08 February, 2010

Album

In those restless gaps in the middle of the night*, washed in the faint glow of my screen, I make music. I produce a lot of bad music that should never be heard by others' ears, but some of it turns out to be fairly decent. When all I had was an analog bass guitar and guitar, I was frequently frustrated by my inability to record and multitrack, but once I procured a virtual synthesizer suite, I was suddenly freed of this constraint. The immediate consequence was a lot of noise and I produced such tracks as "Sneeze Bucket Hat", "Los Pantalones Brillante" and "Pomegranite Ballet". But time progressed and my skills improved and I eventually found that I have 3+ hours worth of music that I think is good enough that I don't mind other people hearing it. This music tends to fall into 2 categories: crunchy, fast electronica smashing subgenres from 8-bit to breakcore jazz together and a smoother music of mostly classical instrumentation running over hip hop/industrial types of backgrounds. I could probably pull 3 full-length albums out of everything, but it is only recently that I finally decided to make an album out of the latter genre.

Toaster Sunshine - "Arc"
1. Oxidative Periphery
2. A Retrospective Abnegation of the Postmodernist Solipism
3. Swiftly Daftly Boom Boom Doom
4. Density Earache
5. Dishware Flossery
6. Additivity (Damitol)
7. Suburban Dirge
8. Erosion
9. Thermal Counterpart
10. Thunder Melted Your Words
11. Läpikuultava Syndan**
12. Aftermath
13. The Nineteen Shades of Concrete Unbeknownst to Sunlight
14. Saccharine Nocturne
15. Somewhere the Magic Happy

This is just a working title, and all the songs are in rough draft form. I think "Retrospective Abnegation of the Postmodernist" needs some more slices mixed in to make it more interesting (it was composed entirely out of about a dozen samples from Shostakovich and Bartoks' string quartets), "Suburban Dirge"'s violins need EQ tweaking, and I have noticed that there is a high pitched percussive artifact in "Thermal Counterpart" that needs to be found and dealt with. Also, something weird happened with "Saccharine Nocturne" upon conversion to an .mp3 that I'll have to track down.

Anyway, if you'd like to listen to the raw tracks in all their muddy glory, you can download a zipped version of the above album at: http://drop.io/ji4trez#. If you do so, please, by all means, criticize it as bluntly as you'd like.

*Notwithstanding the background music I tend to produce whenever there's a guitar handy, despite whatever else is going on around me.
**This translates to 'translucent heart'.

2 comments:

Antti said...

"**This translates to 'translucent heart'."

Well.. it _almost_ does. 'Syndan' is not Finnish, I'm afraid. You got the translucence right, though, so good on you. :) 'Sydän' is what you were after.

Btw, my cousin's husband runs an small record label as a side gig. *nudge nudge, wink wink*

Toaster Sunshine said...

I apologize for my bastardization of 'Sydän'; my Finnish has been garbled through the screen of stubborn parents who didn't want to teach it to their children.

A record label is probably a couple months down the road, as I'm going to see if I cannot cajole local players to re-record with me with actual instruments on most of the tracks with MIDI strings, but I do indeed appreciate the advocacy.