Written in one evening for /r/songaweek Week #4 - unthemed.

Demigods of Electromagnetism

Very rushed mix for songaweek 2024 week #5 - theme is Carousel.

I used the Audiority Chorus Ensembler plugin to get the guitar sound, which emulates the Boss CE-1 pedal.

Synthetic vocals by Emvoice Jay. This one actually suits Jay's voice down to the ground.

[re-tagged this as a 'demo' as it really does need a bit more work..]

Lyrics:
-------

Painted faces on wooden ponies
Up and down they go
Pledges made by fairground phoneys
You can’t believe a word

Left wing striders and right wing bluster
On this roundabout of broken dreams
Where no-one wins

The cycle prevails
Where unity fails
We all slow down.

Carousel!
We go round and round and round
Carousel!
It goes round and round and round

Blue horses prance, the red ones follow
Round and around they go
Build a thing, tear it down, Build another
Watch the money go

The rhetoric swings
Our candy floss dreams
Melting away

Carousel!
They go round and round and round
Carousel!
We all go round and round and round

Ticket booths are selling hope today
One gives, the other takes away.

Carousel!
We go round and round and round
Carousel!
It goes round and round and round

round and round and round
round and round and round
round and round and round
round and round and round

red blue red blue red blue

Carousel

single release

Carousel (demo)

Week #6 of /r/songaweek - theme is "Rush". This one was rushed, as I wrote and recorded it in about 3 hours yesterday, then mixed it today. 

It's also, deliberately, really fast (for me) at 150bpm - maybe too fast? Certainly outside my comfort zone, the closest I've come to EDM. Perhaps I'm just getting old! I had to keep resisting the urge to slow it down.

Amoc Amok

Another track where the MIDI was generated from the cover art using a Python script - you can access this at https://image2midi.key13.uk/ 

It's not AI (see the website for more details on how it works), and I only get the MIDI notes, so the instrumentation, arrangement and production is all done by me. 

This one is a bit chaotic in places - I used patches and presets with "movement" - i.e. sequences and arpeggios - but there is some underlying sense and structure as well.

Millie's reaction when I played her the track was pretty much the same as you see here in her picture!

Synaesthesia

Millie2Midi

Key 13's winning(!!!) entry "Misaligned Aardvarks" for the 2024 Fedivision Song Contest, representing The Island of Nothing.

Misaligned Aardvarks

buy / download

Unthemed entry for /r/songaweek #34

This is me trying to stretch out and leave the ideas space to breathe, rather than packing as much as I can into one track - it's the longest track I've ever done, even though I wrote most of it in one day on Monday!

It's a rough late night headphone mix to meet the songaweek deadline - I'll revisit that later when I've got more time.

Little Flowers of Perpetual Annoyance

The Indonesian Throughflow (ITF) is a strong ocean current that flows through the islands of Indonesia. In the local language this is "Arus Lintas Indonesia". In some places, the current funnels as much water as is contained in all Earth's rivers through narrow channels between islands, creating powerful eddies and whirlpools. I came across this on a recent David Attenborough wildlife documentary!

Music wise this track is all over the place - it's probably rooted in the 80s but with some more modern industrial-type sounds in there, and some elements of House and SynthWave. Definitely more EDM/dancey then my usual fare.

Apart from the drum machine all sounds come from Rigid Audio Kontakt plugin presets, acquired during their closing down sale.

Written and produced in two days (!) for /r/songaweek Week 48: theme is The Sea.

Arus Lintas

The fabulous community radio station Radio Free Fedi has just closed down, and it will be sorely missed. This was one of the ident/jingles I made for it some time ago, based on my track Solarpunk Grazers.

Radio Free Fedi - Solarpunk Jingle

Entry for /r/songaweek Week #1 of 2025 - theme is "Passage of Time"

I tried to get a real early-eighties feel for this one, using Cherryaudio emulations of the Jupiter-4 and Polymoog synths, as well as their reverb and echo emulations. I also used different mixing/mastering plugins - sticking to vintage/tube emulations and a tape saturation module.

The lyrics I nicked then adapted from various different English translations of Rabindranath Tagore's poem "Taj Mahal". The Shah Jahan created the Taj Mahal as a mausoleum for his late wife, and even though the passage of time has removed all other traces of his empire, this one thing still remains...

Lyrics:
-----

Life and youth
Wealth and glory
Swept away
Down the river of time

Imperial thunder
Fading like the
Sunset’s splendour
In the grieving sky

An empire vanished
The throne lies shattered
Minstrels sing no more

Yet one thing
A solitary
teardrop hangs
on the cheek of time

A teardrop on the cheek of time
A teardrop on the cheek of time
A teardrop on the cheek of time
Forever

A teardrop on the cheek of time
A teardrop on the cheek of time
A teardrop on the cheek of time
Forever

Teardrop on the Cheek of Time

I wasn't intending to write a track this week, but I had an annoying day on Monday, so wrote this to clear my head. Someone at work made a throwaway comment "Tomorrow's always another day" which stuck in my head - so that's the refrain. I made the cover art a week ago, from a photograph I took back in 2020 - and had previously thought it looked a bit like Synthwave track art - or at least a bit 80s. 

And this week's /r/songaweek theme is Lydian, so here it is, a vaguely synthwave-y track in the Lydian mode.

This track is not available anymore.

Other tracks from Key 13