murdertron 4000

this is an extremely rough mix of a song i wrote called “let go.” i have been trying to write this song for weeks, but it has never stopped giving me trouble, during every step of the creative process: from conception to its delivery as a full-grown being, bursting from the womb of my computer like Athena was born full-grown from the mind of Zeus.

this song has been like a stubborn child. i tried to be patient with it, but eventually my patience grew thin and i lost my temper with it. children who are stubborn do not realize that instead of being stubborn, they should be grateful to be alive, grateful to have a father who wants them to grow up and prosper. they should realize that for every human being that gets born, there have been thousands who got miscarried, aborted, or, worse, exposed. life is a gift, everybody.

um…this started out as a remix of a rap song, but then i decided i would rather listen to my own vocoder-assisted rendition of an old brandy song than listen to prodigy ramble about how much of a thug he is. so far, this is the loudest thing i have ever recorded.

this song is called “pony.” it is a dirty R&B song from the 90s. it was sung by ginuwine. if you listened to R&B or went to parties in the 90s, you may remember this song. all the synth sounds in this remix came from two patches i made in my ensoniq esq-1. the remix itself is brought to you by miller high life: the champagne of beers. happy new year!

me and keith made this. it is a cover of a donny hathaway christmas song. we did the whole thing on christmas day. keith laid down his vocals after a particularly long shift at starbucks, and he could not seem to pronounce the word “christmas” correctly. but that’s ok. pronunciation isn’t the meaning of christmas. to learn the true meaning of christmas, stay tuned at the end of the song for a special message from murdertron.

this song is called “the boy is mine.” i did not write it. brandy and monica sang it in 1998 and it was on top of the charts for more than three months. this song was dead before i finished middle school, but this week i exhumed its corpse and revived it, only to murder it all over again, using beats and computers.

this is another song i wrote. the lyrics are from a poem i wrote in june. the poem was not that great so i kept rewriting it, but it still doesn’t rhyme.

this song is worth listening to because it sounds good and it is pretty and because it has a badass key change at the end during the rhodes solo.

it might seem like this song is about me spending a boring night sitting around at a girl’s house after she has fallen asleep, but it is actually a poetic commentary on the fate of modern man’s intelligence. the light symbolizes knowledge, and the two types of light (sunlight and artificial light) symbolize two different types of knowledge. there was a time before artificial lights (i.e., a time before a specific sort of scientific enlightenment) when a person who was indoors at night had little choice but to go to sleep. electric lightbulbs have gone a long way toward erasing the boundary between day and night, between known and the unknown. but with the collapse of the old boundaries, we grow alienated from each other and from the world around us in ways we had never imagined. as time marches on, and technological systems increasingly supplement and replace natural ones, our old fear of nature, our old fear of a God who resided in the elements of the natural world, grows faint and gives way to a strange new anxiety.

there is something deep inside me that expects disaster, that knows that the side effects of progress will visit us with the full fury of divine judgment.

this is a song i wrote called “i remember you.” do not confuse it with the jazz standard of the same title. i wrote the music for this one on tuesday because i was bored and i wanted to write a song. i wrote the lyrics on wednesday while riding the train home from work and started recording vocals that night instead of hanging out with my friends, who played music and ate free pizza without me. then i worked on it all day thursday instead of eating meals or going outside. unlike the last several songs i made, i did not really stretch my technique while recording this; it is moody, not ambitious.

ableton was being a pussy about pitch shifting. toward the end of this project, i had to keep rendering it to disc in order to listen to it because when i tried to play it in ableton, the cpu meter kept jumping up over 100%, and then the audio would slow down drastically during the pitch-shifted parts, after which the playback speed would triple in order to compensate for its weakness. this sort of behavior may be acceptable while driving or studying for a test, but it is not acceptable during playback.

does this song have a stylistic precedent? i cannot think of one, and for this reason, i cannot imagine why anyone might possibly find it as lovely and comforting as i do. it might be a sad song on the surface, but to me, it’s the equivalent of a late night frozen pizza: not particularly healthy or substantial, but perversely satisfying. also, i think the jazz turnaround tag at the end is hilarious.

i wrote another song. i cannot think of a title for it. it is the first song i have finished since the last song i finished. it is a feel-good pop song for the summer, even though summer is over.

this song was not more difficult to make than usual, but somehow my poor little intel could not handle all the vocal tracks, and kept maxing out when i was trying to listen to the playback. i got frustrated with vocal pitch correction, so i stopped using it. i felt that i had not been using enough scream distortion units in reason, so this time, i used nearly a dozen of them. the routing in reason on this song is a masterpiece. you should see all the splitters, mergers, and line mixers i used.

the lyrics of this song involve a realization of existential loneliness. the music in this song involves the use of a few awkward harmonic devices at the end of each section to get back to G sus, because the verses and the choruses all start in C. (the chorus actually starts on e minor, but it’s just a iii-vi-ii-V in C until i hit Ab and start using harmonic voodoo again.) the only place where i suspend this requirement is at the end, in the distorted freakout coda that hangs around F# major through the fadeout. it’s a tritone away from the original key. i didn’t plan that, but it totally expresses the distance that separates people, which is totally the aesthetic my words were getting at. totally. a tritone is the furthest distance in music. ask any music theory major.

remember kids, like rilke said, we are all alone in the world, and no one can help us. it’s best to guard each other’s solitudes. we are all solitudes that border each other. you can realize this by going to a concert, or by going to church. we try to get at communion, but it only exists in fleeting moments, when we are given the grace to forget ourselves and lay self-interest on the altar of the greater good. LOL.

VERSE

Cmaj7 | Cmaj7 | Abmaj7 | Bbsus |

amin7 | amin 7 | emin7 Fmaj7 | Dbmaj7 / Amaj7 (Gsus) |

CHORUS

emin7 | amin7 | dmin7 | Gsus / G7/F |

emin7 | amin7 | Abmaj7 / (D7#11) Dbmaj7 | bbmin7 / F#maj7 (Gsus) |

i wrote another song. it is called “assurance.” i think it is finished. the lyrics aren’t much, but they contain some nice symmetry. the musical theme in the chorus is something i thought of a couple of years ago, but the chord progression on the verses resulted from a failed attempt to write something based on “swahililand,” the ahmad jamal song j dilla sampled on the beat for de la soul’s “stakes is high.”

swahililand (you can skip the intro if you want to see what i am talking about)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApjL8YZvOIU

stakes is high

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYw0NnHDRzc

this is a song i wrote. i call it “like a bell.” on this song, i kept adding extra vocal tracks and reverb until i realized ableton was hogging over 50% of my cpu’s processing power.

this song is about a come-on attempt that never actually happened.