Futurists

Futurists – Clatter (November 30, 2009) (download here).

well okay, maybe it took a bit longer than two minutes. But, I did crank this song out in a single day.

yesterday afternoon I headed to the local Barnes & Noble, got myself a venti coffee (1/3 caffeine, 2/3 decaf), sat down in the café, put on my headphones (Sony MDR-7506 for the curious) and started cranking out this tune. While I was working I must admit I frequently checked the Carolina/Clemson game on ESPN, but it didn’t slow me down too much. I got most of the song done there; the rest I finished after dinner. I put a few finishing touches on it just now.

I was going for a dark, pounding club tune with a relentlessly driving beat, which is pretty much what I ended up with. I asked my good friend Brian, a DJ and producer from Detroit, to help me classify it, and was surprised when he said “Techno” – there are so gosh darn many different varieties of techno out there these days that I suppose I expected it to be something fancier – but he’s right, it’s pretty much techno. Granted, after he said that, he did add, “with Electro influences”!

so here it is. It may not be Freedom Rock, but… turn it up!

Futurists – Globules (Acid Remix) (November 28, 2009) (download here).

here’s an acid trance remix of Globules, a melodic trance song I created a while back.  When I say acid trance, I’m hearkening back to the glory days of trance – not the sweeping, epic trance of today, but that of the early 90s, during which a style of music developed that some would consider ‘true trance’.

it’s been a lot of fun remixing a trance song into an acid song, and challenging, too.  My sequence is littered with “stuff I tried” – lots of high-pass filter sweeps, side-chain compression, bleeps and bloops, cymbal crashes, etc, that currently have their channels off because they just didn’t work.  In the end, the song is quite minimal, with some mixing it up with the sample from Alan Shepard’s moonwalk, a few instruments carefully placed here and there, and a driving beat that I’ve attempted to use to lull listeners into the so-called trance.

that being said, there’s work I could do to make this remix better.  The beginning and ending are not particularly strong – I’ve done this to make the song easier for a DJ to mix with other songs, but the ending certainly doesn’t stand on its own very well.  Nonetheless, it’s time to shelve this one for a while, to get back to finishing some of the other tracks I’ve been working on.

I have neglected to mention why I named the songs I’ve made so far on this site, the names I’ve given them.

Globules is a space-themed song, complete with an audio sample of Alan Shepard’s moonwalk from over forty years ago.  I named this song after Bok globules, dense clouds of dust and gas that are some of the coldest objects in the universe.  I’m big on astronomy, and thought the name rather fitting.

Bobbins, of course, are spindles, often holding yarn, wire or film.  However, Bobbins is also a British term that indicates that something is junk (though I guess the British would call it “rubbish”).  When I first started creating Bobbins I didn’t find it that good, and named it as such.  It progressed from that point, but I kept the name.  There is also a character from the Oz books named Betsy Bobbin, for whom I did not name the song, but she comes up when you do a wiki search, that’s got to count for something.

one place I make sure to visit from time to time is New Mixes, a site hosting a variety of DJ mixes of different electronic genres.  Lately they’ve been having some difficulties keeping links to their mixes active (as of this writing, only the most recent of mixes are downloadable – but they’re great).  I’ve had the Nature One 2009 mixes on repeat at work since they arrived on the site last August.  At any rate, highly recommended.