A little chillout music I put together for a Secret Santa event on an internet forum.

Nighttime at Mile Zero

The only Elämäni Musiikissa track that is only a two-parter rather than a three-parter.

Start-5:31 - Heart of the Forest. A trip to Koksilah River Provincial Park in British Columbia, Canada, inspired this piece. It was actually originally written as my final project for MUSI 102, and played on two pianos by Clare Yuan and Amy Li. The original, however, was only about 40% of the length, and, like I said, for two pianos. :-p I fleshed it out much more in the following years, adding the key change and repetition of the theme, the timpanis, the bells, and... well... everything but the pianos in terms of sound, which made it much closer to the original idea I'd had. I suppose I wanted to be a tone poet of sorts. I'm no Smetana, but I did enjoy making this piece.

5:38-end - Across the Icefields. Another very old idea based off some of the stories I wrote when I was in HS (and like many of my stories I ended up axing them in the end, although admittedly this does fit well with certain Insurgency motifs as well). Somehow, though, I managed to bugger up the bassline and not notice that I had done so, making it an octave too low, so what you can hear is a bit of a crackly mess. Derp. If I had the bassline where it should have been, it would have been a much more fluid-sounding piece. :-p Oh well, if I ever rework this sucker, that's the first thing I'll do.

Elämäni musiikissa, Part 4

As corny as this sounds, this was originally written as part of a compilation CD as a birthday present for my favourite actress at the time, Leelee Sobieski, back in 2007. It was intended as a track to slow-dance to, using a leitmotif lead with various chordal patterns and a white-noise track with low-freq oscillator, meant to emulate crashing waves. Admittedly though, my favourite sound was the "air bell" from a freeware synth, which is that airy ping in the background. The white-noise track was actually converted from a pink-noise, windy-sounding preset. :-p But I really had fun making this track. There are, as you've probably noticed, two competing leads, which never actually clash with one another but complement one another. I remastered this a couple of times after the fact, trying to get it to sound better. Production-wise, I still think this is my best track, although I think I have done better composition-wise in other tracks.

The leitmotif idea was mainly inspired by John Williams and Engelbert Humperdinck (the original one), while the sounds I used were tweaked to sound sort of like Jean-Michel Jarre. Obviously I'm not worthy to untie JMJ's shoes, though. :-p

Moonlight

Start-6:34 - Flight of the Eagle. The main idea for this might be (jointly) the oldest idea I've put in one of these, going back to 1997. The kind of ideas you can glean from using percussion and repeat buttons on a Hammond, eh? ;-) Although the repeat-button sound wasn't retained in FotE, the main idea was, although there were additions made, such as starting off small, the 6/8 section between the intro and the main thrust of the piece, and the guitar intro (which could sound a lot better, obviously, but hey, I was using freeware for that :-p ). Parts of the melody very late in the piece were also later innovations dating nine or ten years after the original idea started out. Yes, I did originally intend for it to end anticlimactically.

The 17-second transition was admittedly unoriginal. But such things happen when one is stringing together what are essentially multiple pieces in a medley.

6:51-11:17 - Thunder And Lightning Dance. I had a blast doing this one. This, along with the piece preceding it, is jointly the oldest idea that has already been put in the EM tracks. I used pizzicato strings to mimic the repeat-button setting of a Hammond organ. Partially inspired by Jean-Michel Jarre, partially a run of me goofing off while having nothing better to do with my time, and partially my insufferable love of timpani, the idea barely changed a bit in the ten years between the improv sessions starting and me exporting this track, with the exception of the frenetic, high-pitched part right before the very end, which was a late addition.

11:18-end: Manifest. An old acquaintance of mine once told me this could be made into a good dance track, and indeed when I first put this out electronically with my older program in about 2002, it was as an intended dance track. I didn't change the main idea - inspired partly by the Aztec stage of Goldeneye 007 and refined in a period between 1998 and 2002 - one iota from that first release, with one big exception - I slowed the percussion line down to half the speed I'd had it before and made it sound much different. I did add some piano rolls as well. 

Elämäni musiikissa, Part 6

Start-5:54 - Romantique. One of my newer ideas, probably coming out around 2007ish; the lead sound is actually a tweaking of one of the leads from "Moonlight," and the premise of this was me feeling a bit mushy at the time. :-p Seriously. The idea was more driven by the harmony than the melody, and the whole major-to-minor-with-tempo-change was carryover from Heart of the Forest, with a bit of Dvorak influence on top. I think this is actually one of my better ideas, at least in the ranks of the ones I've rendered electronically.

5:55-9:30 - Horne Lake Overture. Like Heart of the Forest, this was inspired by a trip into nature, but this one was Horne Lake Caves, which I went to in Grade 12 (iirc) which would date it 2001. That's kind of when the idea started to come about, but I didn't really develop it until 2006-2007ish. The harp sounds and the idea to have a flute as the lead were actually inspired by video game music, more specifically stage 3-1 from Super Castlevania IV for Super Nintendo, and do a decent job of reflecting water dripping off of stalagmites, in my opinion. :-) I could flesh this out a bit more.

9:31-end - Largo in E major. Darnit. I made this TOO slow. But regardless of whether or not I made it too slow, I feel I did a good job capturing the feeling of romantic love that I was going for, as I was trying for a largely gentle and romantic piece that built into an ecstatic climax before dropping off into a newly gentle denouement. I have no idea where this idea started, but as to when it started it was no earlier than 2006.

Elämäni musiikissa, Part 5

Start-3:54 - The Rising. This is actually a fusion of two separate ideas I had started playing around with in high school. The first two minutes of it are these two ideas, then after that was an added transition and key change that would come later. Believe it or not, this was initially intended to be a trance track, and in 2003 or 2004 it became thus on older software. But later, I would play around with it some more, replacing kick drums with timpani, playing with the background spheres to make it sound more classical, and adding a ritardando and what I thought was a very foreboding timpani-bell line at the end. If I were ever to orchestrate this, I'd add gong and the loudest, deepest bass drum I could find to the end as well.

3:54-7:42 - Requiem. The beginning of this is an idea I've had that dates back to my first composition experimentations, but most of this is actually relatively new, and not all that complicated. It's basically a funeral dirge with a hopeful twist. Actually, I have a few ideas of how to flesh this one out even further. This is probably the most balanced fusion of the classical-meets-trance sound that I love so much.

7:42-end - Jubilee. This idea is relatively new, with the first elements of it only going back to about 2005. With all the darker music I'd written I wanted to write something a little more joyful in nature. Inspired partially by epic trance (more specifically former TranceAddict Fatboy), partially by Bach (more specifically Prelude and Fugue in G minor), and partially just by being in a good mood, this was the result. This is probably as close to trance as any of these symphonic tracks will get. And one of the rare times you'll hear G13 chords used in anything remotely close to trance. ;-)

Elämäni musiikissa, Part 3

Start-5:53 - The Sombre Side of Dark. This idea has been evolving since it first came into my head in teenage improv sessions on my old Hammond organ and on the band room computer, but I didn't really completely flesh it out until about four or five years later. The timp line, a later addition, was somewhat inspired by Babylon 5's soundtrack as well, although admittedly my choice of sound font, and my choice of notes used, could have been better at times.

5:53-7:38 - Intermezzo. Originally intended to be Insurgency's opening theme, I thought it lacked the dramatism necessary, so I made it an intermezzo. :-p Anyway, the original idea was spawned in the late 90s fiddling around on the band room computer. The chordal structure remained largely the same, but the piano lead, except for the ending downward sequence, changed a lot until I made the final form around 2005ish.

7:40-end - Escape from Distorted City. Another Insurgency track, I actually based the entire first chapter of Insurgency on this track, especially the last section where what the title of this implies actually happens. This idea came partially from Dean Malenko's old WCW theme song (goofy, I know), partially from Gustav Holst's Mars, partially from the notion of building on a theme more and more up to the end (much like EM1's "Incursion"), and partially my own goofing around. Now putting appropriate sounds to it came several years later. Confession time - I put way too much reverb into it. :-p But the idea remained relatively unchanged. I could easily have made this a track by itself.

Elämäni musiikissa, Part 2

Start-1:55 - Opening Theme From "Insurgency." I actually renamed this track very recently. I wrote the original of this in 2004 as my mid-term project for MUSI 102 at the University of Victoria and named it "Theme from Covert Mayhem," which was a story I would later scrap. "Insurgency" is the name of my present writing project. Who knows? Insurgency might also get scrapped. :-p Originally in A-minor, I would flesh it out a bit more later, change a few notes, change the key to B-minor, and add timpani and bells.

1:55-4:17 - Just Another Day. I based the chord structure of all but the last 20 seconds or so on a piano improv session with a fellow MUSI 102 student, and since the melody was kind of random in that, it was in this as well. I like how it turned out.

4:17-end - Incursion. This was also a MUSI 102 project, as we were studying Stravinskyan rhythmic interpolations and stuff like that, and I got started and just couldn't stop. This is actually largely unchanged from the 2004 original except for added bells and crash cymbals, and a noticeable slowdown near the end for dramatic effect. The bells trailing off at the end were also new. Put those in about 2009.

Elämäni musiikissa, Part 1

My first original composition in 9 years, and I might not even be finished it yet. Rather than building around a melody, this was more an assembly of harmonic and soundscape ideas that I had floating around in my head, complete with some spacey sound effects. A bit of a different direction for me. Perhaps even more soundtrackish than usual.

D'Arcy Chapman