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Well, that was weird: The Enemy Is Whoever You Are Facing
A first, of sorts. I, er, ‘composed’ this entire… thing… at the piano, playing successive parts into instances of Atom. A single USB C cable from the Roland into the IPad Pro, no interfaces or dongles or whatnot required, a very slick workflow.
So what? I hear you yawn. Well, it’s just that this is a very novel way for me to work. (Given that I can’t play the piano, obviously.) Usually, I’m all about the auto generators and found sounds and File Player loops. But this was an actual instrument, fingers on keys in real time stuff. Metronomes, even.
As I say, weird. Not to mention: difficult. That actual playing an instrument thing is quite tricky, isn’t it?
As to what style it is… I dunno. I went with ‘chaos’. Seemed as accurate as anything. Maybe someone can tell me what genre this ought to be. Does it remind you of anything? (Other than a right old din, obviously.)
Comments
I listened to this while answering some sampler-related questions elsewhere, and I'd say the coverall genre would be "Experimental". However, given the underlying baet, it reminds me of a more Twelve-Tone Bossa Nova. Quite harsh in timbre lending to the chaos but also has an oddly satisfying vibe to it, like being in an alien lounge sipping on a martian cocktail laced with something akin to opium where you vibe out on a couch all afternoon.
Nailed it!
You speak with the voice of experience 🤔
😂🤣🤣 Never tried opium mate, but I've dabbled in weed before lol.
Not for me this one! Too fast and I find the lead line grating. At a much slower tempo and with a modified lead line with a bit more space in it, I think I’d really like it, I nearly always love your stuff Irena, so I hope you don’t mind too much that I am giving this one a very frank but negative review. Your own comment about this gives me the feeling you don’t like it much either, to be honest. And I definitely can’t hear any opium lounge vibes here JMW - if anything it feels like it’s on speed!
Has a very 80s feel about it to me. I can’t remember the song, but it reminds me of a particular synth pop song that has some really out of left field riffs in it. If I think of it I’ll let you know.
It really is quite catchy though. Not in terms of an instantly recallable melody, but it’s insistently listenable.
Glad to see you performing as the "note generator" ! Hope you will keep on doing it regularly aside of your usual workflow. Why not blending both world at some point?
I love using hardware or software to generate sound. But after a few years away from real
Instruments, creating music exclusively with Generators and Piano rolls, while it is fun, I found out that nothing beats performance with real instruments. It is fun, immediate, challenging and rewarding as it always brings unexpected things. And it's good for physical coordination too ! Don't give up ! It is great for a first trial (though not my fav of yours) and you can only get better with time !
Hi all, and thanks for your insights on this one, especially @Gavinski and @JanKun for giving their honest views, and @jwmmakerofmusic for giving me a new genre for it - alien lounge music!
Gav, you are accurate in your observation that I also don’t much like this track, but I am sort of weirdly fascinated by it all the same, which is why I decided to post it to see what kind of feedback it elicits. (I have no other audience to turn to for such feedback.)
I set it to loop and after three or four plays it sort-of started making sense to me. Adam Neely’s observation: repetition legitimises. I found myself imagining a kind of woozy, nauseous David Lynch dream, soundtrack for a scene set in a ghastly cabaret cum strip club, maybe…
I do take my commitment to random seriously as a lodestar for all I make using it, and the one iron rule is that once embarked upon, the random has to play out to its conclusion. My physical playing at the piano was definitely random, so…
That doesn’t mean I just post any old tosh, (though my critics may beg to differ!
), a lot of what I attempt never sees the light of day, but this does - intrigue me. I ran it through the Atom pitch shift function to ensure that I wasn’t actually hitting any bum notes, so the sickness seems to arise from the choice of timbres, or maybe the relationship between the insistent lead voice and the backing.
I don’t have the theory chops to understand what is going on with it, and part of me perversely likes the fact that I don’t like it, that it unsettles me, too. Properly unsettles, not in the spook house, halloween music kind of way, but by being just… off.
Not unrelated, I’ve also been watching a lot of analog horror lately, e.g.:
@michael_m may be on to something, as the touchstone for analog horror is 80s media. Having just discovered the genre, and the typically woozy Lo-Fi vibe of audio in that, it may have played into this. It’s a format which leans into the ‘off’, as you’ll see if you stick with this example to the end.
More pertinently perhaps, I spent some time prior to making it watching a fascinating YouTube doc on Noise music. The documentary was also attempting to grapple with a format which through the kaleidoscope of taste is by some views a serious and high effort meaningful engagement, and by others just a low effort screaming bloody, well, noise:
Maybe some of that thought bled into this as well. Or maybe, when the comedian realises they are having to explain the joke, the time has come to give up on that particular joke…
And @michael_m : that interests me - which track is it, I wonder?
I’ll have to check out that Noise video, thnx! Yes, this piece is definitely very effective when it comes to evoking a sense of foreground manic unease coupled with a background chilled Lynchian unease. It is an interesting juxtaposition and I could see it working well for a scene in a movie.
Definitely getting the Lynch imagery here.
I listened to it again, and strangely or not, it reminds a bit of the musical weirdness present in Peter Gabriel's 2 or 3 first solo albums he released at the end of the 70s, by the time he was collaborating with Robert Fripp and before he indulged in a more mainstream vibe.
It is definitely a peculiar track and it is good you shared it !
PS: weird has not a pejorative connotation in my dictionary !
Put me down as very firmly in favor of this track. I was trying to think of something it reminded me of specifically, but I could do no better than the song in the video link below — both strike me as sort of an admixture of lounge pop and quicksand, leaving me, the listener, with no real melodic spot to gain a foothold, as it were. That’s fun.
Edit: I too would group w/ hallucinogens rather than stimulants.
@GUB : I see what you mean.
What a great track! Thank you for bringing it.
Dystopian Lounge
I work hard getting robots to play like that.
It might be my head phones but I could use more presence in the bass to ground the Latin jazz lounge feeling. Maybe gut be easy to fix with EQ but more likely a stronger punchy instrument is needed. With MIDI you can revisit that choice.
I’m glad you keep experimenting and hope you put more ‘’you” in the mix. Maybe this genre is “Found Me”.
Ultimately we only release what we are willing to stand behind which means we listen first.
I have been racking my brains and just can’t think. For a while I was wondering if it’s an early 80s Cabaret Voltaire track, but can’t think which one, if that’s even it.