murdertron 4000

this is an extremely rough mix of a song i wrote called "let go." i have been trying to write this song for weeks, but it has never stopped giving me trouble, during every step of the creative process: from conception to its delivery as a full-grown being, bursting from the womb of my computer like Athena was born full-grown from the mind of Zeus.

this is another song i wrote. the lyrics are from a poem i wrote in june. the poem was not that great so i kept rewriting it, but it still doesn't rhyme.

this song is worth listening to because it sounds good and it is pretty and because it has a badass key change at the end during the rhodes solo.

it might seem like this song is about me spending a boring night sitting around at a girl's house after she has fallen asleep, but it is actually a poetic commentary on the fate of modern man's intelligence. the light symbolizes knowledge, and the two types of light (sunlight and artificial light) symbolize two different types of knowledge. there was a time before artificial lights (i.e., a time before a specific sort of scientific enlightenment) when a person who was indoors at night had little choice but to go to sleep. electric lightbulbs have gone a long way toward erasing the boundary between day and night, between known and the unknown. but with the collapse of the old boundaries, we grow alienated from each other and from the world around us in ways we had never imagined. as time marches on, and technological systems increasingly supplement and replace natural ones, our old fear of nature, our old fear of a God who resided in the elements of the natural world, grows faint and gives way to a strange new anxiety.

this is a song i wrote called "i remember you." do not confuse it with the jazz standard of the same title. i wrote the music for this one on tuesday because i was bored and i wanted to write a song. i wrote the lyrics on wednesday while riding the train home from work and started recording vocals that night instead of hanging out with my friends, who played music and ate free pizza without me. then i worked on it all day thursday instead of eating meals or going outside. unlike the last several songs i made, i did not really stretch my technique while recording this; it is moody, not ambitious.

ableton was being a pussy about pitch shifting. toward the end of this project, i had to keep rendering it to disc in order to listen to it because when i tried to play it in ableton, the cpu meter kept jumping up over 100%, and then the audio would slow down drastically during the pitch-shifted parts, after which the playback speed would triple in order to compensate for its weakness. this sort of behavior may be acceptable while driving or studying for a test, but it is not acceptable during playback.

i wrote another song. i cannot think of a title for it. it is the first song i have finished since the last song i finished. it is a feel-good pop song for the summer, even though summer is over.

this song was not more difficult to make than usual, but somehow my poor little intel could not handle all the vocal tracks, and kept maxing out when i was trying to listen to the playback. i got frustrated with vocal pitch correction, so i stopped using it. i felt that i had not been using enough scream distortion units in reason, so this time, i used nearly a dozen of them. the routing in reason on this song is a masterpiece. you should see all the splitters, mergers, and line mixers i used.

the lyrics of this song involve a realization of existential loneliness. the music in this song involves the use of a few awkward harmonic devices at the end of each section to get back to G sus, because the verses and the choruses all start in C. (the chorus actually starts on e minor, but it's just a iii-vi-ii-V in C until i hit Ab and start using harmonic voodoo again.) the only place where i suspend this requirement is at the end, in the distorted freakout coda that hangs around F# major through the fadeout. it's a tritone away from the original key. i didn't plan that, but it totally expresses the distance that separates people, which is totally the aesthetic my words were getting at. totally. a tritone is the furthest distance in music. ask any music theory major.

remember kids, like rilke said, we are all alone in the world, and no one can help us. it's best to guard each other's solitudes. we are all solitudes that border each other. you can realize this by going to a concert, or by going to church. we try to get at communion, but it only exists in fleeting moments, when we are given the grace to forget ourselves and lay self-interest on the altar of the greater good. LOL.

VERSE

Cmaj7 | Cmaj7 | Abmaj7 | Bbsus |

amin7 | amin 7 | emin7 Fmaj7 | Dbmaj7 / Amaj7 (Gsus) |

CHORUS

emin7 | amin7 | dmin7 | Gsus / G7/F |

i wrote another song. it is called "assurance." i think it is finished. the lyrics aren't much, but they contain some nice symmetry. the musical theme in the chorus is something i thought of a couple of years ago, but the chord progression on the verses resulted from a failed attempt to write something based on "swahililand," the ahmad jamal song j dilla sampled on the beat for de la soul's "stakes is high."

swahililand (you can skip the intro if you want to see what i am talking about)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApjL8YZvOIU

stakes is high

this is a song i wrote. i call it "like a bell." on this song, i kept adding extra vocal tracks and reverb until i realized ableton was hogging over 50% of my cpu's processing power.

if you are a fan of the fox television show "the oc" or the singer imogen heap, you will probably not like this song. if you are aware of "the oc" and imogen heap, but are not fans of either, you might find this song ridiculous and unnecessary. if you are in a third category of people who watch prime-time soaps on occasion, out of a morbid curiosity, and pay attention to mainstream pop music only on those rare occasions when, in spite of itself, it stumbles across a fresh and interesting sound, perhaps you should find it in your heart to sit through this song at least once.

this is a song i wrote. it does not have a title, but i have been calling it "dolce," since it derives its inspiration from a fellini film called "la dolce vita." i adapted some of the lyrics from a soliloquy delivered by an unhappy character during a quiet scene somewhere in the middle of the movie. here are some quotes from that scene:

"don't think that safety is being locked up in one's home...a more miserable life is better, believe me, than an existence protected by an organized society, where everything is calculated, everything is perfect.

sometimes at night this darkness, this silence, weighs on me. peace frightens me. i'm afraid of peace more than anything else. sometimes it seems that it's only an outer shell and that hell is hiding beneath it.

one should live outside passions, beyond emotions, in that harmony you find in completed artworks, in that enchanted order. we should learn to love each other so much, to live outside of time, detached, detached..."

this is a song i wrote. it does not have a name. the lyrics are based on an idea i stole from wallace stevens. "you are the dream of dead men," he says. i added something about a ghost you find in old books, whose empty words echo throughout the land. it's pretty good poetry, i think.

this is a song i wrote. i call it "young romantics." i wrote the lyrics while i was at work. i wrote the chords while i was in college.

this is a patrice rushen song called "remind me."