One of the first things I've recorded. I've always loved the sound of distorted, grungy guitar so this was my attempt. The disgusting overdriven distortion was done by playing the guitar through an echo unit and using a Y patch-cable to split the output so it would feed back into the unit to get the results heard here. I'm not a guitar player so all I did was just mindlessly bang out some chords which became so noisy and distorted that it almost didn't matter what I played since it almost all sounded the same. The quiet, bubbling intro is what I got when I tried to reduce the noise using Audacity's noise reduction function.

All the sounds on this track were basically just me learning how to make sounds with a modular synth I've put together. The drone came from the Phonogene modular unit morphing a simple synth line that I used to test the unit out with. As I kept experimenting with the settings using a bunch of LFOs, I heard this come out. I was actually so taken with the drone that I thought to myself maybe I should keep pursuing this. The chittering effects you hear overlaid on top of the drone is taken from a different learning session when I was just plugging cables in everywhere to see what would happen. It's good to know what you're doing, but sometimes dumb luck works out just as well.

This was my attempt at doing a kind of glitchy electro thing, and I'm not that happy with it. I do think it's kind of boring, but I do wonder how much of that is not colored by me laboring over this song for a long time. This was the toughest song for me to do since it has a definite song structure and it isn't just some random noise. Turns out it's very challenging to write an actual song when you're not a musician, but I wanted to see if I can do it. The answer is yes, but barely. It was very frustrating, but I did end up learning a lot. It's weird: I didn't have any fun making this song as I do when I simply improvise, but in the end I think I am more proud of what I did here than with the improvised songs because it was so challenging. I just need to keep doing this so I can get better.

Essentially this is me abusing a Casio SA-20 keyboard by opening it up and soldering some new connections and then recording the results. Most of the sounds here are presented as they came out, but there is some editing since a lot of what comes out by circuit-bending tends to be repetitive. The sounds on this track are probably the earliest recordings I've made as I've had to transfer them from computer to computer over the years. I still have the keyboard, so maybe more will come.

This song, which lasts over an hour, came about out of necessity. I'm a computer programmer by trade, and too often I find the office way too noisy to concentrate, so the fix for this was for me to put headphones on and listen to music. The danger of this (besides possibly damaging your hearing) is that sometimes I would be distracted by the music, especially if there was a vocalist. I tried using white noise, but it's too much for my ears after a few hours, so that wouldn't do either. This led me to get into more ambient and drone music, but a lot of that music can be really pricey to collect, so I decided to make my own. The drone track was done on a Minimoog all in one take. I taped down a key and very slowly altered the sounds for the next hour. After that, I decided to put some noise on top of the drone to offer up some variation. Not being satisfied with just random noise, I thought about using samples of dialog and distorting them so you wouldn't know they were actually words. At first I was just going to just stetch the samples out, since I was thinking that would be the only way a listener can change the playback so they can hear the dialog, but then I realized most people listening to this would probably have a DAW, which freed me up as to how to distort the dialog, but not too much that the listener couldn't figure out how to unscramble the sounds, should they want to. In case you're wondering, the song is about me trying to reconcile myself to dying, and a lot of the dialog within offers different takes on death. Not that I agree with all of these samples, since some of them are from controversial people, but it did offer me some peace while doing this, seeing how other people have had these thoughts and how they've gotten past it. Taken together, the drone and the samples enabled me to work out a vision of the afterlife and what happens to your consciousness in the end... possibly.

This is the same as above except there's no samples. It's only the drone, in case you found the above track too distracting while you're trying to concentrate. I do prefer the original, but again this was something I was making to be a tool for others to use while working, so I thought I might as well make this version available. By the way, both tracks start and end the same way so you can have them on a loop if you desire.

This is a little song I made as I was messing about on a Yamaha DX-7 and I sort of lost myself in a trance, but luckly I thought to hit record. I used this song as a placeholder for A Desperate Hope above because Bandcamp wouldn't allow me to upload the hour-long tracks since I'm not a paying customer. I might use this as part of a more complex track, but I do like the simplicity of it.