Gnome Valley
Gnome Valley uses recordings of a beach in Tasmania and a forest in Margaret River, some stuff I liked but hadn't used yet. The goal was to depict the little conglomerate of gnomes first getting infected by the fungus - which is represented with more distorted and electronic sounds in contrast to the sounds of nature. The piece uses heavy down-sampling and saturation on all the pads, which were selected from various improvised lines of music (1). The video game inspired synth that first disrupts the sounds of nature gives way to a pulse stretched version of another song I wrote in 2022. The song was a demo piece for a dancer that got rejected, so I used Ableton's warp function to distort it into similar noises to the video game-like synth (2). The track was then sent to a glitch machine, turned up 36 dB, limited down 20 and then put through a 50/50 wet/dry reverb to become the wonderful noise it is now. I took inspiration from some older Nintendo songs (I'll get more specific about which songs in Mariachi Mycelium). The Gameboy Advanced era of Nintendo excited a lot of Japanese composers and was seen as a challenge - who could write the best song with only 8-bit sounds and 6 audio channels. This lead to a lot of use of implied harmony and more experimental chords being used to to make up for the loss of harmonic potential, the best example being the chord I to chord bVII 11 in the opening title of The Legend of Zelda (which wasn't a GBA game but same same). The music focuses on rhythmic playing to support percussion lines and harmony lines make chordal leaps within that rhythmic pulse. I used a similar idea with the bass part to this song, its not playable but it creates most of the harmonic tensions and release, and a harmonic tension that evolves with the descending bass line that enters halfway through the song. Most of the distortion came from Mercurial's 'Greed Smasher', 'Chorus WS-1', and 'TSC 808 core'. All plugins that aimed to copy classic heavy rock effects pedals and brought less digital sound to the distortion. The parts that represented the fungus, however, used less of these plugins and focused more on the built in Ableton effects; mainly the 'Digital Clip' saturator. This focused on giving the fungus parts more of a digital sound and really differentiated the two textures, even though they were both so distorted. I did do some more stuff but a lot of these songs used similar techniques, so we'll cover it in later paragraphs. Mariachi Mycelium
I mentioned the effect of Nintendo on video game music in the 90s earlier - the challenge of writing for small devices lead to a signature sound: fast harmonies, rhythmic playing, with a defined and forward melody over the top. When newer composers joined, like Junichi Masuda, they took to composing in that style rather than challenging themselves to push a classical style into a Gameboy (see: Youtube link). The Pokemon games doubled as a passion project for Masuda, who was actually the director and lead designer but played the trombone and had a passion for Stravinsky. He developed his music through the next few games until he created the (at the time controversial) incredible Pokemon Black and White soundtrack. Which featured my favourite piece: Battle! Legendary Pokemon (see: Youtube link). Mariachi Mycelium opens with a cut up drum sample that depicts the digital fungus breaking its way into the gnomes. The bassline from the previous song is an extension of the one in Gnome Valley and the melodic contour of the bassline creates a 3/3/2 quaver pulse, (which I think is funny because Lindsay once told me he hated that pulse). The 3/3/2 quaver pulse also helps push the piece forward - Normally I would use an odd time signature to create a sense of urgency, a common video game technique, but to keep the heavy rock style of this song I wanted to keep the 4-4 time signature. The subdivisions functioned as a way to make it feel like I was playing in an odd time, pushing the energy of the piece forward, without throwing out the drum rhythms. The drum part to this song functions as the melody, it uses multiple samples from a pack called 'breakcore won't get you laid' that I got free from reddit. The drumline stammers, glitches and occasionally reverses and I brought it a tiny bit more forward in the mix to add some focus to it. At 3 minutes, the racing noise returns (1) with a melody in counterpoint added. I liked the new motive that comes in at the last part because it seems 'wrong' to me. I've always written with a sonata like exposition -> development -> recapitulation treatment of my motives but this style of fast electronic music really rewards simple motivic additions. The piece finishes with a dull groan from a synth which gives a nice fade to black vibe, like an intermission at a theatre show. I took that opportunity to play the other songs I wrote this year: Daruma, Saga Load and Blasted in the Blaezatorium before playing the final two songs of the invasion of gnomesville EP. Daruma
Daruma was the first breakcore song I considered a success. The song has a lot of synths that slowly pan slightly from left to right, along with their slow evolutions. The piece was inspired by inpeace by sewerslvt (see: YouTube video). Which was also the song that inspired me to start writing in this style. Similarly, I included a lot of extra sounds (1) and layered synth parts (2) to create a lot of space in the piece. Each synth also featured my 'synth mover' (3) device which is just a bit of chorus and a slow and minimal pan LFO. I also focused on maintaining a standard Amen Break pulse throughout the piece, even when cutting up and rearranging the drum samples (4). 1. Added noise daruma_noise.mp3 1.1 Added noise in context daruma_noise_context.mp3 The song features samples from Pokemon that are saturated, pitched down and warped to avoid any major lawsuit. I was feeling really sentimental with this one and for some reason it came out as Pokemon samples - the first sound is from a Pokemon called maractus (5), that likes to dance as a way of keeping itself and its loved ones safe, and the second sample is from a Pokemon called morellul (6), that lulls people to sleep and eats them. I wrote this song when I was trying to get more work and money for the baby my wife and I were about to have, and it was one of the first times I wrote without thinking about chord functions and motivic development: I ended up just playing and recording what felt like I felt. I wanted to capture the feeling of being too busy to see a loved one for the sake of looking after them. Not being able to see my wife because I need to get money, or the long drive home from a night shift where I know she's already asleep and I won't see her until she's leaving to work the next morning. I wanted it to feel like that feeling was okay and the sadness of it is what will end it. We will see each other again and still love each other because we don't want to keep working like this.
Saga Load
Saga load is an easy listening song I wrote because I needed a break. At this point I had already written Daruma and Blasted in the Blaezatorium and the film score was turning into a nightmare. Saga Load started with chords and then a melody before I started cutting up drum samples beneath it, but rather than filling it with more and more I decided to play around with instrumentation and repeat the long melody line across different instruments. Then played with the drum samples and added a quote from an anime I was watching at the time. Nothing too meaningful, just something fun and rewarding. I get a lot of personality into these pieces and it makes me less wary of doing something 'too different' within the piece. Like the ending motive which seems to be a different song before the piece just fades out. With this piece, I focused more on evolving synths and some less standard drum lines. (I would have examples but my hard drive broke and it was lost (1)) For the drums I stopped following the basic amen break pattern and double some odd phrases to put the drums on the off or up beats every so often. It took me a while to get it sounding seamless but it definitely paid off. Blasted in the Blaezatorium
This piece was dramatically inspired by Hawatari Nioku Centi by Maximum the Hormone (see: YouTube video). I love this band because they will often have hard changes in their music and a lot of seemingly random melody changes. Before I wrote this piece, however, I had to ask my mum about a thing I made called "crazy loud music". As a kid I refused to use coloured pencils for some reason, but one day when I was 4 years old, I covered an A4 sheet of paper entirely in scribbles of every coloured pencil I had and showed it to my mum. According to her I said, "This is crazy loud music. I want to play it." At the time I hadn't done any music and didn't really have a big musical influence in my family, but mum wanted to see me make music. She ended up really sad because she'd saved the sheet of paper for years but lost it when we moved house - it would of made such a good graphic score. She does not like Maximum the Hormone but this is my updated version of crazy loud music. I guess I wrote this song for my mum even though I know she won't like it. But she likes Kings of Leon so what does she know. Love you Mum. Getting into the nitty-gritty, this piece of music (according to a friend) is in the genre 'shitcore'. Breakcore that is shit (see: YouTube video). The issue with writing in this style, is trying to mix and master a piece that purposefully sounds 'bad'. I would consider the volume and over saturation 'bad' in this context, but there is a good reason for that. Similarly with acoustic instruments (maybe even more so), electronic instruments with a lot of processing change timbre as they get higher/lower and softer/louder. To get the 'crazy loud' sound things need to be really loud, even a multiband EQ dampens some of the overdriven sound I love so the piece had to be loud and a little unbalanced (1). The unbalance mainly came from trying to give my ears a break while writing this piece. BIOMECHA
BIOMECHA brings us back to the invasion of gnomesville. The song features both alarms and delicate singing samples. The alarms evolve and move constantly whereas the voice maintains a single ostinato the entire time (1). I did this so that the alarms, the more mechanical sound, would sound more like random and fluid like an organic creature, and the voice would eventually sound like the haunting whirr of a machine. The natural and unnatural have merged and swapped places as the gnomes begin to have their minds replaced by the parasites. I was running out of ideas by time I got to this track, my set for the bird featured a few other tracks that were not suitable for my recital and making something unique within the same genre was becoming a big ask. Luckily I saved a video of alternate pentatonic scales a while ago, hence the heavy pentatonic focus in this piece. To help me get the 17 times production speed I mentioned earlier I needed a very formulaic approach; one that I learned from Alice Humphries: Limitations -> Motifs -> improv -> fixing. I select the instruments and tonalities I wanted, made 3 or 4 melody lines and then began filling it in based on that guide. I'm not sure the exact cliché but this song feels like I really leaned on a cliché to get it sounding finished. I really like the 'screamer' synth I made for this piece and I just wanted to mention that it's good. Posthumous Parasite
This piece reuses the drum fill intro but doesn't stammer this time as the fungus has taken over and naturalised. The drum part of this song isn't sampled but rather lots of little samples from the Metal Gear Solid games that I've turned into a drum/SFX machine (1). The song really leans on the video game style of my writing and really pulls a lot of my energy forward. The piece uses similar distorted bass and volume-effected timbre I mentioned in the previous pieces, while also focusing on my melody driven style. The B section features more sound samples and more irregular drum samples after being inspired by Kono Yubi Tomare by JUUNA (see: youtube video) (2). At 3:50 the piece falls into a more chaotic section and gradually becomes more out of key and time. It finished with a final soft vocal part that blasts into the last chorus - which is incredibly common for anime music and I'll talk about it more with Pyrophyte. After finishing all this music, I sprained my ankle from sitting down for so long. So my conclusion is - don't write and produce at 17 times your normal speed for 4 days. |
1. Improv pads and bassline
2. The processing on the demo song
1, Racing machine's processing
2. Layered Synths - The top two are the two main synths, with the lower tracks entering and exiting ad hoc.
3. Synth Mover
4. Cut up drum samples
5. pokemon_cries_-_maractus_[2023-09-17_135821].wav6. pokémon_sounds_collection_-_morelull_shiinotic_[2023-09-17_140059].wav
1. Corrupt files
1. getting things loud
1. Audio samples are alarms and the MIDI is voice
1. Metal Gear Solid drumkit
2. Chaotic Drums
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Pyrophyte was written for the animation concert in an effort to meet an inspiration of mine, Kevin Penkin. I pushed myself to write for an orchestra and focus on more rhythmically complex harmonies, because I'd been telling myself I would do it for the past year and a bit. I wrote the song inspired by Adabana Necromancy for Zombie Land Saga, because it used an orchestra but focused more on a big band and extravagant sound - plus I really like the song. I was new to writing harmonies like this so the song is became very derivative. I was also trying to stick to the signature form and tempo of anime style music so the song was almost identical. To counter this I took some inspiration from Other Side of the Wall from Princess Principal because it captured some of the energy I wanted to put into the song. After writing the piece, rehearsing it and getting some feedback from Kevin, the piece was done and I'm pretty sure it's perfect.
When it came to the recital, I did not want to organise 30 musicians, so I reduced it down to as few instruments as I could. I focused on keep all the instruments the same for GPI and this piece so I already had a string synth to substitute the string section, and a lot of the part was doubled by the flutes anyway. The Clarinet section absorbed some of the sax and oboe motives, mainly filling in chords where the sax and trumpet heavy melody lines couldn't. The horns stayed the same as they were the shine of the piece, with voice and drumkit also being essential. The piece required a small bit of tuning when I bought it to the orchestra but mainly just issues with articulation. I spent so long and learned so much from this piece I had every part memorised and could rewrite it easily, and notice my mistakes pretty quickly. In the end, this piece has been so rewarding. It was the first piece in classical style (if you can call it that) that I really enjoyed hearing. |
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