My Music

I used to make a lot of electronic music when I was younger (under a different screen name), and I'd love to get back into it. In the meantime, I'm moving to host my full catalog here, and I'll probably republish an album every Monday.

Daybreak (2008)

The first album I made, purely with MIDI. It's unclear whether I started with a text-to-MIDI PHP site and graduated to Music MasterWorks (how I remember it), or whether I lost the MMW license after a hard drive wipe and had to switch to the PHP site (how I apparently wrote it down in high school). While I'm glad I eventually gained access to samples and effects, there's something to be said for pure MIDI as a study exercise for learning how to make good music with minimal tools. This is more of a historical artifact than a "must-listen", but if you have a little nostalgia for playing onestop.mid on Windows XP, you might enjoy this one.

Life is Like a Neutered Monkey (2009)

It feels weird to say this, but I made this album in high school, and the album title was a running gag with my friends about the non-anatomically correct monkey toy in the album cover. In fact, that paneled wall was the outside of one of the school buildings. A lot of this music is mixed poorly, because I was still pretty early in making music - I had a good instinct or two, but no good training.

Forward is the Great Password (2010)

This is where I started to really get into my groove. The album is named after a track that I was really proud of, but it was on a sensitive topic (it samples the movie Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), it examines the costs of fascism, and it blows out of the gate with "Can you understand what Hitler meant to us?"), so I never properly published Midnight Express. And I always regretted that, I always felt "I should publish that song, that was so important I named the whole album after it." So now I am, even though the only copy I have has some glitches from maxing out my CPU while recording. I was such a maximalist back then, or at least, I got carried away easily.

That's definitely not the only thing on this album I'm proud of. What if We had it Backwards is a musical palindrome, including reversed reverb. Template marked a milestone in my wacky sample percussion skills and my comfort with cranking up the resonance on my filters, which would later pay off in the moody atmospheric breakbeats of Catnip Aloe. It's probably one of the albums where I least masked the depression I was going through at the time, even down to some track names. Things got better. I didn't believe they would, but they did.

Victory for a Day (2011)

I was finally getting proper good at this music stuff, and made some of the music I'm most proud of, like Prime and Pebbles. I also made some of my most emotionally raw stuff, like I'll Be Fine and Important Things (also, Ideal Pictures was around this time but ended up on a different album). I don't regret making them, even if they're hard to listen to now and slightly embarrassing - art isn't content, it's therapy, which is why it's pointless to have bots make it for you. I was still burying my voice under layers and layers of filters to obscure the tone and lyrics, which is why I actually forgot - until listening to it again for this republish - that Bridge Over Nowhere is thematically about suicide, but in a way that intentionally snuck the theme past the audience.

This was also still the era where I was spending some time making prototype indie games. Coffee was the background track I made for my prototype of the game Oil, which used spring physics to simulate playing as a little blob of goo. I must have heard that track a hundred times while tweaking and testing that prototype!

No Merit (2015)

This was mostly a concept album based around computer science themes, and I never meant it to grow so big, or eventually encompass a few songs that were more lyrical and off theme - Prime ended up on VFAD but it belonged on No Merit. I think the concept is why this album has such a signature sound of bitcrush and distortion and grit. Lots of it is this catchy combo of happy-aggressive. When I want to show off my music, a lot of the time, this is the album I go to - my last complete one, spanning from 2011-2015, before going experimental in a failed attempt to save off a long burnout period.

As for the lyrical stuff, there's one set of falsetto vocals I cringe about (the first verse of Ideal Pictures), but overall I finally found some confidence in Beck-like monotones and spoken word, and wrote some of the best lyrics I ever have. It's probably the most I really let people hear me, and pain wasn't the only thing I had to say. Still, the back cover is pretty raw on purpose, and needs a bit of a content warning for being a mostly-uncensored monologue by someone suicidally depressed.

Outwards

Go outwards
In the silent, stinging night
And look up at the sky

Find the darkest patch you can
Even that patch is full of stars
Galaxies far, much older than us
And the sky is bright

Let the majesty wash through your hair
Across your skin
And down your spine
On the back of the wind

The grass is silver
and soft
and invisible to feet in sneakers

Things are temporary
We are things
We are temporary as wooden spoons

We know these things
Yet there is no greater terror than realizing them
And no greater serenity than accepting them

Go outwards

Sidewinder

It's a matter of trust
It's a matter of faith
It's a matter of fact
It's a matter of fate

And they'll tell you what you want to hear all day
They're just wired that way

The world's a harsh place
And I can't tell you how to live your life
Mother Nature loves you
Like all her other tasty children

So trust who you want
Trust who you need
And pick people up
When they bleed

Ideal Pictures

Ideal pictures
On the wall
I didn't paint them
but they keep the psychos out
Not a single brushstroke
Just cross and hatch
They look like motion
They feel like life

Ideal pictures
On the wall
Blame isn't useful
and I'm sick of it right now
Not a single moment
Just across the latch
I don't want your motion
I don't want your noise