visualculture

I created this track in a hotel on a business trip to Madison, WI in 2019. I brought my Arturia minibrute with me on the plane and set up a little workstation on the desk in the hotel room with my laptop and an audio interface. The title comes from the fact that the World Dairy Expo that year was being held across the street from my hotel.

Every synth sound in this track is from the Minibrute. The percussion samples are from Ableton. The pitched-down vocal sample is from a Kate Bush song.

When covid started in 2020, I moved back in with my parents for a few months and set up a little studio in a spare room in their basement. That's where I made this track.

The percussive bass synth in the first section was made by sequencing a Kermit Mark III using Ableton. I used the MIDI randomizer effect to generate lots of variations while recording, and then I picked the ones that sounded the best and sampled those for the track.

When it suddenly cuts to the second section where the percussion drops out, the randomized bass synth continues and a melody played on a Casio CTK-558 comes in. (Side note: I really like the sound of this little keyboard and plan to use it a lot more in the future.)

The rest of the track develops this melody using layered lines played on an Intellijel Atlantis. It winds down and then closes out with an ambient texture.

This one also started as a 2020 basement track, and I finished it up in 2021 in my new place after I moved out. The bass synth during the first section is an Arturia Minubrute and the percussion is a Roland TR-8. The other synth parts are a Casio CZ-3000. In the second half, the bass synth is a VST version of the Ensoniq SQ80 (the SQ8L), the shimmering chords are the Casio CZ-3000, and the other synth parts are the Casio CTK-558.

The origin of this track was when C!erra My$t asked me to make a track for a release for his Dream Soft 64 side project. He made all of his tracks on it using N64 sound fonts, so that's how I made this one. The soundfonts I used were from the N64 game Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon and I tried to write in a style similar to the music in the game, which is broadly a combination of traditional Japanese instrumentation and melodies but with a funk feel to it.

The original release can be found here. I wrote this in about 2 weeks in early 2020.

Like tracks 2 and 3, this one also started as a 2020 basement track which I finished later in 2021. In the first section, the percussion is the Roland TR-8 and the synth is the Arturia Minibrute. The bassline that comes in is a x0xb0x (a kit-built Roland TB-303 clone). After the tempo speeds up and it changes to the new section, the percussion is sampled from one of the many patterns on the Casio CTK-558. This one sounded so goofy and awkward I had to use it. The chords and synth melodies in the final section are the Casio CZ-3000. The bassline is the Kermit Mark III, again sequenced semi-randomly with Ableton.

I think out of all the tracks on this album, this one shows my Aphex Twin influence the most :p

Like track 4, this track also uses Mystical Ninja for inspiration. Instead of using soundfonts, though, I sampled music from the game and added my own synth parts and percussion samples to it. The game samples are also cut up and woven into new melodies.

The synthesizer I used here was the Casio CZ-3000. This is also one of the earlier tracks I made, finishing it in 2018.

The last of the four 2020 basement tracks, CHKDSK is the first track I made using the 16-step sequencer that I designed during the summer of 2020. Rather than sequencing notes, it's actually sequencing the cutoff frequency of the filter on the bassline synth here. The notes were sequenced in Ableton and sent to a module in my Eurorack, and the MIDI clock generated by ableton was controlling the clock of my sequencer to synronize it with the notes. My sequencer also generates automatic patterns that are divisions of the clock, and I was using those to trigger other drum modules in my eurorack that are clones of the Roland TR-808.

The chaotic ending of this track was created with the hold function that I built into my sequencer. When hold is enabled, the sequencer stops on the current step but keeps repeating it in time with the clock. Since the notes are coming into the rack from Ableton, they keep going, but the drums and filter cutoff are affected by the hold function. I was enabling it and disabling it manually during this section. There is also heavy overdrive and compression used on this track because I wanted it to have an especially dirty feel.

I made this track around the same time I made track 4, Persimmon Castle, and it also uses N64 soundfonts. I imagine this song would be played during a cutscene of a funeral in a forest in an N64 game. The title is a pun that illustrates this: 森 means forest, and in Japanese is pronounced "mori" (making the title "memento mori").

The track is written in a Baroque 4-voice chorale style and I tried to stick to Bach-style voice-leading conventions.

This was from a period of time in 2018 where I was writing music on paper before recording it. I think it resulted in 4-5 tracks and this was my favorite of the set, so I included it on this album. I may post the other ones at some point.

Here is a photo of the document I wrote out for this track. The right page defines the content of each musical block of the track. The left page defines how the blocks are put together to form the whole track. The segments in red ink are blocks that involve tonal content (synths) and the segments in blue ink are blocks that involve percussive content.

The bass synth in this track is the x0xb0x, the other synth parts are a Korg Minilogue, and the percussion is a Roland TR-606. The bass and percussion were sequenced on their respective devices and recorded onto a cassette via a 4-track recorder. Then I recorded the other synth parts, playing them by hand onto another track on the 4-track. Finally I recorded the vocals on top of everything. This is the only DAW-less track on the album. The lyrics deal with modern technology's encroachment on beauty.

I actually first recorded this track around 2014-2015, but was never quite happy with it and never found a place for it. Sometime around 2021 I revisited it. The original Ableton file wasn't readily accessible because it was on an older computer, so the edits I made to it during this time were to the wav file itself. I sped up the tempo slightly, added some additional percussion elements, and ran it through another compressor to make everything breathe a little bit. Not an ideal workflow, but I like the slightly dirty and unrefined sound that resulted from it.

The bass synth in this track is an Arturia Minibrute, the other synth parts are a Korg Minilogue, and the percussion is mostly a Roland TR-8 with a few samples added. The lyrics deal with noble self-sacrifice and its glorification.