Splash

Too much, too little, too fast, too soon, too quickly. Not enough. Never enough.

Sparkles

It's ambient, man. It's really really ambient. This s*** makes Brian Eno look like Happy Hardcore.

I'm telling you.

Spirals

This was originally written in mid 1996. The original Impulse Tracker file is lost; this is pulled from a cassette tape, so what you're hearing was recorded almost two decades ago from the line out of a computer with well under 1/1000th the capacity of a bottom-of-the-barrel android phone you can buy in a blister pack at Walmart. I didn't try to fix it up.

So, there you go. A look back in time at a teenager who'd been tracking for a couple of years.

Unknown 3

Perisoft - Transfers

This track is from a while ago - 2009 actually - but it recently succeeded in lulling my three-month-old daughter to sleep twice in a row, so I figure it deserves a spot in my SC.

Interestingly, it was originally written as a kind of lullaby: At 2am or so, I was lying awake with a Beatles song stuck in my head, and I couldn't get it out. So I got up and wrote a song with the express purpose of doing so - hence the title and the rather mellow feel.

Out Of My Head

Logged in again. Time to put up some old stuff. Here's something. I might upload more of them until I run out of random images to include.

Sailfish

In the fall of 2007, I was in a hotel in India while the markets were tanking. As one does, I fired up Renoise and started making something. This is it.

The vast majority of the song was actually performed improvisationally on the keyboard - by which I mean the laptop keyboard - which is why some of it is kind of off-kilter.

I could fix it, but I'm not going to.

Sell sell sell

OK, here's an Impulse Tracker song from 1996. For those of you who've grown up in the modern world, some points of reference: This song is 32 channels of samples. No synthesizers, no effects. The only thing I could do to the samples in this song was to specify pitch, panning, and volume. The file size for all the samples and all the sequencing information in this song is 360kb, which is probably less than the markup to define the web page you're looking at now, and may be smaller than the thumbnail image I pick to go with the song. There's no compressor, no reverb, no delay, no filters, no effects, no post-processing. And, for that matter, no volume envelopes, no attack/decay/sustain/release, no automation, no way to adjust the volume of individual tracks aside from changing the volume of each note. Just 32 channels of 8bit samples mixed together. The entire definition of any given note trigger was this:

A-5 3A 64 D01

Sample 3A playing note A in octave five at maximum volume with the volume set to drop by 1 during that row. Put 32 of those next to one another and 64 down and you have 15 seconds of music. There *was* copy and paste, though.

It was written in Impulse Tracker, which was 120kb, and ran in DOS in text mode. The computer on which it was written on was a 486/40 with 4mb of ram and a 260mb hard drive, capable of around .03gflops. A mid-range Android phone is about fourteen thousand times faster, has a display with ten times the resolution, has five hundred times as much RAM, one hundred times as much mass storage, and the phone's cellular connection can transfer data faster than that computer's internal video bus.

And yet this song's last two minutes are two of the best minutes I've ever written. So there you go.

PeriSoft

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