A curated collection of space junk, delivered from edges of the infostellar super highway directly to your internet browser.
Nothing warms the soul like watching a handful of 90s comedy movies. Okay... I got carried away and watched five in a row. A few were produced under New Line Cinemas, and the introduction fanfare immediately left an impression on me. Surely I could I sample this?
Fast forward a few weeks, and I found myself at the cafe looping it for a number of hours. Eventually I paired it with the macOS startup chime, because why wouldn't I? Sure, the chime from OS 9 would be more appropriate for a 90s inspired tune, but I suspect few will notice.
I really hope to expand on this one.
Last winter, I signed up for a songwriting workshop with Daniel Lopatin. There was a strong emphasis on "playing the fool". Since I don't have any education about music, that was an idea I could very much get behind. The class had over 1000 participants, and we spent 4 weeks attending lectures, making loops, and sharing them live over a Zoom call. Overall, I had a lot of fun with the class and successfully made 3 tracks.
Entrance
Assignment 1. We were given a collection of samples and encouraged to experiment with them. One of the samples sounds like a busy playground, and I swear it's the same audio used in MGMT's Kids. Listening to this track now, I imagine an unearthly creature being overwhelmed by a bright, sun-shiny day on our planet.
Untitled
I believe this was an edit to Entrance. Found in my files as "Lopatin Round 2".
Machines
Assignment 2 tasked us with recording our own foley and environmental sounds. Since it was the middle of winter and the days were short, I'd decided to record sounds at my workplace.
Machines v2
I very much wanted a song out of the machine noises, and so attempted arranging them into one. At one point, I slapped a canned drum loop into the arrangement which truly fucking ruined it. I left it in this version, but turned the volume wayyyyy down.
Experimental Rooms
The Final Project. Daniel instructed us to imagine traversing a map of musical "rooms". I interpreted the project as two distinct rooms, related, but still very different.
The resulting track sounds quite dark, but it was very representative of two places: the place where I record vocals, and the place where I work. Recording machine noises and looping them for basically three straight weeks had me feeling very heavy, which strongly affected the overall sound of this project. Ultimately, I'm very proud of it.
About six years ago, I met a fellow who was really into creating music. His excitement about it was contagious, and our shared curiousity and ridiculous humor quickly led to us becoming friends. Fast forward a couple years, and we ended up being roommates. Not just roommates, but best friends. Perhaps a story for another day.
Point being, his enthusiasm got me into messing with Ableton regularly. I refuse to call it "making music", because I often feel like I have no idea what I'm doing. Songmaking usually looks like opening Ableton, recording some random keys, playing with the effects, and if I'm lucky they assemble into something resembling a listenable combination of noises.
Can you tell me please, which way should I go?
That depends on where you want to go.
Not just a quote from Curious Alice or a G Jones song, this is a question I'm currently asking myself when it comes to music. I have an intense need to share what I'm making, but I don't have a place to do it yet.
For now, I'll curate my loops here on this website. It gets me practicing web development, helps me avoid toxic social media, and gets projects out of the depths of my computer and into the trenches of the internet. Yay!
This past week brought some realizations that perhaps I'm spending too much time absorbed in my own wants and needs. What's the point of locking in and achieving something if you can't share it with anyone?
Sometimes, life feels overwhelming and it becomes easy to fall into patterns. Sometimes they're productive, like working out. Other times, it's shutting down and avoiding responsibilities. In either case, it's important to rely on others and share the experience of life.
A spider's web has caught the remains of what appears to be a joint. No, it's not mine.
My latest Ableton adventure involved messing around with Auto Shift.
Listenable below to those with eardrums made of steel:
G Jones has been calling me over the past few weeks. Check out By Your Side from his 2025 album Disk Utility.