Recent Music

While I'm going to be posting a lot of older material soon, I thought I'd kick things off with three recent tracks I put together in Garageband.

First off "Courting the Fire Dancer"



One of the major elements of iMovie I've been playing around with a lot lately is the green screen function, I'm slowly getting the hang of it but in older videos you'll see I used to be a lot more clumsy. Still I'm interested more in using it in ways it wasn't really intended to be used, creating digital collages. At this point there still isn't a great deal of method to the madness, just aesthetic experiments with color and texture.

Then there is the footage... yeah, I made a little tinfoil man and sat him in my bathtub, soaked him in 90% rubbing alcohol, and then lit him on fire. What about it?

Ahem. As for the tune itself, it has a somewhat grunge flavor too it. I had been been repainting my mother's bedroom listening to the Boys for Pele album by Tori Amos not long before I arrange this. The piece feels very gender conflicted, full of bad boys and fiery girls, and a little bit jazzy despite itself.

Next up: "Into the City, It Cometh at Night"




This is a much more industrial piece with an amusing story behind its conception. You see, in a future post I plan to share an ambient album I put together as a Christmas gift. I posted the whole album on YouTube, and a friend of mine decided he wanted to act completely insane, posting a rather lengthy series of comments, chronicling his downward spiral into insanity.

We have a... peculiar friendship.

Anyway, among the ramblings he mentioned a screamo-ish screaming album he wanted to record, so, being amused at his bit of mad digital performance art, I thought I'd make him an album of screaming. Sadly, life is full of demands, and this is as far as I got, a layered series of vocals with some bass and recorded keyboard loops. I'm quite happy with the piece, but it's not really want I set out to create.

The video follows a motif I've been slowly developing of abstracting footage into basic simple forms and textures, and is highly reminiscent of the footage I cobbled together, experimenting for the ambient album (which I'll get to next post!).


Finally, "Passage Among Glaciers"



I think this is one of the best pieces of music I've created up to this point and more than any other has made me start to take all this farting around seriously. It was composed without any template loops, which is to say, I didn't start by taking loops from the Garageband's library, and then moved the notes around until I made something totally different and new. All the notes are hand-dragged into place. It was a pretty massively layer piece, and yet it came together rather effortlessly.

The footage is largely thrown together from this last winter, and consists of a lot of the same footage from the aforementioned ambient album. It was one of the first things I did following that project.

Well that's all for now. I'll try and follow up soon with tracks from the ambient album and some side stuff I've been doing.

Later.