a bunch of compilation albums of tracks I made that were too old for their own albums or remnants of failed albums. they vary widely in quality but all of them are worth listening to I think. I have nothing interesting to say here so here's the backstory of the cover art.
FLORALITIES: that's my grandma's old house in new jersey. I found a bunch of fabric flowers there that were the same color as that terrible sweater that looks like it has popcorn glued to it that I loved so much i wrote a song about it that no one will ever hear. my bizarre 1920s flapper haircut gives this image an "enigmatic" feel. "florality" was the name of a track that got left off i'm just a person for being bad.
KEEP ME WARM BABY: that is me sitting in the fridge at my friend rita's house. I am smiling because i thought it was so funny that i was in the fridge, like you aren't usually supposed to be in the fridge. rita took the picture. I think i was about fifteen in this image which does not reflect the age i was when i made any of these songs except for track 5.
SUMMER EP BLAH BLAH BLAH: i made this image as a joke to show my then-friends. they all thought it was very funny. most of them turned out to be assholes which is sad but this image i made to entertain them lives on as the cover to this EP.
WHY DO TWO OF THEM HAVE FANCY BORDERS: they were supposed to be companion pieces to savannah, ga. this is the sort of marketing tactic you only do when people besides your parents listen to your music. i understood this but did it for fun anyway.
"barbed wire heartz part 1" b/w "came catsitting" (single)
combined, these two are about the length of an EP. both intricate experiments in prog-rock and emo.
the first is inspired by an extremely small part of a comic I read once. yeah, really. like most of my other songs, it's about how intimacy is scary in a world that's out to hurt you, but maybe the fact that intimacy feels painful is part of what makes it a good thing. it's kind of optimistic about it though which i like. optimism is cool.
it uses a couple experimental (for me) techniques: the opening two sections, a pop semi-pastiche of black metal, are not in the twelve-tone equal temperament (wherein every note is about the same distance away from every other note) common in western pop music but instead uses a slightly different scale, i don't remember, it was one of the default ones in logic. in the same sections I set the backing track (everything but my vocals, the hi-hat and the synth solos) to intentionally clip horribly, in a way that is usually avoided. it gets slowly worse as the section goes on, giving an impression of slow decay.
this is part one because I don't think i got across the point I wanted. yeah, eight minutes and i still haven't gotten across all i wanted to say. i have never met an editor in my life. "head and heart" from biddy fox vii is part two and "tuxedo cat" is part three. part four will probably be a bunnies song.
the b-side, "came catsitting," is also inspired by some artist that i don't want to say here.
the intro is a straight-up ripoff of a unicorns song, sorry.
the subject matter is way simpler and way sillier that bwhp1, it's kinda about how it's kind of ok to be silly and stupid and genuine and make mistakes. ("just because everything has a downside doesn't mean that the upsides aren't just as good.") internalizing that is really hard for me, but "nothing easy's worth doing." etc. it ties into the themes of genuineness that its a-side displays. i still think these two songs together are missing something, but i'd need to write another song to explain what that would be.
I've always wanted to put a string section in a punk song, so that's what i did, it's representative of how being corny is punk or whatever, etc etc. this is also probably the last use of my beloved $10 octave pedal (used on maybe 50 percent of the guitar parts on everybody relax) which broke in two (!) immediately after recording.
this one is particularly electronic-oriented. the idea of this one is that it's kind of rhythmically/timbrally unbalanced, switching between various incomplete electronic ensembles and choppy rhythmic patterns before all coalescing for the coda, the only part with a proper danceable backbeat, in which a primitive electronic organ sound enters the mix to both tie together and deliberately contrast the otherwise hypermodern synthesis of the rest of the piece. all sections are tied together by heavy drums and bubble-like percussion.
"biddy fox loses her tooth in a saltwater taffy" (download)
this piece is heavily influenced by early trance music as well as modern hyperpop such as A.G. Cook. there's this specific synthesizer sound called a "supersaw," which is where you take a simple sawtooth wave, and complexify the timbre by multiplying it several times, with each iteration being slightly out of tune with the rest, evoking the sound of a string ensemble all playing the same pitch with different intonations. cook uses it constantly and i wanted to see how i could use it in an interesting way. so i gave it some huge extended jazz chords and went wild. one of my absolute favorite things about this song is that there's a bit near the end where it modulates a whole-step up but the vocal sample doesn't so you end up with this delightfully polytonal harmony that should be dissonant but manages not to be. it sounds really cool to write a melody in the key a whole step over the root if youre in major key.
this also uses my favorite type of drum sound ever, drum breaks. best-known for being a hallmark of drum and bass, jungle, and also video game soundtracks for some reason. you can make it very syncopated but also very very fast and intense.
