This is part one of a series of posts that will detail the creation of my album Coding My Words To Cover You for Archipel’s Soundtracks sublabel. If you’d like to learn more about the concept behind Soundtracks, you should go here. This part will cover my thoughts on the overall concept and list of restrictions and directions that the album included.

Theme: Cypher

Album title: Coding my Words To Cover You

I studied Writing and Linguistics in school, and these two things, the name and title, immediately spoke to me and created a solid theme to work with when constructing the overall album. I knew that I needed to try and convey these two concepts through the music. weaving together disparate emotions with words and sounds to form a sort of safety net for the listener.

This album was written in the 3 months between my work on LEGO Universe ending, and beginning preparation for my move to Baltimore, to work on Elder Scrolls: Online (I am a sound designer.). I mention this because it was a very emotional and confusing time for me. I had lived in Colorado for 14 years, and my entire world was contained within that state. I have to admit that it is a wondrous place to be, and the Denver/Boulder area are probably two of the greatest places that you can live in America. By deciding to move away, I was, in my mind, essentially abandoning the life I had spent so long creating. So, I was dealing with a lot of emotions, fear, excitement, depression, anxiety, detachment… it goes on and on. Needless to say, this rollercoaster ride, I think is well represented in the music presented.

I had my fiancee, Meagan, coming with me though, so I had a partner in this stupid adventure to a foreign east coast. Her role in all of this is featured prominently in the album, which I’ll describe as I go through each track in the coming days.

Along with the album rules and restrictions below, I created a couple of rules for myself when sitting down to work on the music.

1. I would include in every track either field recordings that I recorded, or samples from vinyl records (or, you know, both.). These were things I was playing with a lot at the time, (records because of Jonathan Ten & Tracer Canupp, and field recordings because I had just purchased my own little tascam dealy and was carrying it everywhere.) and so it seemed natural to force myself to work with these two mediums, and see what I could make of it. As I go through the song descriptions, I’ll try to include what the names of the records I used were in any given track. I’ll also describe where the field recordings come from.

2. The only synth I used was the AniMoog synth for the iPad. I would play the synth live, entirely, over the track, and I would only do, at most, three takes before calling it good (in almost all cases, I only did one or two takes.). I hoped that doing this would inject humanity into the album, as I’d be exposing myself to facing up to my own insecurities about making music. I think it comes through and lends a lot of personality to the album. Also, sticking with the same synth the whole time gives a cohesive sound to the music and helps string it all together.

Album general concept:

Sticking to the essentials of a track and constantly morphing the few sounds per tracks. Each tracks should be stripped down from anything unnecessary and if possible, even discard percussion.

The album should be an experience of always confusing an idea and then making it more comprehensible. Playing with the listener’s point of view.

All tracks should be done in order. The last 4 tracks should use some automations from the first 4 tracks.

No use of organic drum samples (conga, bongos or other african related)

I wasn’t sure what to expect when JP sent me the instruction sheet for my soundtrack. I had been waiting for it with anticipation. When I was asked to take part, I immediately knew that this project was something special and I wanted to be part of it. Now that I was reading what my instructions actually were, I have to admit, I was afraid of whether or not I would be able to fulfill what was being required of me. “This,” I thought, “might be what exposes me as a sucky crap face.”

It turned out to be the most enjoyable musical project I’ve ever worked on. Somehow, having the rules and limitations laid out before me freed me up to be more experimental than I normally would be. By taking on someone else’s restrictions around music creation, I was able to ignore my own internalized ones, and make something that still sounded like “me,” while going beyond “me” and opening up my creativity to new avenues.

No use of organic drum samples (conga, bongos or other african related)

This immediately made me laugh as just one day earlier, my good friend and Make Mistakes cohort, Steven Dermody had been chiding me about my perceived (by him), abuse of hand drums in my music. I argued against this saying that I just particularly enjoyed them, and felt that they were a necessary piece of my sound; something I liked to define myself by. I like African shit, this is just the way of me, deal with it.

I mentioned this to JP, asking if Steve had said something to him.  He swore up and down that this was randomly generated and in no way had he targeted me specifically with the prohibition. It was, according to him, merely a really funny coincidence.

I do not believe this.

But, whatever, jerks, challenge accepted.

Sticking to the essentials of a track and constantly morphing the few sounds per tracks. Each tracks should be stripped down from anything unnecessary and if possible, even discard percussion.

This is a good one, it’ll let me cover a couple points at once. The morphing few sounds was another restriction I would have to wrestle with. Up to this point, my solo music, I would say, had a pretty maximalist approach; loaded up with stuff for the most part. I had been doing sound design professionally for almost two years at this point, and was excited to try my hand at reversing that trend. I think I did a good job of it, at least from my point of view, each of these tracks have very few channels of audio, though it might not always seem like it.

The second part brings me to an important part of designing a project, any project: You have to pick and choose when to ignore and when to listen to what you’re being told to do. This is something that all of us do all the time every day. It doesn’t matter if it’s a boss, or one of your good friends giving you the chance to make music for a cool new project; we like to rebel against stuff. I was not interested in making a completely abstract and strange album (Which I thought was what was being asked of me.), i wanted to make dance music. So, I took this one, discard percussion, and said, “you already took Africa from me, you can’t have Detroit too,” and made most of the album 4×4 “dance” jams.

The album should be an experience of always confusing an idea and then making it more comprehensible. Playing with the listener’s point of view.

I don’t know how to quantify whether or not I acheived this goal. I will say this: I tried really hard to take liberties with the timing of things coming in and out; synths tumbling along, percussion building and slacking, and changing more or less at the right times. I tried to give the album a flow from dark, to light, to cautious optimism. For me, that’s a pretty good summation of the creative process, I think.

My music, in general, is a little confusing, this is likely because I have no formal training, and know only what I’ve learned on the streets and figured out as I’ve gone along. The most musically inclined book that I’ve read is This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel J. Levitin. The truth is, I just love music and was driven to make techno because it is the most important music of my life. It has connected me with the greatest memories, best friends I’ve ever had, the love of my life, my career and myself. My shit is raw, yo.

That’s actually the music that I enjoy the most; incredibly raw music that has the feeling of people not necessarily knowing what they’re doing, but having a particular energy and needing to get it out. That’s why I find so much joy in classic rave music, acid house, and ragga jungle. It has an urgency that is hard to find.

Anyway, I’ll only know if I achieved this directive if people tell me I did.

The last bit, about automation is not interesting to talk about, that is for nerds. It’s in there.

So, that is part one of the story of my Soundtrack. If you would like to preview the album you can hear it here.

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