The Free mp3s
Recent home organising, moving and cleaning has allowed myself to setup an ‘office’ in my south-facing spare room. This has been done at the same time as getting ADSL put on. I have joined the broadband masses! Now I can sufficiently geek-out unrestricted and work on many web-projects and promotions for my music.
One of the first projects in ‘the office’ is to tidy up this site’s mp3s and establish a podcast feed. This has been done, and will make for a clean method of adding new material in the future. However, if you have linked to any old URLs they will now be broken. The new URLs will be featured here.
The first podcast deals with a simple list of all my ‘free mp3s’ – those that are not album specific. These are the songs that I have been offering to the public in attempt to keep people interested while I work on larger complex album projects, which are secret.
Two older blog articles have already been created about the latest songs (‘New England’ and ‘Phoebe’), I will use this post to briefly describe the older songs. So permit me, if you will, to begin some rambling:
summertime in bureaucratic portions – with henriette
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This was an odd collaboration that happened via the Renoise messaged boards. Henriette Isabella Berggren, from Norway, was looking to provide vocals to producers so that she could gain experience and confidence in the process of vocal recording. One of the items she posted was a demo of a folk song called Summertime – just the vocal track that you could tell she had sung to a simple guitar backing. I took the vocals and went about mapping them into a new song with different chords and rhythms. This was difficult because the original take wasn’t sung to a mechanical bmp, and her phrasing wasn’t as sure of itself because it was a demo. Nevertheless I got a very electronic and moody backing track done and sent the mash-up back to her. Fortunately she liked it and we went ahead with a release, which is what you hear here. Henriette did express that she wanted to do a stronger vocal take more suited to the mood of my music. We did a little work on that, but due to complexity of life, the project has been postponed to an unknown date.
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This song, depending on how you look at it, can be considered criminal. The story starts one evening hanging around some young college acquaintances who had returned with meals from a certain ‘multinational corporation franchise meal retailer’. One of the bonus toy items with the meal was a CD – a cross promotional audio track from a different partner corporation aimed at a selling narratives and products to children, tweens and teens. Acquiring the CD I was struck by the monologue which was full of insidious references to fear-based-conformity and ego-mania. These are the tools used to snare consumers to a brand which is counter-evolutionary. Naturally I thought I could send this up. The result is here in the form of re-contextualising the monologue highlighting it’s hidden menace. It’s not a very musical track, more of a noisy spew.
vulcanella self destruct – featuring Adalita (Magic Dirt)
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In 2003 a government youth initiative called ‘Noise’ ran a series of remix competitions. One of the tracks on offer was Magic Dirt’s ‘Vulcanella’. I took most of the vocals and one of the guitar riffs and decided to take the song in a different direction (rather than just re-ordering the original). Adalita’s rant is framed more in a lucid context, which cues the building atmospheric plod. There comes a point where a release is achieved, so in this case the response at the end of the song is annihilation or absolution via obliteration. This song has been popular with my friends, but I couldn’t satisfy them with even a placing in the competition.
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This heavy, sonically large and progressive track was inspired by the Spanish train terrorism attack of 2004 that caused an anti-unilateral-war political swing in that country. I had originally intended to have some fairly political lyrics for this song, but due to lack of confidence and equipment the vocals were never recorded. Hence why it is an instrumental. This song was the first instance of creating heavy rhythm guitars entirely out of samples and effects – that is, there are zero real guitars in this song. There are many newer songs in progress which feature this technique to keep an ear out for…
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This is inspired by James DXU’s Fluid Filled Lungs, a beautiful dark electronica song. James and I have a long history working on projects related to each other and in 2004 I felt owed him some remixes. To juxtapose the original I decided to make a song in sarcastic take on garage-indie rock, a style which continues to be very popular on Triple J. Afterall, it wasn’t hard to do because it was all made in my bedroom! But, there is a little sonic-cookie in there to ‘widen’ the experience, well beyond the bedroom.
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This is the other track inspired by James DXU’s Fluid Filled Lungs. This time the theme is interpreted in dark atmospheric dub that flutters up to a decisive drum and bass flight. The vocal ‘Today is a fine day… to play god’ first appeared in and old song of mine called ‘First Day of School’ which James sampled and used in the Fluid Filled Lungs song. So in truly clichéd fashion I stole it back.
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The third remix of James DXU’s ‘Turning Tides’ material was of his co-op with Perth hip-hop troupe Clandestine. I took the vocal bile of MC’s Graphic and Tommahawk and did some rather odd pre-edits. Cutting out all the gaps between the words and also producing tracks entirely made of the MC’s inhalation sounds I had some frantic material to build a song out of. The end result gets pretty close to destructive evil and rage. I’m not sure why, but it is what it is!
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Back in 1997, which my musical friend Organic and I were creating a large number of demo songs under a project name of Audiophonica. Most of these demos were very short, only a few bars long. Occasionally I mine the nostalgia by going through the old demos. Sometimes I find things I really like and want to finish off. The problem is that most Organic’s demo material makes me want to complete it – so I had to decide on one to get the motivation out of my system. ‘Find’ was a little single pattern arrangement of heavenly pads with a simple house beat. The song that came out of it follows closely the old style of techno music we used to create in Audiophonica. Unashamedly uplifting dance music.
Well, there you go: that’s quite a varied bag of songs. These are by no means my best work, but serve as unhinged curiosities in themselves. Subscribe to the podcast, because whenever I’m working on music there will be free material to be offered.
