Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Marshmallow

Originally composed by Rich Vreeland from The Chronicles of Jammage the Jam Mage.


Rich Vreeland is this monster whose music I was introduced to on the Metroid Metal message boards. It was (and still is) music unlike anything else ever, and it’s extremely good and extremely clever and we used to bounce ideas off of each other all the time. The original version of this song is called “Martianmallow Town” from his album, The Chronicles of Jammage the Jam Mage which is the soundtrack to an imaginary game of his. I loved it when I heard it but couldn’t help hearing it differently in my memory and figured I’d might as well record it the way I remembered it. I asked his permission and not only did he give me the go ahead, he sent me his actual song files to play with. I don’t recall expecting an open-source angle into the song, but how generous!

In retrospect, I think I took his unique music and made it more conventional sounding than anything else. I intended to evoke the energy of live musicians. Classic Motown recordings have that quality to them where you can almost hear the room itself and I had a feeling that a sound like that might be right for what I wanted to do. Rich programmed the original instruments himself using his own peculiar methods, and much of this data is what I imported to use as I wished. In essence, this song has been re-produced rather than performed entirely myself, and the personality of the music is still very much his own as a result. It was plenty good to begin with so I honestly didn’t see the need to try and copy what he’d already done. As I said, open source!

Please visit Rich's site: disasterpeace.com !!

Friday, December 2, 2005

Attainment Suite

This is one of my own original concoctions.


My goal was to take a set of motifs and styles through an emotional journey based loosely on the Kübler-Ross model of coping with grief (skipping over the first stage because, musically, “denial” really wouldn’t fit). Many artists prefer to leave their work open to interpretation, but I know that really, everyone wants to know what the artists themselves meant or felt about something they’ve made. So the explanation above is, in my own view, what’s going on. Naturally, I still encourage anyone to make of this work what they will (within the rules outlined by the Creative Commons license of course!).