going to be another week of sample creation/editing. So it goes!

Until next week!

2022-06-06 (Week 2218): Refueling the Tank

Last week wasn't incredibly productive for creating new ideas, but I made many new drum samples.

They came from a collection of field recordings I've made over the past five years (most from 2016-17), and I reduced them into beat samples. I also found an ambient guitar demo in that collection which I'm pretty sure I made with an EBow, so I ran it through Audiobulb Ambient, and here it is:

It may have been better without the processing - shorter anyway.

As for how the composition is coming along, my most recent musical note description is "current Meshuggah structures combined with early Godflesh beats combined with Shadowscapes: Forgotten Industry ambiance & rhythms."

You might be familiar with Meshuggah or Godflesh, but likely not "Shadowscapes: Forgotten Industry." It's one of my tracks that I posted about in an earlier entry, but if you didn't catch it the first time, here it is:

Hopefully, next week I'll have something resembling a demo or two.

Until next week!

2022-05-30 (Week 2217): Exploring Detours

Last week I wrote about the dream I had of wanting to do a side label with a bunch of different abstract musical projects, so I decided to explore that trajectory.

The results were interesting enough, and they came from the idea of having randomized tom samples as I do in The Long Road Here demos.

I used five instances of Reason's Redrum to add 50 samples playing randomly at different speeds (10 drums each at 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, and 1/32 rate) using a Reason Refill of 50 affected hand drum samples by Doru Malaia. I made two different loops at 52 BPM, which you can hear below:

They have a good rhythm and create a solid background, but I feel like it will all sound similar if I keep going with that method.

Then I decided to run those loops through Audiobulb Ambient, and while I could post those samples, they sound like hundreds of metal balls propelling through a metal dumpster and bouncing incessantly off the sides of the said dumpster.

While that didn't work out so well, I remembered that I had a sample pack of 1160 keyboard samples, so I decided to run those through the above drum setup. I selected 50 of them randomly via an integer generator at Random.org, plugged them in, and here was the result:

It has a similar rhythmic feel to the hand drum demos but more bass and 8-bit chip sound. Running that through Audiobulb Ambient proved a little more interesting.

I got a little bit of that dumpster sound from before, but this feels more like the sound effects to a bullet hell game with the bass frequencies turned up to 10.

I'm not sure what the next step is with this, and I came up with some labor-intensive ideas that will take me further down the rabbit hole with this detour I'm on, or I could use this as a background with live instrumentation.

I had hoped to get The Long Road Here done by the end of summer, but who knows how long it will take with all these detours I'm exploring. It feels like I'm more interested in chasing sonic ideas than making music, but that's a more esoteric post for another time.

Also, come to say hello in the new Chat link above or fire off any questions you may have. Until next week!

2022-05-23 (Week 2216): Pit Stop

It's been a slow week work-wise, as there have been a lot of personal events that have taken precedence over creating music.

I did a little reworking of the track I posted last week, trying to anchor it around the A 9-tone scale, going to E 9-tone for the 2nd part, bringing it back to the A 9-tone, and then changing the arpeggio to D 9-tone instead of B/F# 9-tone:

It's becoming more apparent that this is three parts of three different songs. I'll likely leave the third part in its original key and change it to 7/4 since I keep hearing it that way in my head. I'm thinking about changing the 2nd part to 9/8 and using it in a different piece.

I've done more clerical work on the album this week, figuring out song titles and time signatures for each song and picking keys for about half of them. As I haven't decided on the keys yet, I'll leave them out, but here's the list and the time signatures:

01. Counting the Miles (4/4)
02. Hitting Roadblocks (9/8)
03. Shifting Gears (13/8)
04. No Turning Back (11/8)
05. Through the Barrens (5/4)
06. Roads Not Taken (7/4)
07. A Bridge to Better Times (6/4)
08. The Long Road Here (15/8)

It feels like this album is picking up where I left off with Enveloped and other albums before those, so maybe this is kind of an unofficial Days Gone By, Volume 2 (Volume 1 is here). There will be parts from old tracks and demos showing up in these pieces, but it will be mostly new material.

On the flip side of that, I had a dream last week where I ran a web label with many different noise projects that were all mine, similar to the old Hanson Records site.

I don't know what to do since I have a knack for putting together presets that dial into specific sonic parameters. I've had dozens of different projects over the years, sometimes having upwards of 10 or more at a time. Many of them never made it past the development stages, but if they did, I'd likely have something similar to the Hanson Records site.

I had a project earlier this year before The Long Road Here started coming together that was heavily inspired by the aesthetics of Sewerslvt, though that also never made it past the development stage. I have a long list of notes about how I wanted it to sound, so I need to figure out if I want to keep that going or just let it go.

Regardless, I know I need to complete The Long Road Here, and I'm not sure if it will be before I do anything else or if I will work on both concurrently. There are many things to decide in the warehouse this week, and everything is a process.

Until next week!

2022-05-16 (Week 2215): Five Quick Turns

I've made it somewhere with the first demo, which I've unofficially titled "Five Quick Turns" because it has five different parts. It could be called "Four Quick Turns" instead, though it's a working title.

I took the demo I posted from last week, slowed it down two BPM (from 56 to 54) to let it breathe more, and added four more sections.

The sections follow the Circle of Fifths (in 9-tone scales), going from A -> E -> B -> F# -> C#. The B -> F# section is a key change with an added layer, and the A and C# parts are the same but transposed up a major third.

When the piece was still at 56, I felt like the part in A 9-tone needed a string section layer added on the 3rd and 4th repetition, but dropping it to 54 BPM alleviated that desire. It's weird how that works.

I still need to add bass and piano parts to it - bass to match the rhythm guitar, and piano to make the parts with the guitar arpeggio and lead a bit more ominous, as well as help with the transition back to the transposed original part.

I've also had a couple more riffs pop into my head over the past week, and I got one of them mapped out:

I've got bass and piano on this one too, and this one either feels like it needs the lead over it, or it's building to something else. A middle section, I suppose.

I also conceptualized a piece that has a 5/4 base with a 6/4 arpeggio over top of it, but it feels like a middle part. I'll likely add the intro section from Apocalypse to it since it's a 5/4 part I've worked with for the past 20 years. You can hear the part in both of these tracks (from two of my different projects):

I'm not sure I'll be as productive as I have been these last few weeks because I've discovered a new game that's holding my interest called The Planet Crafter: Prologue, but I'll try to keep working on music before work and get some gaming in at night.

See you next week!

2022-05-09 (Week 2214): Building the Engine

Since starting to develop "The Long Road Here," my process for composing pieces changed at least three or four times, so it's more like "building and re-building the engine."

When I started this album project, the first track was "Surveying the Map." I made three demos of two tracks each - all of which have the same background track:

They all have a feel of pieces I've created before - they remind me the most of the Altered Sun era. I prefer the first variation the most, but it's a moot point because things have evolved since then.

I've continued with similar sound samples to those in the above tracks, but instead of running the drums and keys/vibraphone through Audiobulb Ambient, I've left them unaltered.

The tom samples are randomized to create that moving and tribal feel that I love in tracks like Sepultura's "Territory" or Neurosis's "Through Silver in Blood" (or "Cleanse" if you want to go into a deep cut).

I added distortion to the 9-tone chords to emulate the heavy guitars I plan to record in their stead (or in addition to - I haven't decided yet).

I want to combine most of the things I have a musical interest in with this album. Things like aleatoric/generative music, 9-tone scales, and the use of Audiobulb Ambient to create abstract sound tapestries. I also want slow and heavy metal guitars, guitar arpeggios, and sampling. It would be nice to get just intonation in there, but I don't think it's feasible for this album. Perhaps for the next one.

That's all I've got for this week. See you next week!

2022-05-02 (Week 2213): Prologue

The last couple of years were somewhat chaotic for one big reason and many smaller ones. During this time, my creative output felt very scattered.

I completed my Links to the Past project at the end of April last year, but even that began to feel uninspired and like I was only trying to get to fifty pieces.

My original goal was to complete one piece a week for a year, and including the Shattered Memories album, I managed that goal and kept going for an extra ten weeks.

Since finishing that string of pieces, I haven't had any cohesive ideas until a little over a month ago.

After diving deep into the Devin Townsend Podcast and listening to most of the episodes multiple times to glean information, I began to carry a pocket-sized notebook around with me to jot down creative ideas.

It took a couple of months for cohesive ideas to form, but they came flooding in once they started. I have the title locked in (see above), the artwork is in a good place, and I'm nearing completion on how exactly I want to approach this album.

I haven't fully decided whether it will be ambient with drums or more structured. Considering what Shattered Memories comprises, it will likely be the former.

I also want to give the ambient pieces more structure, so it will likely be more loop-based. It might be somewhat akin to my Shadowscapes: Forgotten Industry track from late 2016 but more abstract. I won't know until I get further into the creative process.

In any event, I plan to write an update every Monday to talk about the process of "The Long Road Here" or things that happened on the long road here (thus the title). I'm still trying to figure out my weekly schedule after going from two part-time jobs to one full-time job, but I've settled on Monday updates.

See you next week!