May 23
Snowdrifts
Exclusive to MeFi music, Snowdrifts as originally recorded! From Where The Trail Leads. [more inside]
May 22
Flip Side
What's it like when you feel like you're on the flip side from everyone else on the street?
A vaporwave exploration of the lo-fi a e s t h e t i c.
May 17
Prosthetic Conscience
Guitar Instrumental.
A rework of an old piece of mine. Just got a bass guitar, so of course it's pretty high in the mix.
Transcontinental Airway
Another IDM travelogue inspired by the remote land arrows of the Transcontinental Airway System. Music for dancing, thinking, or especially (if you have the means) driving.
May 15
Where The Trail Leads
The title song from my new online-only album Where The Trail Leads. Stream or downlaod for free. [more inside]
May 14
OP-1 Experiment 4
Playing with the OP-1 again. This one might approach danceability. Benefits from a subwoofer or headphones.
May 13
wowzers
An old instrumental jam from when I lived on the island. I think this is from around 2013.
May 12
OP-1 Experiment 2
May 10
Mumbo Jumbo: Light It Up
I couldn't help noticing a certain theme to Mumbo Jumbo's Hermitcraft Season 6. (Well--two, really. One was breaking and placing concrete, but that's not the one I made a song about.) [more inside]
May 9
Make Right the Time [Danny Schmidt cover]
A different draft of the song rangefinder 1.4 introduced me to, having been given her basic tracks and having added my noodling. This is the one with the piano. And the kitchen sink. [more inside]
Obscure Reference
May 7
Falling Into Summer - DEMO
May 5
I'll race you!
May 4
Autumn, Semaphores
A psychedelic synthpop meditation on dreams, the romance of travel, the uncanny desert night, and technology approaching obsolescence. If Tears For Fears collaborated with 1970-era Steve Reich, you might get something like this. Based on a painting by Georgy Nissky and a time-lapse video of two vintage railroad semaphores in the New Mexico desert. [more inside]
May 1
25 Seconds of Wuthering Heights
I never finished my entry for the Kate Bush music challenge a while back, but I liked the bit I did get done.
April 30
cover of Freedom '90 by George Michael
I’ve been working on a musical collaboration with a fellow musician friend of mine during these crazy coronavirus times, in hopes of generating something fun and creative while we have all this spare time not working or gigging. Here's the second song from that collaboration.
April 29
Salaman
This is an West African kora tune recorded by Toumani Diabate, but this arrangement for guitar by Derek Gripper makes it feel like a tango.
I recorded it on my porch in New Orleans. I didn't mean to record the covid ambulance sirens in the background, but I imagine that I'll listen to this later and remember what now was like.
Red Haired Boy
April 24
Dislocated
Upbeat and jangly with an orchestral edge. Trying to keep up with posting a song every month or so, this was recorded at the tail end of last summer.
April 23
Elkins - Dorrigo
April 20
The Last Baseball Game - Part III
April 19
maskmaker, maskmaker
lofi relyricization of harnick/bock song from fiddler on the roof for the sars-cov-2 era. another quarantune! [more inside]
07 - nothing on the wind - vampire deer
hoping that some of the things we like, which seem to be shallow comforts until we're deprived of them, will manage to come back sometime soon [more inside]
April 18
My Way (Roboticized)
I've always hated this song. But digging through my old sheet music I found a midcentury piano treatment that made it much more melancholy and interesting, so I decided to give the tune a synthesizer treatment and marry it up to the vocals to see if I couldn't do some damage. [more inside]
April 17
06 - turn away - vampire deer
StreamJam01
A bit of a collab that happened via an ill-formed idea for a twitch stream. User Carrot Adventure is in the mix. Can you guess where.
April 15
Bach Prelude in C, but shifted by a sixteenth-note
A very silly rendition of this well-known piece with the beat on the wrong note. It kinda works!? Also available on youtube if you want to see the score.
April 14
05 - cadillac ride - vampire deer
April 12
04 - keeping warm - vampire deer
this is about just sitting at home, waiting to see if i got better or not - spoiler - i did get better [more inside]
April 11
299
Haunted Weather
I've spent an agonizing 11 days dialing this one to perfection. Another bumper that hearkens back to my high school days, when a song couldn't possibly have enough rhythm tracks. Suitable for all your living-room silent discos.
April 9
03 - crows happen - vampire deer
my daughter has a treefull of crows outside her window and she's convinced they're as interested in her as she is in them [more inside]
April 8
The Great Compromise (John Prine)
When I heard the news of John Prine's hospitalization on March 30, I was, of course, saddened. His music has meant so much to me over the decades. On that day, I recorded this cover of one of my favorites from Prine's early output, a political song cleverly disguised as a broken-hearted love ballad. There's a video I posted to YouTube of this very same performance, which also includes some spoken introduction, about how I was feeling upon getting the news of John's contracting the coronavirus, and so forth. So, if you'd like to hear that, and see the song performed, it's here. I did a little bit of work on the audio for this MeFiMu upload, though, so I think it might sound a little better here than on the video. Anyway, rest in peace, John Prine, rest in peace.
02 - solskifte - vampire deer
in the northern part of the world, the sun takes a while to be given a bigger share of our sky - which also can stand for a metaphor for a lot of things these days [more inside]
April 7
01 - cruelest month - vampire deer
i guess you would call this my quarantine album - i call it solskifte, which means sun division - and in a lot of ways, not just seasonal, that's what seems to be going on - much more inside [more inside]
April 6
cover of Galileo by the Indigo Girls
I’ve been working on a musical collaboration with a fellow musician friend of mine during these crazy coronavirus times, in hopes of generating something fun and creative while we have all this spare time not working or gigging. Here's the first song from that collaboration. [more inside]
April 5
Viral
An entry in the April/May MeFiMusicChallenge, inspired by the pandemic. Instrumental, chill track. [more inside]
April 4
You Can Make Me Feel Bad (Arthur Russell cover)
I've been listening to this song a lot recently, and admire Russell's sort of ambiguity. Featuring authentic San Francisco rain and street noise.
April 2
Golden Age Of The Cinema
Written before the pandemic, inspired by a story about a town that rescued an old art deco theater. But the words seem suddenly relevant... [more inside]
April 1
Make Right the Time
This is my synth-based anthem cover of the song by singer/songwriter Danny Schmidt. This version is an earlier draft from 2018, mostly from a whirlwind month when I was trying to get as much done before my trial of Ableton Live ended. Me on vocals, synth/loops. Many thanks to not_on_display for the arrangement idea and feedback through multiple iterations. Basically I made this to help myself feel better, and I figure it's something I could share especially now. [more inside]