It’s almost Presidential election day.

After the last election day, I made a song to express my utter frustration with the results. I didn’t publicise it too much, and in fact deliberately didn’t comment much on it on its release post, because artists mixing in politics seldom goes over well. Also, I was simply numb and dejected.

I think that with this coming election, maybe I will elaborate on it, though, because this year’s campaign has brought up a lot of the same passions as 2004’s did.

In 2004, when I made this song, I was still in disbelief at the series of events that had put George W. Bush in office in 2000. Whether you believe the Supreme Court acted properly, or the election was outright stolen, or somewhere in the varied and enormous in-between, it was certainly not a traditional election. It was not how we have practiced democracy to that point. The electoral college and the courts were never so heavily prominent.

I was never particularly enthusiastic about John Kerry as a candidate. He finally won me over from “meh” in the debates, but I was not passionate about him, and I simply hate the idea of being one of those people that votes against somebody. I’d much rather be for somebody. That said, over the four years he’d been in office I had come to despise everything Bush did or stood for, so I was in a pretty serious state of desperation, not to mention disbelief that the country was once again so bitterly divided, and not seeing the nonsense used to divide them. In place of discussion about real issues, reality took a backseat to political narratives.

One of these issues close to me was the utterly dishonest and poorly executed war in Iraq. 

I absorbed political coverage like a sponge in 2004, and watched the election night coverage, as I had in 2000, well into the wee hours of the morning. As I did so, I became more and more despondent - not because a guy I was only vaguely on board with was losing, but because it meant a blank check and a percieved pat on the back to a man I utterly despised, and this time, the true voice of the people wasn’t in question.

Bush was winning. For real. He’d used deplorable tactics to excuse and distract from his terrible record, would doubtlessly (and lo, has) commit far more blunders and jaw-dropping abuses of the country, but he was getting a clear majority of the votes. The people had spoken, though I still am completely baffled as to why they chose the way they did. 

This put me in a bit of a state of mental chaos, as I have a fundamental bottom-line take of “whoever wins according to the system agreed upon at the outset, that’s the winner, done deal. Quit whining.” Having so many decry Bush over the years as someone who didn’t meet that requirement and snuck into office, I thought surely that after adding botched judgment after botched judgment to his repertoire, he would end up even more on the deficient side of votes, and this year we would make sure the office wasn’t hijacked. That he was winning for real absolutely floored me. He didn’t need to sneak in this time, he was being invited. By sixty million people.

I went into a pretty deep diversionary bender to try and distract myself from what I viewed to be another 4 years of grinding my teeth every day, and a missed opportunity to finally have some release from that. 

Towards the end of this bender, as the outrage and despair faded, the mantra shone through. He’d won, legitimately (as far as vote counts) this time, and it was time to stop whining. So, my rage and frustration gave way to a profound sadness, for the troops and those in need over the next four years.  I couldn’t keep hold of that, so I tried to vent it off into a song. 

It’s called “four more years.”

The lyrics are an abuse of soundbytes by our forty-third president, which I rationalized using in that the judicious use of damaging soundbytes was one of his more successful depraved campaign tactics.  I outlined what I considered to be his fearmongering, profiteering, duplicitious, irresponsible and divisive nature and effect on the country, and capped it off with my conflict: that despite all this, the will of the people must be heard. The lyrics:

All of us want peace
but resolutions mean little without resolve

We seek to protect Iraq’s natural resources
And ensure those resources are used to threaten the American people

The game is over. We will remain in Iraq as long as necessary.

To fight
and destroy

because our country is a battlefield
and a better quality of life will fade and die away

And we go forward with confidence
to implement the roadmap
and to reach that goal. 

The work ahead is demanding
because we trust in the power of human freedom
but the voice of the people must be heard 

<crowds at the Republican National Convention cheer “four more years”>

DIck Cheney: Thank you! 

4 years since I created this, and I’ve gotten way better at doing this evocative audio stuff - yet I still feel the sadness that went into composing this as much or more than I do some of the more recent material, where the tools didn’t get in the way.

That sadness proved to be well founded - over 3000 military dead since the election, botched catastrophe response, economic meltdown. I’m going into this election hopeful, though, because I have someone to be for.  It’s this difference that made me really want to explain where I was in 2004 in further detail. And with national polls hitting 10 point margins, and completely unprecedented early turnout, I’m hopeful I never have to make a song like this again.

A collection of weak B-Sides from 2004 is now available. It is called Twilight. The full page for this album, with downloads, is available here.

All of the songs on this album have been available via the blog and this site for a while now - so this is nothing particularly new, though for this album they have all been tweaked and remastered.

This process took far longer than I would have liked, as I kept trying to tweak the original mix, and test it in every possible usage scenario, and buff every little bit into a perfect state of 1 or 0. I’d probably still be at it, were it not for this eerily and fortuitously timed post by the venerable Jonathan Coulton, on inadvertently releasing a mono mix of something he spent forever being a perfectionist about:

I’m sure I sweated like crazy over the stereo placement of this or that element during the mixing process, and then I just plastered over all those details with stucco, and turns out nobody really cares. Not even me, apparently. This is a lesson that I learned (or rather, failed to learn) many times over the course of Thing a Week: that thing you’ve been working on forever, buffing and polishing to get to that last 2% of excellence? It’s done. Finish it and move on.

So, in that spirit, I’m finishing this and moving on.

As the licensing page states, you’re pretty much free to do whatever you want with it, as long as you aren’t making money off it. 

Enjoy.

I’ve wanted to sort the stable of songs I have up here into albums, polish them up, and post them that way for a while now, and that effort has finally begun. Each album will have a proper track order and cover art and such, instead of just hanging out in an amorphous list.

To this end, I’ve created an Albums page, which allows for easy browsing of the album material, while the unruly downloads page and this blog continue to display everything as it is completed.

A Room of One’s Own was created as a full album, so it’s already up, and Twilight, a collection of demos and B-material from about 5 years ago will be available shortly. 

There are 2 more TRB albums that will be available by year’s end, each featuring actual full songs, each roughly covering a block of years (2005-2006, for example.) Another album of B-sides, demos and rare material from before 2003 will be coming, but may not be complete in 2008.

And with this, the experiment pretty much ends. I have artwork on the way, and I have to decide on the order of tracks and such, but the week to week grind is done - 10 tracks in 12 weeks. This will be the final track on the album, whereas the others might get rearranged for optimum in-sequence enjoyment.

This is called “One Last Dance.”  It has a fake glockenspiel and fake acoustic guitars. If I may once again borrow a sentiment:

“Our music is sampled, totally fake
it’s done by machines, coz they don’t make mistakes”

–KMFDM, Sucks

No doubt about it, I suck too. It’s been fun, folks - watch this space for the downloads and such in the future, as well as a self-flagellating post-mortem on this whole experiment.

Week 10 was the second Bye week. So, here’s week 11, and next week is the last one. I haven’t done exactly what I set out to do, but this has been an educational experience, and I have 1 or 2 things in here I can actually work with.

This one is called “Robots die alone.” It’s pretty sad, and has an annoying drum sequence, and a lot of stuff going on, but here ya go.

I have grown very annoyed at myself for the excuses these posts have been making about the lack of time, so I’m gonna try and steer clear of that.

Inspirado came very easily for this. It’s about 4 minutes long, it’s relatively simple, and it was put together in about 3.5 hours total. The title will be “There is no escape.”

Enjoy, or don’t, if you find sampled acoustic guitars an abomination.

So, the thing is, every time I say, “Man, I’m never doing a concept piece again, what a trainwreck.” I forget it like a year to the day later. I said it a year ago, I said it tonight, and I hope someone will remind me I said it about 50 weeks from now.

This is a concept piece, and it is god freakin’ awful. I wouldn’t put it up, but it’s something and I hate to burn an off week, so I suppose I pull a Mulligan on this one, and this will hopefully be the Fancy Pants of this project. Like Fancy pants, it is mercifully short, though it is unlikely that it could ever be made awesome on stage via a Zen Drum.

Since I’m putting it up, I might as well explain the title and the concept. I was reading some random stuff, and came across the phrase “Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate” in reference to punch cards. If you aren’t familiar with this phrase or what punch cards even are, well, you’re probably either under the age of 50 or don’t find yourself interested in obscure trivia of the history of computing. I do.

I’ll spare you the overall history of punch cards - there’s a Wikipedia page for that - but suffice to say they have had a massive impact on the development of the computer, and the first really popular and widespread uses of computers involved carrying a stack of the buggers around, which more often than not had the phrase “Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate” on them. This is because they were paper, and had holes punched in them, and had to be fed into a machine that recognized when holes were punched into paper. Mutilation of these cards would be like resting your hard drive on a giant magnet that is on fire.

I found it interesting that this once household phrase had essentially died out completely, and found I rather liked it for the title of a song - not only the cadence of it, but the nod to history. After all, without punch cards, I would not have this snazzy computer to sequence nonsense on. So, I thought, okay, I love this as a song title, but what the hell do I do with it?

What I did was make little 6-note patterns with a little robot sample, and put them in a huge sequence, like one would a deck of punch cards running a math problem. I thought this was a cool concept piece, until I realized that it would fall under the curse of all my concept pieces, and sound like digital cat dissection on live subjects.

Anyway, I added a bunch of stuff to the sequence, but this is high concept and low tolerability. It makes me laugh because it is so bad but has some sort of wacky, fun vibe going for it - described to me as a robot singing a song it doesn’t know. I suppose that’s about right, me trying to infuse a computer history lesson via step sequenced “punch cards” into an entirely digital 21st century 32bit synth rig. I have no idea how I thought this was going to be a song I could sing.
In closing: Man, I’m never doing a concept piece again, what a trainwreck.

I started this Today at 7:15pm - the final mp3 exported at 10:45pm. That’s 3 and a half hours, and I ate dinner and watched from the poisoning scene in Princess Bride onward in there somewhere too.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, this was fast.

It’s amazing how much faster things come together when I allow myself to use a stock beat to get going. I’m still not happy with the piano sample on this one, and as always with the room of one’s own releases, I really wish I could even out some of the mixing issues, but I have some more real life to attend to, and I’m just flabberghasted that I have anything to post at all. Going into today with absolutely nothing, I was already trying to figure out how I’d punish myself for failure. This isn’t great, but it’s something, and that’s part of the idea. Plus, no punishment for failure.

This has a nice mellow feel to it, but still got my toe tappin’  for a second or two, so I’m pretty happy, especially considering the timeframe. Give it a listen and see if my 2.5 hours is worth your 3 minutes and 53 seconds.

This one is actually flat-out incomplete. If you ever wanted to see a larval stage TRB song, here you go - it’s got some of the main loops arranged, some other sounds designed, and an end point mapped out, but it utterly lacks cohesion.

This is kinda what I get for starting something on a Tuesday afternoon when the deadline’s supposed to be midnight Wednesday.

Anyway, in keeping with the rules, I am publishing it incomplete in the hopes that my self-shaming will get me to do some work on week 7’s piece over the weekend. I will be taking the time to polish this up into a completed track as it becomes possible to do so. This should have been up last night for the deadline, but I had an mp3 export issue. Nothing has been added to this content-wise in the interim, much as I wish I’d been able to.

For sanity and personal scheduling reasons, I started this one on Monday, so I have only had 3 nights after pretty late depatures from work to play with it.

As such, it’s pretty basic, but I was expecting to only be able to squeeze out 2 minutes of crapola, and this is significantly better than expected, and over 3 minutes in length. Also, it has drums! Yay drums!

The title will be “Never enough time.”