xiphux » Music

Synchronous

xiphux — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 18:59:26 +0000

I started doing another song last night in Reason. I originally intended to make a breakbeat dance song in the vein of Hybrid. However, as I kept writing, I began to lose focus and it degraded into a cheesy house song, and was moving further and further away from the song I originally envisioned. The song was already too far along to go back and change it, so I lost interest in continuing. But I’ve decided to, rather than just scrap the song, release it as is, without any intent on improving its mediocrity – restricting the entire creation time to one night while drunk. It’s released as what I’m now calling a One Night Drunk Songwriting Experiment on the music page. You may see more of these in the future.

Snow (Gamma)

xiphux — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 21:00:55 +0000

Decided to release the song “Snow” after all, in an incomplete fashion. If I had just decided to wait until I believed it was ready it could possibly have never seen a release. This is released with a version since it’s unfinished and could be superseded in the future. Currently it’s version Gamma (versions Alpha and Beta were unreleased builds), with a disclaimer that it’s unfinished along with the link on the music page.

Snow

xiphux — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 01:20:05 +0000

This past summer, before moving, I was composing another song in reason called Snow. It’s another experimental drum song in the style of Evening Stars, with a couple simple floating melodies overlaid on an extremely complicated drum line, to create a discordant feel. This one has even more dreamlike whistling melodies, influenced by such songs as the Metroid Prime Phendrana Drifts theme and bad loop’s “lumme”. The drum also surpasses the complexity of the drums in Evening Stars to approach a Venetian Snares-ish feel.

I finally found time this past weekend to pull it back up and take a look at it.

But I seem to be at a bit of an impasse. I’m not satisfied enough to say that the song is finished. It feels incomplete. However, I am at a loss as to what I want to change to make it complete. ”Writer’s” block, I guess?

I’m trying to decide whether to release it as is, release it but mark it as a “rough” mix, or wait until I figure out where I want to go with it (which could be a long time).

I guess this kind of thing happens to artists, writers, and musicians alike.

nightwatchman

xiphux — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 06:30:36 +0000

Went to see The Nightwatchman today, Tom Morello’s (Rage Against The Machine’s guitarist) acoustic side project. Again, no time to write much as I was supposed to be working on a final paper instead of going to this concert, so I have a bit of catching up to do…

I went in expecting all acoustic folk music, but it turned out the second half was mostly rock music. He had a ton of guests there, including Brian Baker, the guitarist for Bad Religion. Tom even used his “Arm the Homeless” guitar and played a number of Rage-style solos, which was awesome. I got him to autograph my ticket:

Pi E Phi

xiphux — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 18:19:12 +0000

I’ve arranged my songs into a sort of homebrew EP, called Pi E Phi. There aren’t any new songs or anything, it’s just that the existing songs are arranged differently, so if you have them already you aren’t missing anything (except maybe updated ID3 tags). More details on the music page.

mp3s

xiphux — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:57:48 +0000

I’ve posted mp3 versions of music I’ve composed. After switching to Mac and fighting with iTunes’s lack of native compatibility for flac and ogg (I know there are addon components but there are still a few problems with them, not to mention the flacs/oggs still won’t work on an ipod/iphone), I’ve come to the realization that the vast majority of people do not know what oggs are. So I bit the bullet and encoded mp3 versions.