Clockwork Daydream

Big Cycle Beat

This is a track that I cooked up last night with Bryan Bacon. We've been talking for some time about getting an electronic side project together under the name The Mars Underground. I don't know if that will necessarily grow out of this, but it's a pretty damn cool track, all the same.

I was going to make a joke and call this "chillstep" because it's basically chillout electronica, but I added the dubstep bass, because I just bought NI Razor, and I wanted to play with it. Razor can do a whole lot more than wobble basses, but it does make building really great ones stupidly easy. Anyhow, out of curiosity, I googled the term "chillstep", and sure enough ... there actually is a such thing. Proving again, that if synths and a drum machines are involved then someone, somewhere has described it by taking any adjective or noun from the dictionary at random and slapping "-step" on the end.

Springstone

Springstone

"It's like mother nature is makin' sweet love to the breeze while all the little fishies groove on it" - Bender "Bending" Rodriguez

It's the first day of spring here in Huntsville, Alabama. It's that magical bepollen'd span of about 6 weeks between "I can't feel my toes" and "I just soaked my car seat with ass-sweat" ... and it is absolutely gorgeous.

I wrote this song almost exactly a year ago. As the name implies, it is a celebration of the returning yearly crescendo of life ... and being open to that in a particularly cosmic way. This is the first song I ever did where didn't resort to canned drum loops ... those are real drums, though I did cheat a little, by making my own loops :-)

Oh, also, that picture was taken from my front yard ... actually around the same time as I was writing this. It's not photoshopped, it was really that vivid. It was all the way across the sky. I do not know what it means, but I did write a song about it.

Day Zero

Day Zero

If you have the chance to be somewhere that you don't really belong, take it.

I've been lucky enough to have spent my entire life getting into one situation after another that I really had no business being in. The reward is always worth the risk, even if it only consists of having a good story at the end of the day.

This is a track called "Day Zero" that I wrote on Christmas Eve 2009. I get a lot of songwriting done around the holidays because (at least usually) I have a fair amount of vacation to "use or lose" by that time of year. It's a little uptempo meditation on new beginnings. It's a little old. I've had it posted on myspace for a while so probably if you already know me, you've heard it before. It seemed appropriate for a Monday morning, and apropos to some hot-mess I'm dealing with in my day job (for however much longer that lasts).

bling! (ooh-aah-zooma mix)

Big Cycle Beat

This is more than likely the greatest hip-hop coffee mug solo of all time.

Christmas Break 2008: two bored kids + music geek dad + lots of free time = this.

So, what do we have here? This is one from the archives for sure, can't believe this was almost 3 years ago. Anyhow, well ... that's Andrea singing random syllables into auto-tune there. That's uh ... me ... dad ... singing "bling", "hooooo", "ooh", "aah", "haaaaaah", and "with my mind on my money and my money on my mind". That's all three of us doing hand claps, and overdubbed trumpet into a good ol' SM-57 ... the aforementioned coffee-cup ... random other stuff too.

I look at it this way: how many kids can look back on their Christmas break from when they were in elementary school and say ... well one year we made the craziest hip-hop beat with dad ... yeah. I'm either the coolest dad in the world or the weirdest. I'll take either. Or both.

Parenthood: I did it for the lulz, apparently :-)

The Mellow Sturgeon: a Canine Odyssey in Two Parts

The Mellow Sturgeon

Whatever it is dogs dream about, this is the soundtrack.

This is a chilly chill remix of a jam my band does called "The Murky Sturgeon", a rocking number indeed. This one, not so much.

It has some cool stuff. First, tempo-synced lawn sprinkler samples. Clearly "I haz them", so let's just get past that obvious bit of awesomeness. The plucky guitar sound is not a guitar. It is a "vintage" Yamaha FB-01, that I've had since I was like 15. The clicky evolving thing is the game of life running inside reaktor. It also has me, playing a real trumpet, into my new-ish ribbon mic. Though it sounds like a drum machine, that's me playing actual drums, intentionally trying to get the raunchiest room sound possible, then running it through the effects.

This song was written by Wayne Thompson of the Thumbless Hitchhikers. I'm appropriating it here for my own chilled out purposes, but if you wanna know the dude who really wrote it, that's your guy.

Catharsis

Catharsis

Catharsis or katharsis (Greek: κάθαρσις) is a Greek word meaning "cleansing" or "purging". It is derived from the verb καθαίρειν, kathairein, "to purify, purge," and it is related to the adjective καθαρός, katharos, "pure or clean."

Sometimes in purifying ourselves, we scrub away the dirt that made us clean. Making your voice whole to scream righteous against the world. Dig it.