Stompy Thumpy Time

So I've been meaning to try out this EDM thing people are on about. I dunno about genre, it's all trance to me =)

Also, it turns out I stole the hook from the intro to Sixteen Short, I guess those chords just make sense to me... 

Anyway, enjoy!

Mix updated March 2023

Fastest Cube

So, here we are again, 12 years later... Felt it was time to give this old behemoth some love. It's the same track order as the previous one (which I'll leave up in case people prefer it) but if you know it well enough you'll notice some tweaks, and the end part is new-ish. Same vibe, more stuff happening.

Megamix 2022

This song is the last notable track I made before leaving the games industry in 2012. As is common with tracks destined for games projects, it's riddled with half-finished ideas and questionable decisions, but it still has that raw energy that comes with late-night inspiration. You won't find this anywhere else -- the in-game version is an even less polished "temp render" I gave to the animators to have something to sync the dance to, and that's what stuck. Once an asset is in the game, you don't change it unless you have a damn good reason to waste everybody's time.

I can't quite remember how I made the vocal sample -- It's obviously made with Vocaloid, likely Hatsune Miku, but the original project is somewhere deep in the Starbreeze archives. We did a lot of experiments with voice synthesis for the DART chip voice. The lyrics, as has been stated elsewhere, are "Syndicate, classic franchise, Persuader, happy minigun" written phonetically in Engrish. Just a little inside joke.

If you have access to the game (or, you know, YouTube) play the Aspari Extraction level and find the club / disco scene to enjoy the song in its surround-reverbed glory. Also pay attention to the brilliant dance moves, mocapped and animated by Frida. Good times!

Oh, and if any EA lawyer finds this: Nyah. My song.

Syndicate - Aspari Extraction

This track completes the trifecta of resurrected Candela demo soundtracks from the mid-90's. 

Illumination was the first (and certainly the most ambitious) full-length demo track I made. It had a very experimental intro, multiple scenes riddled with sync points and tempo changes -- which  would likely have caused some headache for the coders had we ever actually gotten around to making a demo for it. 

As with most tracks from this period in my life, I have nothing but old cassette recordings to go on, so this one has been subjected to some fairly aggressive remixing. 

Enjoy!

Illumination 2012

A remake of the song I made for the 2005 Candela demo by the same name. 

The original project was lost in a harddrive crash shortly after this song was made. I've been meaning to do this reconstruction for quite some time, but something in the way the original was mixed made it a bit hard to reproduce. The samples blend with the synth layers in a way that actually hides a lot of funky artifacts and "meh, good enough" edits.

The dobro section in the middle is probably good enough to earn an extended mix at some point in the future.

Fair Play to the Queen

A remastered extended version of the song made for the 2006 Candela demo of the same name.

For once I actually have the old project files around, albeit not usable on my current workstation. I instead set up a WinXP VM with all my old plugins and DAW:s so I could export and reference the stuff I used. The MIDI notes and Kontakt instruments were easily exportable to FL Studio, and the only casualty was the Cubase-specific filter plugin Tonic which I had to replicate as well as I could. I also added back some parts that were cut out of the demo for time, and replaced some drums to improve the mix.

A shout-out must go to the z3ta+ VSTi and its great implementation of Hermode tuning. It's what makes the signature sound of this track possible, having such aggressive distorsion without all the mud that comes from equal-tempered tuning.

Jeff

Another victim of the 2005 hard drive crash, resurrected with the help of Insider, who used to run our Candela BBS back in the 90's. Props, dude. 

This was a particularly fun project to do, since it involved recovering some fairly obscure voice samples. First of all, I bounced 40 stems (one per instrument) from the original XM file, which were then montaged and timesynced in Cubase. For some weird reason, the BPM was 138.080. I then started swapping out some of the most horribly resampled sounds, while giving others some facelifts (trivia: apart from hihats, the drums are all the original samples). I then dug up a YouTube video of the McEnroe rant, did some polishing in Audition, and then went on the abandonware hunt for the Bioforge sample. The samples for the game were all stored in a gigantic 30-minute file, and to top it all off the phrase "This is not an experiment, this is a demonstration" was not actually in the game -- I had apparently edited it together from other phrases. 10 minutes in Vegas later, and Bob's your uncle.

Bright 2010

Another resurrected XM from the dark ages (a.k.a. the 90's). 57 instruments, all out of tune, with fractional BPM changes that sure made me appreciate some of the tempo tools in Cubase. Contains one of my favorite voice samples ever, by our very own Sgt. Hulka from Stripes.

I should probably point out that this song, as well as Bright 2010, are demo soundtracks. They have bit of a cinematic structure (a weird intro, plenty of hitpoints and a grand finale) simply because they're meant to accompany something visual. Usually something with a lot of flying in it.

Bogus 2010

Just a little love letter to a genre that vastly broadened my musical horizons. In particular the early works of Simon Posford (Hallucinogen and Shpongle) had this lasting effect on my approach to writing music. The way he borrowed ideas from anywhere and everywhere really made me feel like genres and constraints are determined by the musician, not the listener, which was a good lesson for young me.

Enjoy!

Last Stand at Dawn

I'm just a tiny, yellow ball making funky music.

"Wii sports on crack" -- MorN

"Makes me think of a news station bringing you the most intense news but at a point in time when it's all run by robots and cyborgs" -- RthR

Stompy Thumpy Time

Teetow