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Download: First Impressions Always Count

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I hide in warm clothes
You hide in your briefcase
I guess we can call off
Our little battle of truth (game set match!)
We sit here and hope
That the birds don’t come down, down
And pick apart our stale bread offerings
We of the infantile narratives

Slay people with lasers of truth
Yet cower in the soft warm glow of TV.
Worry about the garden -
Don’t worry about the lasers!

I’m snug and warm
And you’re financially sound
Don’t push it.

First Impressions Always Count was first composed in Renoise during late 2004. Therefore, it has taken nearly 5 years of chipping away to finally get this song finished – all for a measly three and a half minutes of music! Talk about inefficiency! The reality of the situation was more to do with being very fussy about the quality of the vocal takes, and working the strength of my voice up to a point where I could easily do what the melody required of me. It’s still not perfect, but it’s at a level where I can walk away from it and live with the result. I don’t regard myself as much of a singer, but hopefully the musical ideas here are strong enough to hold the whole experience together and pass as good music. That’s for you to decide.

This song is the first track off an album I am working on called The Paradox. The songs off this work in progress are in a much similar stasis that First Impressions was in for a long time – the music is complete but the vocals have yet to be set in stone. With some luck, the whole project will be finished off sometime in 2010. The music will be much the same style as this piece, dramatic dark pop with a whole range of electronica influences. These songs have been some of my most personal and introspective music I’ve ever done, but done with the aim of being ‘open’ enough for people to have their own interpretation. Explaining the words anymore than that would miss the point and would hamper your imagination conjuring up all sorts of cool images and stories for the music.

So, download and listen to First Impressions Always Count, and let me know your impressions!

EDIT 09-10-28:

After some feedback and reflection I decided that my mastering approach to this song was way, way off and too clouded in digital exciters and saturation. I’ve went for a more organic approach and eventually ended up with results I’m most happy with. If you’ve downloaded the file previous to this for your collection I recommend that you download the file again to get the new version, the best version. Sorry for not getting it right in the first place! I hope you find, like I do, that this version is “correctly devastating”.

After nearly 10 years since its creation, I’ve finally accepted what is will be and released my album Puddles free on the web:

mr_mark_dollin – Puddles

Personally, I find it somewhat hard to avoid cringing when listening to these songs, perhaps in some places more than others. It’s like looking at a reflection of yourself when you’re 18 and all you can see are the faults. That personal cringe factor has prevented me from putting this music out there, keeping it filed in the ‘embarrassing journey-man years’ category. It’s a drama of me awkwardly finding my own creative voice against the odds of immaturity, lo-fi equipment, and being just a little too under the influence of other popular music at the time. I haven’t really been able to share this music without being apologetic for it, and even now despite it being from an entirely different phase of my life I still feel awkwardly responsible for it. Still, you can’t pre-judge your own work on behalf of an audience – it’s up to them to like it or not for themselves. So it’s time to set it free, and to move on.

To explain what this album is all about I have to go back to where it all began – 1996 was the year I started to write music on Fast Tracker II and a lot of that music was written with or alongside Warwick Newell, a good musical buddy from high school. Warwick and I learned a lot of our early studio and composing chops emulating electronic dance music that was exploding and mutating throughout the 90s. I think deep down it was initially my hope that Warwick and I would be a dual producer act much like Itch-e and Sratch-e or maybe even like the Chemical Brothers. Our act name was ‘Audiophonica’, although that meant squat to anyone else in suburban Taree – just two more computer dorks who loved techno. Life as a tennage student and life in general doesn’t favor these sorts of ambitions and despite a few projects we finished most of the time we had false starts. Upon leaving my hometown going to University I was stuck on my own and not too sure what to do with all these ideas. Eventually (I’m always slow with these realisations) I knew I had to do a solo album and put together something that best showcased all the different styles I liked to do and something the really flowed well as a long-play listen. It was my half of Audiophonica,  but striving to be better.

Part of the naivety of this album is that a lot of my musical influences were worn on my sleeve, loud and proud – that’s generally something you try to avoid as a composer with a more mature intention. So as a result, a lot of this music seems oddly dated or like bad photocopies of not-so-strong popular musical ideas. Genre wise its a mix of techno, trance, breaks, metal, ambient, pop, industrial, indie rock and prog, and it has it’s fair share of 90s style genre-hopping within the one song. The vocals don’t have confidence, and often I awkwardly took on voices other than my own due to not even knowing what my own voice was or how to use it. Sometimes I think I’d like to re-do it all, but I’d change the songs so much they wouldn’t resemble the originals any more. Again, it’s better to just leave these as they are, representative of that time and who I was. It was a much darker time for me as a person, and all that aggression, sadness and weirdness went straight into the music. If it sounds awkward, it is because I was awkward.

Technically speaking the odds were stacked against me in terms of trying to pull off an ambitious sounding sonic presentation with very limited equipment and skill. The bulk of the work was made on a primitive bit of DOS software called Fast Tracker II or FT2. With a stereo field of about 80%, zero sample interpolation, 16bit processing, 32 channels of mono-polyphony, and no modern bells and whistles like DSP processing or recording synchronization – FT2 was the beastly lo-fi software used to make all these songs happen. To get anything more fancy beyond panning and volume settings there was tracker-esq trickery going (pattern effect commands) but a lot of effecting was done with sample pre-production: pre-rendering down effects like reverb, filtering and other treatments. The lack of recording sync made the vocal tracking a nightmare. I had to guess the relative pitch and timing, recording blind to silence hoping that the take would match up to the song. I think I even dropped some backing track parts to cassette just to get a sense of what I was doing. On a student budget I could only afford a very basic $30 desk-stand small diaphragm condenser microphone plugged straight into cheap as chips soundcard. My monitors were either low end Philips headphones, or these no-name ‘multi-media’ speakers that came with a lot of computers in the 90s. Talk about low fidelity! It’s a miracle that any of this music sounds even half decent. But somehow, if you listen past all the sludgy bass, noise and general mix shambles – these songs still hold together as music to be enjoyed. Just turn your volume down a little in case you’re sent deaf or your speakers blow up.

So all apologies aside, I hope you enjoy Puddles, or at least find it as an interesting primitative precursor to where I am now. Maybe I got it right in the first place – I still get people saying their favourite songs are off this album, or of even earlier work. Ah, what can you do? Put it out there!

Download the new song by myself and Mick Rippon – Our Blood Is Black

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This was composed in seven swaps between Mick and myself over the last few weeks. The style of music is a strange mix of chiptune, breakcore, and a weird dark angry Arabic scale meshed into a pop drama with sung vocals and lead guitar. While on the surface it may appear as another one of my epic dark pop songs, it has got its lion share of Mick’s classic composing styles, with ‘tracker’ style strings, structure and lead synth melodies. The mix work was also 50/50, and Mick played a big part in bringing out the dynamics of the piece.

The song had a bit of an unusual birth: I was mind numbingly bored at work and decided to open up Renoise and have a play with making hand drawn waveform instruments. After tracking a simple drone I added a little Arabic chiptune melody. Feeling it was pretty one dimensional I posted the file on the #renoise IRC channel and see if anyone wanted to co-op on it. Mick went for it and before long we had some seriously accelerated song development happening. And it was turning out surprisingly dark and angular, especially in contrast to some of Mick’s upbeat music.

The Arabic feel inspired me to think about Dubai and some of the horror stories I’ve heard about that place. I remember once seeing that they had so much money they could afford to build this massive indoor ski field, right in the middle of this desert country. It’s the kind of decadence that seems to have little to do with reality. It made me think of this bizarre love hate relationship the west has Arabic oil power – both a reverence of decadence, but a grudging dependence on this economic and cultural lubricant that is oil. So the lyrics came from that tension, a kind of corrupt fatalism that could really apply to any sort of trade based drama.

The song was mastered in Reaper digitally, and then recorded to my tape setup (the Tascam BR20T calibrated with Ampex 456 tape). We both chose to have a very clear and dynamic sounding mix and master, which during the loud sections are at around K-12 leveling. If it seems a touch quiet to begin with, please turn it up nice and loud and enjoy the dynamics!

Enjoying my new monitors I thought I’d take a break from the heavy involvement in an album project I’m working on and go back to revisit a track I never got right in the first place. Rewind back to 2003 and we have a song called Vulcanella Self Destruct! Made as an entry to a Triple J remix competition, I took Adalita’s (from Magic Dirt) vocals plus the songs chords and built a lumbering industrial wasteland groove around it. I didn’t win the competition, but I liked the cathartic dirge the song ended up becoming – the only trouble was that I never got the mix right with the limitations I had at the time. Now that I have an accurate mixing/mastering setup I can finally get the beast to behave how my ears always wanted it to. So as a point of comparison I’d firstly like to share the original 2003 mix: listen at your own peril! – get it here. What follows is the new definitive version…

I feel it necessary to discuss some technical issues here, so if you find this stuff boring read on to the links and grab the songs. To start things off I upped the entire mix from 32bit 44.1khz sampling to 32bit 96khz sampling, which is what all my projects have been in for the last year or so. The higher sample rate brings new life and vitality to some rather ‘cheap’ sounds and effects that I used in the original, even though it’s a pretty noisy song. This allowed me to really give everything a good polish and take my time with the monitors to get the placement and tone of everything just right. Then again at 96khz I made up a mastering chain of good plugins, the best stuff I got at the moment. So my 96khz mix and master was complete, and I was happy enough with it. However, the trouble with using 96khz is that you have to at the end of the process get the song back down to 16bit 44.1khz sampling for mp3 and CD playback. I’ve been doing this step in the work using a pure digital process: i.e. mathematically using software to upsample then downsample the audio to get the sample rate remotely representing the original high quality mix, and a process called dithering to move down from 32bit to 16bit. Despite the quality of such digital processes the mathematics isn’t perfect and the sound is slightly compromised as a result. It’s good enough for what I’ve been doing so far, but I’ve wondered how I can get around this downsampling/dithering problem.

This is where my new reel to reel tape deck comes into the picture! I set up the Tascam BR-20T with some high quality tape to record my 32bit 96khz master audio file. The soundcard I’m using is the M-Audio Delta 1010 (which isn’t jitter free, see more on jitter for an entirely other technical issues) connected with balanced cables to the tape deck. The BR-20T (pictured above) is a last generation mastering tape deck and the specs are pretty fantastic (e.g. low noise) – I used the IEC EQ profile which is an industry standard for tape. After fiddling a bit to get everything calibrated I recorded a clean take of my high quality mix and checked it on headphones. After rewinding I opened up a new blank file on my computer set to 16bit 44.1khz sampling. I hit record on the computer and played the recording off the tape – so I was recording the analog tape sound back into digital sampling. This was so I didn’t have to do any editing on the digital file (aside from top and tail edits) and I didn’t need to do anything to it that would muck with the sound digitally after the recording. Playing back the end result was quite magical. As some of you may know, tape introduces all sorts of magic to audio – it changes the dynamics in nice ways; it smooths harsh sounds; and it makes anything in the mix that has an organic quality to it (like vocals for example) sound warmer and real. On the other hand the EQ profile and limits of the tape format plainly showed that I had lost some of the crispness in the high end frequencies, and had lost some of the sub frequencies. So if I felt I really needed those parts of the sound I’d have to be mindful that the tape looses those aspects a bit at the benefit of producing a really lovely organic sound. Already I’m thinking that tape would be appropriate for some genres and styles of sound, and for others not so much.

I decided that I’d let people decide for themselves what they think of the difference. So I have made up not one, but two versions of the new mix/master of Vulcanella Self Destruct. The first is the ‘regular digital method’ of using the software to do the downsampling and dithering; the second is the tape mastering version. For web, I’ve made them into 192kbps mp3s, which you can download here:

Vulcanella Self Destruct – Digital Version
Vulcanella Self Destruct – Tape Version

I’m interested to see what you think of the comparison. Can you pick the difference? Which do you prefer? I’m also interested to see what you think of the song. It’s certainly nothing I would ‘compose’ these days – definitely represents a different era of headspace. But I do think now the idea is properly ‘represented’ for what its worth. Give us a shout if you like what you hear.

Incidentally, Mick Rippon has been testing some new web software for my mastering website that allows for streaming A-B comparrisons. We thought we’d test it out on the two versions of this song. You can try it out here!

Link to YouTube.

Iain MacKay has recently got his creative video gears going again and finished a lovely video matched to my music. The song he chose is called Sub Conscious and is from last year’s album 3 Smargaid Maerd. The dark moody music give Iain’s images a doomed nostalgia filtered through a montaged dream consciousness. The work, I believe, will be on display this Friday at Armidale’s NERAM gallery as part of a new media exhibition. It’s quite exciting to finally have one of my songs have a proper video to it and to finally get on YouTube. Iain has a whole stack of other works that are well worth checking out, as well as more in the pipeline.

Iain and I will be playing live as Ghost Inputs again this year too, so stay tuned for dates.