A new record of ambient and/or instrumental performances, recorded daily over the course of Spring 2022.

Day Songs

DAY ONE

Below the freezing point in a bleak corner of Lincoln, NE. I plugged in and played.

Abraham

How about a day when you have no obligations, you just have to improvise and go with the flow. This song sounds like a spring breeze where the taste of adventure allows beautiful encounters

Sunday Mood

For those childhood memories now coated in a layer of dust.

Cover art by Delta Changeling.

Music produced in LMMS.

dusty memories

The weirdest song on the album. Probably took the longest to put together. All the songs referenced except the Mingus one have something to do with alienation, detachment, and hopelessness (and there's always at least a vein of that in Mingus anyway).

First off, here's the original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUrplxf8VSI

The song it slips into during the bridge is the song referenced in the first verse...

Charles Mingus - The Shoes of a Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rbdx-jR3a8U

During that bridge, we also hear snippets of two other songs.

Big Black - Kerosene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXV6EmSBULY

Mansion (not to be confused with Fatima Mansions - this is the Finnish doom metal group with the Christian cult kayfabe) - Heathen Hole: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TymypptdpqU

This is also a diptych - the second song is a longtime favorite of mine.

American Music Club - Never Mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjvDOsIvkH4

Like all AMC/Mark Eitzel songs, it is criminal that it's not better-known.

Frankfurt Cowboy Yodel (Slippers-Never Mind)

Video: https://youtu.be/qnpk_mk57-M

“…eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man, for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure of blood...."

Thomas De Quincey (1821)

The title of my string quartet piece is drawn from Thomas De Quincey’s "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" (1821). "Confessions" is an autobiographical account of De Quincey’s struggles with opium addiction. He took the drug in the form of laudanum, a popular opium tincture. De Quincey meditates first on the pleasures of opium, describing its effectiveness in aiding sleep, fostering a sense of wellbeing and assuaging psychological disquiet. He goes on to chart the decline of such pleasures into nightmarish visions, hallucinations and physical frailty. In the early 1800s little was known about the effects of narcotics: "Confessions" was one of the first publications to offer a systematic study of their regular use.

I was intrigued by the fact that Beethoven’s late quartets were published in the same decade as De Quincey’s famous work. In 'The Opium-Eaters' I respond to these two outputs, quietly exploring the idea of the epiphanic moment. The performers are asked to face inwards, a position that string quartets would have adopted when playing from the table music stands of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

'The Opium-Eaters' was premiered by the Escher String Quartet in Taplin Auditorium, Princeton, March 2016. This recording is shared with their kind permission.

The Opium-Eaters (2016)

Here's what I do: I take music I like, pull out the vocals (if any), and rearrange the music to make something interesting.

My tastes are a bit strange, and I'm not a young person anymore, so it's very possible you won't recognize any of the original artists here. They're all fantastic, though, so maybe you'll find something to your taste?

Everything is done in Logic Pro, with virtual instruments. I claim no copyright in my sampled work, and try to attribute everything, with links back to the original artists. 

Profile image credit: Detail of photo by Dmitry Demidov: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-cassette-tape-3920974/

Banner image credit: Detail of photo by Bastian Riccardi: https://www.pexels.com/photo/majestic-dome-ceiling-with-fresco-paintings-in-catholic-cathedral-6251682/

Support weird music.

Frankfurt Cowboy Yodel (Slippers-Never Mind)

Unctuous Mixtape