EDM

Hypnos

After posting Tori’s Reef, I looked back at the genres I’d been writing for the previous week: Classical, Chill, Deep Ambient, Big Beat, Synth Wave, Classical, Chill… I decided that it would be fun to do something a bit more dancey, but maybe not as adventurous as Mind Your Own. Since I’d gotten a lot of positive feedback on D-13, I decided to go back to house. The fracturing of genres into micro-genres is one of the things I’ve struggled with for a long time. Even as a DJ, it was difficult for me to decide when something was Deep … Continue reading

Mind Your Own

I love Big Beat. Fatboy Slim, Mint Royale, Chemical Brothers, Prodigy… its’ one of my favorite genres. When energy is needed, whether it’s on the dancefloor or just vacuuming the living room, there’s something about the frenetic chaos and multilayered samples that just grabs me and gets me moving. Whether or not I intended for this to be Big Beat, and how successful I was in the end, remains to be seen… I’ll need some listening time. It veers wildly into old school jazz-funk or R&B, but the sample over the top of everything just sort of nails it all … Continue reading

Sineposts

Now here’s a track that’s certainly adequate. I’ve satisfied the requirement of Song-A-Day by writing, recording, and posting. It’s more involved than many that I’ve done before, and maybe even better produced. So why am I negative about it? Because it’s not what’s in my head; it’s not living up to its potential. Now, often when I have this feeling about a piece, it’s a failure on my part. It’s missing something, but I don’t know what, or I do know what but don’t know how to do it. That’s not the case here. My negativity is entirely the product … Continue reading

D-13

With yesterday’s production requiring a bit more time in the morning for finalizing, I didn’t get started on today’s track in earnest until the early evening. There were a couple of false starts, mostly because the lyrics were awful, and then I decided to go ahead and use the song prompt provided by a friend after hearing day 1: “I would like to hear how you destoy the enemy.” Initially, the lyrics you hear were only going to be an introduction or chorus, and I’d planned on some kind of sarcastic take on Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and other … Continue reading

Blue Saffron

This track is largely a continuation of yesterday with two significant distinctions. First, I had at least some nebulous idea of where I was going and how I was going to get there. Second, where everything in Agnostic Prophet came from software, Blue Saffron comes entirely from hardware synths and drum machines. That’s getting to be a pretty blurred distinction, though. Many modern hardware synths are little more than dedicated computers that run software synths. Where you draw the line is subjective, and the online arguments about one vs the other are as predictable as they are pointless. I’ve never … Continue reading