Brainforest
A collection of my most recent recordings, mostly made after moving to Seattle in 2001.
  1. Star Womb  (4:14 min, 7.8 MB)   An actual song, with Scotto singing. Recorded in 2002 I soon forgot all about this piece until July 2008 when Scotto mentioned it and gave me this mp3. How strange to listen to music you wrote and forgot about for six years. And it has a message. I had forgotten the words, but I understand the message, do you?

  2. Omega  (3:52 min, 5.4 MB)   It's like seeing the dead, walk right on out of the living. It's like saying the name with no face to go with it. The taste of blood still hangs on our lips, and we hunger for more. More and more and more and more, and more and more and more and more.

  3. Swallow the Pills  (6:32 min, 9 MB)   A song without words. Or rather, turned instrumental. This slowish piece was meant to be the first part of a sort of song cycle about a person reborn as a slug, and the struggles and joys of slugdom. Then continuing story got weirder and weirder. The "Omega" track above is also from this "song cycle", and also without words. Without words though, it is basically a slow and fairly soothing piece of music. The intro section is borrowed from Strauss's Alpine Symphony's "Night" section, although the instrumentation is slightly different.

  4. Never Know  (3:43 min, 5.2 MB)   Originally composed in 2002 as a song, with lyrics even. Two years later, the instrumental parts have been recorded and fleshed out. Recording of vocals remains to be done, and for all I know, may never be done; you never know. I've come to quite like this instrumental version. The lyric melodies dovetail over one another, and were recorded with some odd arpeggiated synth timbres.

  5. Red Square  (7:46 min, 10.7 MB)   This is mix number eleventy billion of the never-to-be-finished Red Square. The project began with a chaos of tracks and overdubs, and has only become more tangled as the years have passed. I made this particular mix with the intention of using it to work on the lyrics that have always been a part of the plan, but I found I liked this mix as it is, mostly -- Red Square will never be finished, and I will never be quite satisfied. Nevertheless I'm very found of its drum pitter-patters, soothing sweeps of sound, and nostalgic melodies. The title comes from a visit Tara and I took to the Met Museum in New York and our interpretation of a certain modern art painting that "the red square is key"; and the poster Tara later made, all in red squares, demonstrating a certain magic-square-like pattern.

  6. Groovinome  (2:47 min, 3.8 MB)   Ancient scrytch musickified but lacking lyrics.

  7. Supplikant  (5:26 min, 4.9 MB)   Fun with 13/8 time over a rapid-fire pattern of tiny snippets of people talking. Yes I painstakingly took various soundfiles of people talking and cut out tiny slices, each about a tenth of a second long, and then strung quite a lot of them together to make the background of this piece. The only bit I can still understand is a cut-up person saying "burned alive".

  8. Freeze Dried Kid  (3:42 min, 5.1 MB)   Sketchy render of a song-to-be never finished, from 2002.

  9. Palangiation  (2:00 min, 2.8 MB)   A collaboration with Heath. The music is by Heath, mangle-processed and overlain with a futuriffic monologue. In making this I tried some experiments using Pluggo in ProTools. For example, I learned how to use an amplitude envelope (that is, the rising and falling of sound volume) on a track to change the parameters on a sound processing plugin. Specifically, the talking voice in this piece has an "envelope follower" on it, which sends out a stream of data based on how loud the voice is at any given instant. This data stream is sent to a plugin that pitch shifts the voice. The result is when he speaks louder, his voice goes up in pitch, and vice versa.

Duckapus
Released on CD, October 1, 2001. Copies still available, just ask. Duckapus is an evolved sonic garden. The music is sometimes simple, other times a complex many-layered tangle. It is continually changing. It is a journey through many diverse moods. It is undomesticated, full of outskirts, fringes, and moments of chaos, mutating into unexpected yet familiar places in a dreamlike manner. Like a garden or flower, geometry and logic are married to chance and chaos in a state of persistent disequilibrium. Opposites come together: strict algorithmic machine logic can be surpringly organic, and random chance can become highly patterned. In the end, the music of Duckapus is a long journey through a mosaic of unusual places — sometimes sinking into ghostly unsettled darkness, sometimes soaring like a jet through a clear stratosphere, and sometimes burning in ecstatic fire.
  1. Intro: Cry Diode

  2. Vong  (6:47 min, 9.4 MB)   In the transistor jungles, many soundwaves have evolved in the dark into forms that cannot be trusted. This mp3 includes the first track on Duckapus, Intro Cry Diode.

  3. Pause: Hypnogogia

  4. Fremjooblyzop  (5:09 min, 7.1 MB)   You're a rational person. You know the difference between what's real and what's not. Fremjooblyzop is rather annoying and non-musical. My intention in making it the second full piece on Duckapus was as a foreshadowing of the non-musicalness of "Streaming Escape". In other words, "Vong" tells you that there will be music on this album, while "Fremjooblyzop" tells you there will be noise. I'd rather this track was about two minutes shorter, but given the way it got put together I couldn't figure out how to cut it down to size without killing the, um, flow.

  5. Daemonica  (4:55 min, 6.8 MB)   Monks and children sing over various pulsing patterns and voices from afar.

  6. Tongue Box  (4:29 min, 6.1 MB)   Would you hand me my boots?

  7. Domo  (4:45 min, 6.5 MB)   Heavy beat, jittery pianos, thunder cymbals, overly distorted guitars, and a clutter of miscellaneous samples and snippets of voices, with a sudden change of mode at the end to a slow contemplative series of chords. Domo is also on "Disconnect".

  8. Algorithm Cirkus  (3:44 min, 5.1 MB)   This was made via a Max-MSP program I wrote. The program generated semi-random rhythm loops and notes chosen from different scales by a chaotic formula. The stream of notes was sent out as MIDI data, which I patched into another computer and recorded. After fiddling with the MIDI data a bit I sent it to the Korg Prophecy synth and recorded the results back to the first computer. Other than the skipping CD sample at the beginning and a few long synth note overdubs the piece is all one voice, that is, only one note at a time. The richness of the Prophecy sound and the speed of the algorithmic stream of notes makes it sound like there might be several voices at once. The Max-MSP program had a button in it that re-generated the random rhythm loops and reset the chaotic note picking formula. I pressed that button four times. It is pretty obvious where, if you listen for it. In between the resets I fooled with the chaotic formula's parameters, causing the pattern of pitches to change in various ways. I had almost no idea what I was doing — I had only just finished making the Max-MSP program and was really only testing it when I recorded this. As it turned out, the program's random rhythm loops usually sounded bad, and I just got lucky during this test recording. If I had known it would be difficult to make more music like this, I would have run my test a bit longer. Apparently making music with random and chaotic algorithms involves quite a bit of luck, go figure.

  9. Needle Xebec  (4:39 min, 6.4 MB)   This xebec is streamlined and needle shaped, and flies with jet engines.

  10. Ptisaneti  (2:22 min, 3.2 MB)   A memory of evenings without care.

  11. Dark Cave Near Some Cows

  12. Streaming Escape  (26:23 min, 36 MB)   The culmination of two years of being happily insane in NYC. I made two excerpts for the benefit of short attention spans, Streaming Escape, Part 2: What Is This Place?  (4:59 min, 6.8 MB), and Streaming Escape, Part 4: Laloft  (4:44 min, 6.6 MB). Streaming Escape was the last piece I made for my "Nihil" album project, so it is similar to the other "Nihil" tracks "Pulse Cycle Carrier", "Argusmyope", "pr0k r!ndz", and Terchatika", listed below under "Ow My Eye!". The "Nihil" project was something I made for myself — because I wanted to listen to music like this, not because I thought anyone else might like it. I figured other people would not like "Nihil" at all. I still think most people would not like the "Nihil" tracks, except Streaming Escape, which some might find not completely annoying, and a few strange people might actually enjoy. That said, of all the music I have ever made, Streaming Escape remains one of my own favorites. Here is some info on how it was made: Like the other "Nihil" tracks, most of the soundscapes (I hesitate to say "music") were made over the course of several months, using a program I wrote in Max-MSP, similar to the one used for "Scotto's Head in a Blender" (see below under "Ow My Eye!"). I fed this hungry program a library of soundfiles, ranging from bits and pieces of my own music, to various samples from CDs and movies, often of ambiences and people talking. I also fed it some of its own output and earlier "Nihil" tracks. The program output all kinds of messed up sounds, mostly annoying and bad. I recorded hours of this stuff, then saved the bits and pieces that were interesting and deleted the rest. Over time I built up a sizable library of soundfiles made this way. The other "Nihil" tracks were mostly sound collages built from these files. The seed that led to Streaming Escape came from something Stu said. It was about music in general, and I can't remember the exact words, but the idea I came away with was that some music has a "thread" running through it, which can serve as a guide or "lifeline". It might be a singer's voice, or a rhythm, or something more abstract, like the harmonic underpinning of Bach's "Goldberg Variations". Such a "thread" could be useful in complex, potentially overwhelming music, or in stark, "featureless" music — like a path through a jungle or wagon ruts across a flat plain. One night, with this in mind, I made a "thread", which became the underpinning of Streaming Escape. At the time I had a piece of software that could semi-randomize the parameters of my Korg Prophecy synth. The results were like that of my Max-MSP program — usually annoying and bad, but sometimes weird and fun. So I set the synth's arpeggiator to play a short rhythmic loop on one note, began randomizing, and recorded the results. The result was a great many random sounds, mostly bad, all playing the same rhythmic loop. Out of about 200 I picked the "best" 15 or so and put them onto a track, about 20 minutes long, to serve as the "thread" foundation of Streaming Escape. It begins as reasonably clear, vaguely bell-like sound, which repeats for a while before shifting to a similar but muted version. This repeats for a while before changing to another version, and so on. The changes provided a framework for building an evolving sound collage. In addition, the "thread" begins with a fairly clear sound and changes progressively to noiser and more "random" sounds, then back to clearer ones, ending with the same sound it began with. In the final version of Streaming Escape there is a introductory section and an ending section that do not have the thread. For those playing along at home, the thread first appears almost exactly two minutes into the piece. It fades away just after the twenty minute mark. Once the "thread" was in place I started overlaying a sound collage. It went rather quickly. The bulk of the piece was finished within a day. I added details over a week or so. The final version begins with a section of justly-tuned, sawtooth-wave pitches chosen semi-randomly via another Max-MSP program I wrote (similar to the program used for "Three Dreams", described under "/dev/null" below). About 7:30 minutes in a drumbeat appears and the piece becomes semi-musical for a few minutes. This part is on the excerpt "Part 2: What Is This Place?". Then the piece shifts into a slower, quieter section, around 12-13 minutes in. There are some bell sounds played about ten times too slow, making the bell rings very long and low in pitch, with oddly rising overtones. Somewhere I read that bells usually have complex patterns of overtones that change in complex ways over the length of a ringing note, too fast to hear clearly. So I slowed some way down to find out. Around minute 15 another "musical" section starts, this time with a bunch of synth chords, rising and falling in pitch and resonance. This part is on the excerpt "Part 4: Laloft". I had recorded those synth chords a month or two before — a sketchy unused fragment of music. After the Laloft section the original "thread" returns. The piece was to end at that point, but I ended up tacking on some crashing smashing sounds and a long "coda" that slows down and becomes quiet, low pitched, and relatively still. At the very end there is a slight crescendo, a repeating voice saying something like "you will never be alone again", and the first notes of "You Can Touch It", which Streaming Escape blends into on "Duckapus". In making Streaming Escape made one thing became clear to me. Making music, or art in general, is easier when you do it regularly, even if it feels like little is being accomplished day by day. Streaming Escape came together as quickly as it did because I had spent several months making bits and pieces of sound — fragments without a purpose, often of dubious value. Working in this "pointless" way most days for at least an hour or two, I ended up with a sizable library of sound fragments, or building blocks. Some of this was intentional — I was trying to make a library for the "Nihil" project. Some was the result of attempts to make music that went nowhere and ended up in "failure" — like the synths of Laloft. If I hadn't spent all that time working, and failing, pointlessly, Streaming Escape would never have happened. As my friend Heath said, "the day to day hard work of tilling the soil is drudgery, but keep at it so when a seed should happen to fall it can sprout forth rapidly." Something like that anyway.

  13. You Can Touch It  (7:02 min, 9.6 MB)   This track has gone through several name changes and musical edits. For a while I called it "Dance of Light". It combines material from various sources, including an old MIDI piece called "Un", or "Ununion", a MAX-based arpeggiated section made shortly after "Hexamorph", and one of my first attempts to make a "sound collage" of samples. It is also on Disconnect.

  14. The Trouble  (3:38 min, 5 MB)   The trouble is no trouble at all really. If fact, everything is going to be OK. This mp3 includes the end of Duckapus, Coda Dream Diode.

  15. Coda: Dream Diode
/dev/null
This album is made up of tracks that did not make it onto either "Disconnect" or "Duckapus", and are of a generally ambient nature. The album as a whole was designed like "Duckapus" — a CD-length set of tracks that blend into one another, resulting in a guided voyage through almost 80 minutes of generally unagressive, and sometimes even soothing, music. Note that by breaking the album into individual mp3 files, the overall cohesion is lost. The tracks do not properly blend into one another. The CD version is still available, just ask.
  1. Breathe  (2:50 min, 3.9 MB)   A series of slow chords, inhaling and exhaling calmly, while chaotic voices and random sounds bounce around below. A depiction of what sitting meditation is like.

  2. Divergent Friend  (3:44 min, 5.1 MB)   Ambient tones slowly descend over a sound collage that alternates between eerie and soothing.

  3. Frau Mora  (3:12 min, 4.4 MB)   Another ambient sound collage, recorded on an abandoned alien spacecraft, found drifting between the stars.

  4. Quantiflury  (6:00 min, 8.2 MB)   The sound collage of Frau Mora evolves into ticking groove of bass drums, sticks, and staticky patterns. Meanwhile strange sounds drift and float around. A few comments are made by people over a malfunctioning transdimensional intercom. Towards the end, an old man explains the meaning of life, but it's extremely difficult to make out what he is saying.

  5. Praxis  (7:03 min, 9.7 MB)   The sound collage continues, but gives way to some actual music. The piece "Praxis" comes from the "Phloxx" project. It leisurely reflects on a few motifs, considers melancholy, but opts instead for contentment.

  6. Shattered  (5:01 min, 6.9 MB)   Over the continuing sound collages, another Phloxx-era piece of music emerges. This one slow, with long pitches in a non-standard tuning, with quiet piano and synth drops and drips revealing the cavern. From a dark corner, a wise woman tells a tale. The tuning used for the pitched music is the Bohlen-Pierce "13th root of 3" scale, although only a few notes are used. This scale divides the pitch interval of 3/1 (an octave plus a fifth) into 13 equal steps. One of the bouncy "dripping" synths plays notes generated with a formula taken from chaos theory math.

  7. Kristokle  (5:00 min, 6.9 MB)   This track was made around 1997, just after "Disconnect" was put together. It was almost included on that album, but didn't quite make it. Like other pieces that were made just after "Disconnect", it was forgotten and almost lost. Although it has a fairly active rhythm, its mood is soft, even fragile. Long notes glide over the top, twisting in and out of distortion, like out of control dirigibles. An alternate name is "Cris to Claire".

  8. Zlo 88  (5:57 min, 8.2 MB)   This track was one of the results of experimentations with non-standard tuning systems. It uses a tuning called "88 CET", which stands for "88-cent equal temperment". In our standard tuning, there are 12 notes per octave, and a "cent" is defined as 1/100th of such a note. So standard-tuned notes are 100 cents wide in pitch. The 88 CET scale is interesting in part because is a "non-octave" scale: instead of 12 notes per octave there are 13.6363.. It was researched and promoted by Gary Morrison. "Zlo 88" has a playful rhythm. I like the way the bass guitar bounces around near the end. In the middle, there's a section in which everything drops out except a very flangey synth pulse that wanders all over the 88 CET scale before finding the main theme again.

  9. Bends  (3:15 min, 4.5 MB)   A muted rhythmic loop supports a motley collection of odd synthetic sounds, snippets of dialogue, and some very "wet" bleeps and bloops. The wetness near the end is a sound made through semi-random parameter mutation of a Prophecy synthesizer. The "wetness" of the piece explains the title.

  10. Three Dreams  (16:21 min, 22 MB)   This track combines three of the "dreaming" series of pieces I made with MAX-MSP, plus a large assortment of sound collage material, much of it the result of another MAX-MSP program I made to "blenderize" soundfiles. The "dreams" are made of pitches chosen semi-randomly in "just intonation" tuning. The notes are almost always held very long, allowing plenty of time to wrap your ear around the sound of just intonation harmonies, which often have a quality quite unlike standard tuning harmonies. Just intonation harmonies can be so "pure" as to be bland, but they can also involve "beating" dissonances and "wolf" tones. I made several "dreaming" algorithms in MAX-MSP, and sometimes would let them run on while I slept. I find the long pure tones very relaxing. There are a few heavily processed dialogues in this track too, including another long one by the previously encountered enlightened old man, whose words are extremely hard to make out. This is a track to fall asleep to.

Bach Bach Bagaaw
A collection of classical music I have synthed-up and mangled in various ways.
  1. Bachair (fyehmyx)  (6:07 min, 8.5 MB)   A famous piece by Bach, forced into an odd meter and "reorchestrated". Soothing.

  2. Contrapunky 1  (3:22 min, 4.7 MB)   A messed-up remake of Contrapunctus 1 from The Art of Fugue. I like this one for the constantly changing time signatures I forced the music into.

  3. Contrapunky 2  (3:37 min, 5 MB)   A messed-up remake of Contrapunctus 2 from The Art of Fugue. Forced into 13/8 time.

  4. Rachanini Nos. 2-5  (1:43 min, 2.4 MB)   His Rhapsody, variations 2-5.

  5. Rachanini No. 6  (0:54 min, 1.3 MB)   His Rhapsody, variation 6.

  6. Rachanini No. 16  (1:24 min, 1.9 MB)   His Rhapsody, variation 16.

  7. Rachanini No. 19  (0:32 min, 0.7 MB)   His Rhapsody, variation 19. This one is only 30 seconds long, but bouncy bouncy fun. It makes Nathaniel giggle his head off.

  8. Rondough-Capachinio  (6:01 min, 5.6 MB)   Another synthetic electric guitar distortion, from Bach's Keyboard Partitas.

  9. Quartokoda the Third  (1:26 min, 2.0 MB)   The final "Coda" movement of Bartok's Third String Quartet, in which the entire quartet is summarized very quickly and densely, distilled to its essential form and played at breakneck speed. Plus it has some cool long octave-plus pitch bends (tricky to do in MIDI) The piece is fast, zany, and rhythmically and harmonically complex. I got the score from the library and discovered that the time signature changes almost every bar. Even after entering the notes one by one into the computer I still had almost no understanding of what was going on harmonically — my best guess was that there was some kind of simultaneous use of lydian and phrygian modes. When notes ran upwards they seemed to gain sharps in lydian-like patterns, while downward note patterns got flats, phrygian-like. Later I found a book that analyzed the piece's harmony and it turned out no one quite knows what to make of it. My guess was apparently in the right direction, but there's a lot more than just lydian and phrygian going on. The book's analysis was over my head, but one interesting thing was the notion of a kind of "struggle" between C and C#. It begins with C in the bass, and C makes a pretty good effort to stay in control, but C# wins in the end.

  10. Joy of Bleep  (1:58 min, 2.7 MB)   I tried to make the stately rhythm of this most famous Bach piece as utterly unfoot-tappable and awkward as possible. Plus it is quite bleepy.

  11. SaraBachabande  (3:36 min, 4.9 MB)   The Sarabande movement from Bach's Keyboard Partita No. 6 clearly needed to be forced into 11/8 time and played on a bunch of overdriven guitar synths. Duh. It is required that you play it very loud!

  12. PWV 1060.2  (6:54 min, 9.5 MB)   A remake of the second movement of Bach's Concerto BWV 1060, forced into 10/8 time.

  13. Bachbadinerie  (1:12 min, 1.7 MB)   My first manglement of Bach, in a synthetic imitation of electric guitars.

  14. Ge-ArppeMooge  (2:04 min, 2.9 MB)   The beginning of a Beethoven work. It would take me a lot of work to continue the process of destruction — instead it fades out after two minutes. Can you guess which Beethoven piece it is?

  15. Backlegeeg (allgeet mix)  (2:52 min, 4.0 MB)   The Gigue movement from Bach's Keyboard Partita No. 6 on distorted synth guitars, and in triple "swung" time. The time signature is 2/1, very uncommon. I read somewhere that some people theorize that it is meant to be "swung" instead of played in the strict duple time the notation indicates.

  16. Backlegeeg (plunk mix)  (2:38 min, 3.6 MB)   The Gigue movement from Bach's Keyboard Partita No. 6 on distorted synth guitars and a wurlitzer like electric piano. As the "allgeet" mix, this is also in triple "swung" time. It is also slightly faster. I think I like this one better, but am not really happy with either. The piece itself is amazing though.

Disconnect
By 1997 I had amassed a CD album's worth (and then some) of music tracks, and wanted to share them. With the newfangled ability to burn CD-R copies of the album (at a lightning fast hour per burn!), I began to produce "Disconnect" CDs myself, using black-and-white laser printer artwork. Over the Internet, I offered copies for free to anyone who asked, which, in that brief golden age of the Internet, resulted in hundreds of copies being mailed to every continent (ok, I didn't mail one to Antarctica, but one went there for a visit). Because "Disconnect" was made with CD-Rs, I never quite considered it a "published" work. So when I did make a published CD album, "Duckapus", I thought of it as my "debut" album. Previous albums like "Disconnect" were more like experiments in distribution and promotion, and so some of the tracks on "Duckapus" also appear on "Disconnect". In my mind, "Duckapus" superceded "Disconnect". But, many people have told me they prefer "Disconnect" to "Duckapus", and these days the whole concept of "album" is virtually obsolete. Instead of "albums" we have "playlists", and it doesn't matter if two or more playlists contains some of the same music. So with all that in mind, I am again offering "Disconnect" CDs. The music was remastered in 2003, and the CD insert artwork was recreated (originals lost) at higher quality. The mp3 files listed below are also recreated, from the remastered versions, and at a higher bitrate compression.
  1. Domo  (4:45 min, 6.5 MB)   For a long time, this was my favorite work, with its heavy beat, jittery pianos, thunder cymbals, overly distorted electric guitars, clutter of miscellaneous samples and snippets of voices, with a sudden change of mode at the end to a slow contemplative series of chords. It is also on Duckapus.

  2. Hexamorph  (3:29 min, 4.8 MB)   This track, sometimes called "Hexamorphic Conditions", was the result of one of my first attempts to use cycling74's MAX software. In MAX, I programmed a simple, but quirky MIDI arpeggiator. As I fiddled with the sliders and buttons in the bare-bones user-interface on the macintosh computer, MIDI data was recorded on an old 486 Windows computer running Cakewalk (version 2!). Then that MIDI data, on the 486, was used to play an external synth, whose audio output was recorded back into the macintosh. That was how I had to produce and record MIDI and audio in those days. It required two computers. Several different synth sounds were recorded this way and mixed together. A few long held tones were added, along with some samples of dialogue, most notably a few pieces of a talk given by a 100+ year old woman describing why she was an atheist. I found samples of her talk on the Internet, and have long since forgotten all the words, and can't make it all out in the music! The part I do know goes: "Sometimes people ask me, why are you an atheist? The same reason you're a christian and not buddhist: your parents were Chritians. Well my parents were atheists. [...] And I wouldn't lift a finger to persuade anyone to become an atheist, because I have nothing to offer, nothing. And if they have a religion, and it helps them bear some of the burdens that we're subject to in this life, I wouldn't want to take that away from them." Just after that part, the arpeggios, which were semi-randomly produced, run through some upward leaping and running figures that I've always liked, and which convinced me of the potential of "controlled randomness" in algorithmic music. I've come to love setting up semi-random systems and trying to surprise myself with the results. This track perhaps represents my first encounter with that.

  3. Mlaoh  (2:19 min, 3.3 MB)   This track is full of miscellaneous samples of weird sounds and people talking. Some of the voices ("A bongo player?!") were sampled from a forgotten comedy movie from the 1960s. The music is mostly made up of samples from a solo singer, and the drums are a combination of samples from a few sources and overdubs I added. Although I like this track, I thought it pushed the boundaries of the acceptable use of sampled material. I can't remember what the sources were, so I can't even credit them. The inspiration for making "Mlaoh" was the track "Everyone In The World Is Doing Something Without Me", by "The Future Sound of London", which had richly overdubbed voices singing. I tried to do something similar with the voices in "Mlaoh". The results are completely different, but got me interested in overlaying snippets of solo singing and searching for new harmonies (this eventually led to "Scotto's Head in a Blender").

  4. Zepol  (4:22 min, 6 MB)   This is one of the older works on "Disconnect", made before I could record audio to computer and had to create everything in MIDI, sent to external synths in "real-time", with results recorded "live" to cassette tape. Zepol might be the very first piece I recorded in overdubs to computer, once I had the ability (and the first in which I added samples of people talking; in this case, just a woman saying "um" and "confusion". I had yet to build up a sample library!). Rhythm and drums had always been hard for me. My attempts usually sounded either robotic or annoyingly chaotic. One of the first times I found a rhythmic "groove" was with this track Zepol (as well as "Fla", which was made at the same time). The direct cause of Zepol and Fla was a book I bought called "The Drums of Vodou", which described in detail Haitian "voodoo" drumming, music, and even spiritual philosophy. Among the rhythmic forms presented were "zepol" and "fla". I suspect my zepol is quite unlike traditional Haitian zepol, but many of the rhythmic patterns are zepol-based. There used to be a short rhythmic piece attached to the end of Zepol, but I couldn't quite get it right and left it out of the final version of Zepol. I would like to hear that ending piece again, but I suspect it is lost forever.

  5. Black Trip Attain  (8:55 min, 12 MB)   This track is actually three different pieces combined. The first part (slower) and second part (a repeating rhythmic sequence) were originally MIDI pieces with a completely different sound. One black night, I accidentally played them through the wrong synth sounds, and liked the result much better than the original intent. The third part (a drumless cycle of chords played on a particularly animated synth sound) was recorded much earlier, in Denver. The chords and melody, which I've sometimes called "my musical calling card", date from even earlier. This particular recording is one of the rare cases where I just played it myself, rather than constructing things piece by piece on the computer.

  6. You Can Touch It  (7:02 min, 9.6 MB)   This track has gone through several name changes and musical edits. I used to call it "Dance of Light". It combines material from various sources, including an old MIDI piece called "Un", or "Ununion", a MAX-based arpeggiated section made shortly after "Hexamorph", and one of my first attempts to make a "sound collage" of samples. It is also on Duckapus.

  7. Falling in Space  (4:11 min, 5.8 MB)   This track is in two parts. The first is a slowly tense section full of voices, bells, notes falling in pitch, and chords that shift from eerie to soothing. Then, in the second part, a drum beat and repeating chord progression enters. The voices continue, the main one repeating in sync with the drums (it says "would you slow down after a while or keep falling in space?"). I intended the drum loop to be in 4/4 meter, but made a mistake in looping it, resulting in a meter of 8/8 + 13/8.

  8. Room  (2:13 min, 3.1 MB)   This short track always reminds me of giant airships, zeppelins, and blimps, drifting through the fog.

  9. Fla  (6:37 min, 9.1 MB)   This one was made shortly after "Zepol", and uses similar rhythmic patterns and sounds. In addition, in hunting for odd things to sample, I had found a set of stenography practice records from the 1960s. They were made for people to practice taking dictation from, and so had a person dictating very bland business letters, speaking extremely slowly and enunciating carefully. I sampled a set of single words or short phrases and shuffled them all around. It is a coincidence that some of the percussion sounds like a typewriter. I don't think Fla has quite the clarity of Zepol, but it has more variety, and I quite like the transitions.

  10. Pensi  (4:44 min, 6.6 MB)   Shortly after I had the ability to record to computer, I made a 20 minute, four part work called "vo tsina". The idea was that the four parts would represent four basic states, or four stages to life: gleki (happiness), terpa (fear), pensi (pensiveness), and morsi (dying). For a long time, I was amazed I had pulled off such a large work. It was quite long though, and the best part, I thought, was the middle section. So I made a shorter version of just the two middle pieces, terpa and pensi, and called it just "Pensi". So this track is in two parts, the first "fearful", the second "pensive". At the very beginning you can hear the end of "happy" as the music fades in, and at the very end you can hear the beginning of "dying" as it fades out (particularly the sampled words "get me out of here." from "Jacob's Ladder"). The complete "vo tsina" piece took up most of my limited hard disk space, so I backed it up and deleted it from the drive. Much later, I tried to find the backup and couldn't. It might still exist somewhere, but it seems likely that "happiness" and "dying" are lost, leaving only "fear" and "pensive". How appropriate. [Sometime after writing this, I did find the whole of Vo Tsina, so there is happiness and death after all!]

Ow My Eye!
A variety of tracks from the late 1990s that aren't on Disconnect or Duckapus. Some of these are sketchy or annoying, so be careful. Other names for parts of this collection include Aeute, Nihil, and Liquid's Cold Weight.
  1. The Brain!  (3:12 min, 4.4 MB)   The blame for this track can be firmly placed on New Year's Eve on Tybee Island. Specifically the period of several hours spent on the back porch just after dawn. Little. Yellow. Rectangular.

  2. ECCKJKAOT  (5:31 min, 7.6 MB)   An experiment with sound mutation algorithms for the Korg Prophecy synth.

  3. Seed  (2:53 min, 3.9 MB)   I'd forgotten about this track until I discovered it on some old backup. I think it was written for some project of Scotto's.

  4. Scotto's Head in a Blender  (8:35 min, 11.9 MB)   Soon after the music program "Max" expanded into "Max-MSP", I began to wonder how badly audio could be mangled by MSP's audio processing algorithms. This track is one of the results. Here's what happened. Scotto had recorded a few of his songs, overdubbing himself singing to create vocal harmonies. The tracks got into my hands, each one a recording of just one solo vocal track. The correct way to use these tracks was to play them all together in sync, mixed into a song. That is what Scotto did with them. The incorrect thing to do is what I did, using a Max-MSP program algorithm I made. Here's how it works: Once the program is up and running, it selects four of the vocal soundfiles at random. There were about 40 or 50 altogether, after I had snipped them into a few pieces to remove long silences. For each of the four soundfiles the program had picked, the algorithm determines the file's length in time (how long Scotto sings), which was usually between 1-4 minutes. Then the program picks, randomly of course, two points in time somewhere within the overall time length. The first point becomes the starting time, the second becomes the ending time. The program then plays just that part of the soundfile, over and over, looping back to the start whenever the end is reached. Note that the end point might be before the start point, making Scotto come out in reverse. Before the program plays this randomly chosen slice of Scotto, a playback speed is chosen, randomly between -2 and 2, where a value of 1 is normal speed, a value of 2 is double fast, 0.5 is half speed, -1 is normal speed but backwards, and -2 is double speed and backwards. The playback speed could fall anywhere in that range. If it turns out to be near 0, Scotto becomes very slow and may even go infrasonic. The playback speed also changes the pitch. Twice as fast also means twice as high in pitch (an octave up). Twice as slow means half pitch (an octave down). All of this is done to each of the four soundfiles chosen, at random, by the program. All four are played back at the same time, with stereo panning so that two Scottos are to the right and two to the left. The odds that all four Scottos end up singing in tune with each other is very slim. On the other hand, there are many ways to be "in tune" other than the traditional and standard 12 note scale. Further, there is near zero chance that all four Scotto loops will be of the same length, so as the program plays out its madness, the four Scotto loops fall in and out of phase with each other, resulting in ever-changing patterns of "harmony" and rhythm. Finally, the program has a big shiny button that, when pressed, resets everything, picks four new soundfiles, and new loops, and tries a different way to mangle four Scottos. Unsurprisingly, in many cases, four looping Scottos turn out to sound bad, sometimes painfully so. Sometimes the program picks start and end loop points that are very close together, in which case you get a machine-gun like spitting of whatever sliver of audio happens to call that bit of time home. Usually, that doesn't sound very good. But sometimes, if the sliver of audio is right, it may be acceptable. Sometimes it is even good! In any case, the program was not the kind of thing you would want to leave on auto-pilot unless you are an aural masochist. What I ended up doing was to press the shiny reset button over and over until the program happened to find four interesting Scottos. Then I'd let that play for a while and record it. Then I'd press the shiny reset button until Scotto got interesting again, and record that. After a while, I had a sizable collection of interesting, albeit weird, recordings of quad-Scottos. In some cases, the mangled quad-Scotto recordings were subjected to another round of blenderization by using them as input files for the program. These recordings became the raw material for the track "Scotto's Head in a Blender", which is a sort of sound collage of those recordings, put together "by hand", so to speak. I looped the quad-Scottos and arranged them into a multitracked mess, taking care (usually) to let the Scottos fade in and fade out rather than breaking in and out of being without warning. And there you have it. That is how I put Scotto's Head in a Blender.

  5. Pulse Cycle Carrier  (5:26 min, 7.5 MB)   From the "Nihil" project, which means it is very noisy. Parts were used in "Duckapus".

  6. Argusmyope  (7:01 min, 9.7 MB)   From the "Nihil" project, which means it is very noisy, although this one has some actual "music" too. Parts were used in "Duckapus".

  7. pr0k r!ndz  (9:24 min, 13 MB)   From the "Nihil" project, which means it is very noisy. Parts were used in "Duckapus" and some of it was taken from "Radioactive Blue".

  8. Terchatika  (11:28 min, 15.9 MB)   From the "Nihil" project, which means it is very noisy. Parts were used in "Duckapus".

  9. Covered Bridges  (7:30 min, 10.4 MB)   We're not alone in the universe. Not yet. Silly drums, chord progression that repeats too many times.

  10. Alghost  (14:40 min, 20.2 MB)   Long and annoying, but if you accept its message as the truth you will be given the answer to the Meaning of Life by the end. Pay attention! Max-MSP algorithm run amok.

  11. Lasers, Eight O'Clock, Day One  (7:28 min, 10.3 MB)   Made for Burningman but never played there. Designed to be as annoying as possible, except for the nice algorithmic Prophecy flutes at the end.

  12. Uncreative  (12:42 min, 17.4 MB)   An attempt to follow up on the algorithmic fun of "Algorithmic Cirkus", but this time much longer and more complex. As it turned out, too long and too complex. Hard to swallow.

  13. Cris to Claire   (5:00 min, 6.9 MB)   This track emerged from a mess of sketches, false starts, and failed attempts. Over time the soup woke up and pulled itself together as best it could. I'm fond of it, but never knew its true name. So it has had many names (like Kristokle), with the current name's meaning crystal clear. This is the same track as "Kristokle" on /dev/null.

Flowers Fall Weeds Spring Up
A variety of tracks from the middle 1990s.
  1. I'm Dead  (10:01 min, 13.8 MB)   I'm Dead was created in bed. There is a lot of story behind this track. I thought as I made it that I had retuned my synth to the tuning "88-CET", or a scale with each step in pitch 88 cents (rather than the usual 100 cents per step). So most of my music theory was inapplicable and I created it with a feeling of novelty and freshness. After it was done, I realized it was not in 88-CET, but regular old 100-CET tuning, just like everything else. In effect I had accidentally thrown away my preconceptions and made something I wouldn't have otherwise. There are many "wrong notes", if you believe in music theory. The first seven minutes or so can be slow, awkward, and perhaps boring, but starting at about 7 minutes in, a new part starts that I have never stopped enjoying. Someday I would like to redo it. There are many things I don't like about this piece, but other parts, especially the ending part, that I love, if only the the drums were better, and the mixing better, and so on.

  2. Zlo 88  (5:58 min, 8.2 MB)   This one, unlike "I'm Dead", is definitely in the 88-CET tuning. This track is also on /dev/null.

  3. Vast 88  (3:16 min, 4.4 MB)   I had almost forgotten about this track. I think it was one of a set of three, along with Zlo 88 and Ouerrizom, that are in 88-CET tuning.

  4. Ouerrizom  (1:38 min, 2.2 MB)   I had almost forgotten about this track. I think it was one of a set of three, along with Zlo 88 and Vast 88, that are in 88-CET tuning.

  5. NYC  (8:40 min, 11.9 MB)   Another track I had almost forgotten about. This was one of the first things I wrote after moving to New York City, done while I lived with Amir in the Upper West Side before we moved to DUMBO.

  6. Firewater  (2:59 min, 4.1 MB)   A sketchy piece done just after I moved to New York City, in Amir's old apartment.

  7. Vo Tsina  (12:01 min, 16.6 MB)   This is one of the first pieces I made using a computer to record multi-tracked audio. Previously I had only used computers for MIDI, and recorded the results to audio cassette tape. There is a very long story behind this piece, which I may get around to writing about someday. A part of "Vo Tsina" made it onto "Disconnect". I thought the rest was lost, but it turned up on an old backup. I can't really vouch for the piece as being good, but it has a lot of meaning for me personally, and might be interesting to people who are familiar with "Disconnect".

Perplexions
(1995)   After a few years without music-making tools in Denver, I got my hands on a powerful computer (66 Mhz!) and an Ensoniq SQ-2R synth modules, and began to try to make music. The result, after a year or so, was Perplexions, which was mastered to 100 tape cassettes, most of which still exist in a box somewhere in Colorado. These tracks sound rigidly mechanical, mainly because I wrote the music out on paper and then entered the notes into the computer one by one, with the mouse. To my ear, the music sounds almost video-game-like, but I'm still fond of some of the results. The absurd machine-like precision makes me laugh, but the harmonic complexity makes me wonder what I was thinking.
  1. Egregious Puerility  (4:00 min, 5.5 MB)   This is an extremely silly piece. But it's not my fault! It is the "3rd movement" of the first piece of music I tried to make with the computer and synth module I got in Denver. The first two movements are not worth listening to, but I still like this one. Back then, I wrote music out on paper, without an instrument to work thing out with and see out ideas sound. I just relied on my patchy memory of music theory and tried to make harmonies and patterns that made sense. I spent weeks writing this piece out, mostly at St. Mark's Cafe in downtown Denver. When I was done writing it out, I entered it all into the computer, and only then did I get to hear it and realize how silly it was. I had meant it to be a kind of exciting high-speed whirlwind of ever-changing harmonies and key changes that was dizzying but uplifting. I suppose that description might be close to how it actually sounds, but the overpowering character of it turned out to be silliness. Still, I like it even now, many years later. It makes me laugh. And it does work its silly way through ever-changing harmonies and key changes. You might even call it uplifting, maybe.

  2. Toccata  (4:26 min, 6.2 MB)   This one was made not long after "Egregious Puerility". This time, I made every effort to avoid silliness. This one would be dramatic! the result, I think, is a piece that is both dramatic and silly. The main theme, usually sounded on a synthy brass type sound, is a motif I had discovered some years before. The theme, and much of the rest of the piece's harmony, is based on an unusual scale sometimes called "Eastern" or "Gipsy". In the key of C, the scale goes C Db E F G Ab B.

  3. Trinity Sonata  (8:51 min, 12.2 MB)   This was one of the last pieces I made by writing it out on paper before entering it into the computer and listening. It is more or less in classical "sonata-allegro" form, with three themes. One of the themes is a harmonic and melodic progression I had been playing for years and reusing over and over in various disguises.

Misc Cinders
Various things that don't fit any other category here. Some are just sketches, some are annoying. Listen at your own risk.
  1. Cruzzunch  (3:18 min, 4.6 MB)   This began as an exercise in heavily distorted, static and flanged drum loops, and evolved into the Realms of Crunch.

  2. Fughetta Kryptykta  (2:08 min, 3.0 MB)   Shortly after moving to New York City, while still at Amir's apartment, I decided to write a fugue based on lemur Andy's Kryptik Theme. This is the result. I believe it is a proper fugue, but don't quote me on that.

  3. Eggplant  (4:15 min, 5.9 MB)   Not much happens in this sketch of a song never finished.

  4. Hexany Loop, Organ  (1:00 min, 1.4 MB)   This is just a sketch test of using the program scala to generate music in alternate tunings. In this case the tuning is a "hexany". Someday I'll explain the logic in this track a bit. There is also a bleepy version.

  5. Ununion  (10:16 min, 14 MB)   This was cannibalized for making parts of "You Can Touch It", so it begins the same, but then has a messed up middle section that I cannot be held responsible for.

HS2UB
Scary stuff dredged up from High School and College days. Don't listen to these if you know what's good for you.
  1. Battery Acid  (1:07 min, 1.5 MB)   Sigh.

  2. Dednarts  (3:04 min, 4.2 MB)   One of Steve's songs recorded on my old four-track and played backwards for some reason.

  3. Hardcore  (5:57 min, 8.2 MB)   Distorion pedal on the Rhodes electric piano leads to dissonance over an attempt to make a drum beat on an ancient drum machine. Very hissy and longer than necessary.