I just wanted to go over where I'm at with my music and how it's all going, because it's been over 6 months since my last release and I'm itching to put something more out soon. I have some tracks that are pretty close to being released into the world, but I also have some that are waiting in the hangars to be deployed. I'm not sure what format it will all come out as eventually, but these ones I will talk about will eventually come out soon. 2020 was strangely one of my most productive years as an artist, and I’ve created a whole bunch of songs across a whole array of styles (and artists!). I think being able to block out the business of the society I am in helps a LOT. I could just focus on recording and being productive in that manner. My most productive period was from the middle of March 2020 to the end of May 2020, I wrote about 5 projects for uni (most of which I’m repurposing for Orange Orange), two or three Orange songs and a whole EP of Plaza-Trg songs with Harry. It was so wonderful! I need a productive time like that again soon. Anway, here are the tracks, in order of when I made them! Singapore a Distance I wrote this at the end of 2019. This track is quite a departure from the style I’ve developed, as it’s quite bubblegum-pop-esque. It’s quite a standard song structure but I think it works well. I’ve recreated a sound that sounds a lot like a sound from the Warioware DIY sound palette, which is cool! I don’t have lyrics for it yet. I do have quite a soft spot for this song and I hope I end up using it in the future. The World Gets Quiet I had this idea for a song about enjoying the quiet moments in life at the start of 2020 but I couldn't really progress any further than that. Once lockdown hit... I got quite a lot of inspiration as the whole world actually went quiet. I spoke about this song in one of my past blog posts but I’ll say it again. It started life as this upbeat indie song – planned to have this weirdly intricate beat that would be played on a drum kit. The energy that the drum beat brough was so strange and did not match what I was envisioning, so I thoroughly tweaked it to be more unique, more electronic and more open texturally. I felt that a lot of music I had been working on had been texturally thick and could be too much to handle, so I thought to arrange something simpler. I really like this song a lot. I recently re-tracked the vocals with my good friend so hopefully it can come out sooner than later. Friends in 2D I focused my university folio in the first lockdown about living in lockdown and the different interpretations and emotions people had. For Friends in 2D, I was responding to my friend’s artwork that she’d made about a series of pubs by writing about longing to be in a social setting like a pub. I was going through a little guitar phase, and this song was something I made on a guitar tuned down a half-step. I’m writing about interacting with all my friends on ZOOM and Discord and not being able to see them physically directly, only being able to see them in 2D, hence the title. It’s pretty calm but I haven’t really worked on production too much. This song needs a bit of work. You Only Do So Much I wrote this during “the great era of Orange Orange songwriting” during that first lockdown. It was totally unattached to any uni work I was doing though and was just this fun jingle I created. I was really getting back into my indie guitar roots with Born Ruffians and wanted to do this very upbeat, guitar focused song in 6/8. I used to write so much guitar music in 6/8. I miss those days. So far the production is quite lo-fi but I’m secretly quite attached to how unique it sounds. I probably won’t “upgrade” it too much. I’m still trying to figure out lyrics for this song but I think I might talk about lust and how it affects people, both greed and the sexual kind. I really enjoy this song. Waiting For Medium This was originally a doodle I did when I was waiting preparing for the livestream with Medium in April. Charles from Medium was intermittently in contact with me regarding if the streaming software was working so whilst I was waiting, I recorded this Foals-style guitar interplay along with some vocal chanting and stuff. I left it for quite a long time but I’ve come back to it recently, added a funky beat and I’m trying to make it work for a release. The arrangement is pretty different to everything I’ve done before so I’d be curious to see if it works! Saviour of the World I wrote this at the start of May 2020 taking the perspective of someone who couldn’t stand being in lockdown (you and I both knew quite a few people), talking about how bad things were not and the things to be grateful to still be there. It is very much an arrangement based on Foals-style guitar interplay but I think it is pretty cool on its own. I still think the production needs to be tweaked thoroughly, and possibly the beat production as well. I do think this is the best vocals I’ve ever written for myself which is good because on the whole I think I’ve been improving. I’ve played this song with my band at the last EP launch. CYA on MARZ This was the first song I wrote in the second lockdown and it’s quite Kid A of me. I had this really sparse drum machine phrase that was 5-bars long, and I based the whole song around that. I actually wrote the majority of the song on a piano, which is weird for me because everything either starts with production or guitar. Lyrically it’s about human bigotry and how it will probably be something that never goes away and it’s a little fantasy about the world ending because of this bigotry. I’ve had this music video in my head that’s this made-up fanfic of WALL-E, where one of the humans goes through the archive to see how they ended up on the ship, and becomes so disgusted that they get on an escape pod and leave the rest of humanity. After they leave, a comet hits the ship or aliens destroy the ship, whatever, what matters is that the last person alive is this person who has escaped. Maybe I should make a video for this song. This is currently my favourite song I’ve made and I can't wait to put it out. I also wonder how I will do this song live. Future Role I wrote this song with my inspiration being Sydney Miller’s ‘Out From the Inside’ so I tried doing something in 6/8. I made this cool synth patch in Ableton and played around with this simple chord change and eventually I made this song. It’s HUGE. I wrote it wondering what my future would turn out to be, especially what impact I’d want to make as a person, and what other people’s impacts would be. I realised this song would be great with Stella Farnan singing on it, so I asked her to sing on it and she did. I’m going to release this song pretty soon so I’ll go into more detail about it then. Granny Lands I wrote the beat of this song after listening to Everything Everything’s ‘Lord of the Trapdoor’ a lot, because Mike (the drummer) uses the 5/4 time signature to make his drum beat so interesting but simple. I put it in 6/4 and tried playing with space a bit more, and I also played around with this synth patch I made based on the bendy monophonic sound that’s used in Donkey Kong Country and the arrangement is my fave because of it. I got Sydney Miller to sing on it because my low voice just didn’t work for the whole song and it’s sometimes my favourite song too. Again, I’ll put this out soon too so I’ll go into more detail about it when it does. Diamante 2 This song has conceptually been in my head for quite some time – but it just doesn’t exist yet. I have a demo of sections that exists on my computer but I haven’t recorded anything substantial just yet. The lyrics are still coming together too but I think I will be writing about friendships. I do have high hopes for this song though! Breath This song is more akin to my past guitar-focused songs like Bigger Picture and Sickness Illness, which I haven’t done in a while. I made some pretty cool sounds through granularising a guitar part I made, and I elaborated on that. I then wanted to make the song slowly transition to this Huntly-esque doof music with demonic vocals. I’m excited to go a bit further with this one. I originally want to write a song about news anchors but over time I’ve decided not to do that, so who knows what I’ll write about. Longdeath Milk I was playing around with some synth-pad sounds and I combined that with this incredibly energetic drum beat and I made this song. I recently got fascinated with FM-synthesis patches and I successfully implemented this FM patch for the chorus and it sounds pretty darn good. The lyrics are about honesty but I’m retrying writing vocals because the first draft was a bit uninspired but I think it might become good. I really hope it does. The ending section of this song SLAPS so hard. Until next week,
- R
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