Track 06 on the new EP A Night In The Life Of..., OUT NOW on Bandcamp!

https://vampirestepdad.bandcamp.com/album/a-night-in-the-life-of

Stay connected with VSD: 
https://www.facebook.com/vampirestepdad
https://www.youtube.com/c/VampireStepDad82
https://instagram.com/vampirestepdad
https://twitter.com/vampirestepdad

A Night In The Life Of...

You Must Feed

Track 05 on the new EP A Night In The Life Of..., OUT NOW on Bandcamp!

https://vampirestepdad.bandcamp.com/album/a-night-in-the-life-of

Stay connected with VSD: 
https://www.facebook.com/vampirestepdad
https://www.youtube.com/c/VampireStepDad82
https://instagram.com/vampirestepdad
https://twitter.com/vampirestepdad

On The Run...Again

Track 03 on the new EP A Night In The Life Of..., OUT NOW on Bandcamp!

https://vampirestepdad.bandcamp.com/album/a-night-in-the-life-of

Stay connected with VSD: 
https://www.facebook.com/vampirestepdad
https://www.youtube.com/c/VampireStepDad82
https://instagram.com/vampirestepdad
https://twitter.com/vampirestepdad

Invitation

It's been a long time since I've written any music, so I decided to get back into the swing of things by experimenting with found sounds.  I was feeling somewhat nostalgic for the days of dialup BBSes (bulletin board systems).  I've always loved the sounds and visuals I got from listening to modems battle it out over the slightly dodgy copper lines where I lived to negotiate a speed to swap bits with.  BBSes were the place I grew up and came of age - I made friends there that I'm still in regular touch with to this day, and we've been there for each other through good times and bad.  We go to each other's weddings and funerals.  We get together at hacker cons to catch up.  I tried to capture a little bit of that in this song in the sense that it always started out with one phone number, your first BBS, the one you remember most fondly.  On that board you found a few more, and on each of those you found a few more, until you had a list of systems that you dialed into regularly.  Sometimes a board would go offline for some reason; usually it would come back but occasionally it was gone for good.

Toward the end of the heyday of BBSes (around 1998 where I lived) the number of dialup modems dwindled significantly, and I tried to capture that feeling toward the end of the song.  There used to be a couple of dozen, and then there were a dozen, and then there were two, and then... there was silence.  You couldn't find a dialup anywhere, not for love, sex, or money.  All those lovely, shivering, wailing, screaming, chilling, wonderous voices fell silent.  The only thing you could do was pack it in.

Every sound in this song save one is a modem handshake of some kind.  I made certain to avoid the 14.4kbps fax machine handshake that just about every news story about the Net for ten years used because, let's be honest, we're all sick of hearing it.  Instead, I used some of the oldest and oddest modem recordings I could find, from 300bps dialup modems to radio modems to an ancient data-to-fax relay unit.  The speech at the very end is a Hayes AT command which means "Attention: Hang up NOW!"  I generated it with the Festival speech synthesis package, exported as a .wav file, and loaded in as an instrument.

I don't pretend that there is anything like a melody in this track but the multi-layered modem sounds have a rhythm of their own and I tried to work with them rather than force them into an artificial structure.  I did not distort any of the sounds with external audio processing, all of the dynamics were created by playing back each sound at a different pitch and layering them in different ways.  I also exploited the fact that the samples are of different lengths, and some of them overlap Pixitracker frames.

Telecom Jam v1.0

Today I received this audio from a person who claimed to be in a corporate meeting about at Energy Transfer Partners - the company in charge of building the Dakota Access Pipeline.  I am told the person speaking here is Matthew Ramsey, the COO of Energy Transfer Partners and that the recording was made from a mandatory meeting earlier today. 

It appears to be authentic.

Please pay attention to what happens at 6:30 into the audio. 

"Election night changed everything," says the voice on the audio. "We're going through a transition where we will have a new President of the United States. And he gets it. We fully expect as soon as he is inaugurated his team is going to move to get the final approvals done and DAPL will cross the lake."

Recording from a Corporate Meeting about the Dakota Access Pipeline

Synthwave track inspired by "Saber Rider" tv show.

Artwork: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/342203271656943731/

This track is featured on New Retro Wave YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgp8OPlWy00&t=32s

Isidor - Soldier Of Fortune (Synthwave)

the DNA sequence of the Covid-19 virus converted into music. Enjoy.

Telecom Jam v1.0

The Doctor

Related tracks