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So, it is official, Hyphen is out and for sale! Check out the album page for more information.

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One day, someone who’s opinion I respect said that he’d love to hear a whole album of Sparkles and Unicorns. Because I’m an accomodating sellout, I made this in response.

Much like this song, the title is meaningless but kind of pretty.

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It sounds like power tools. Creepy, creepy power tools. Kind of like a drill, I suppose, but if someone was torturing someone else with an electric drill in another room.

This is fully synthesized, no samples were molested in the creation of this track. Also, It’s a year and a half old. I need to not sit on tracks so long.

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I very nearly made this a Braindouche! Hates It’s Listeners installment, but decided that it’s not really long enough to make anyone suffer sufficiently.

It is, however, that Ode To Joy, it is utterly terrible, and it’s a terrific example of the horrors that FL Studio allows otherwise well-meaning people to perpetrate upon music. Enjoy, suckers.

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The only explanation I have for this title is that this track sounds very reminiscent of BBC Radiophonic Workshop music in their more textural, less composery-themey moods. That therefore clearly leads to thoughts of cheap BBC scifi shows, and their associated cheap costumes and FX.

I suppose that means I could have just as easily titled this track “Look, A Walking Cardboard Box”.

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If you recall Vistas, and the abandoned project that spawned it, you pretty much have all the information you need to parse this piece of beautiful, digital New Age music.

Nothing Left To Take Away is, as a title, a statement on  self-editing in digital music, and how there generally isn’t enough of it, and that there’s a habit among digital composers to try to cram 3 or 4 songs’ worth of ideas into one piece, and they shouldn’t. Even as an enthusiast of minimalism, I have the same problem.

The reason I bring it up? This tune needed a lot of scrubbing before it was ready for prime time. It was very crapped up. It is not now, and that is good.

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So, what happened was, I moved 400 miles to a new city and a new state, and I had no internet.I now live in Buffalo, and I got internet yesterday.

Why you didn’t get a podcast yesterday? Because I’m a lazy bastard is why.

Hell Has A Power Grid is industrial and dark and creepy, and it sort of sounds like a warehouse that had, I don’t know, a lot of wiring and shit in it, right after some big freaking thing rampaged through and fucked shit up.

Also? Pure synthesis. I can’t tell you how much I love sample-free industrial.

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One of FL Studio’s strengths AND weaknesses is all of the different ways you are presented to export audio out of a project. It’s relatively straightforward to pull individual elements out of a mix, and it’s fairly simple to pull different drafts out of your project.

It’s also pretty easy to completely screw up your export before you close your project without saving, leaving you with a small audio file that has absolutely nothing to do with what you were trying to accomplish, forcing you to redo your project and release a vastly inferior second take.

Because its never as good the second time.

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Yeah, you heard right. Right after I put out the podcast this morning, I got an email from John at Magnatune (yes, that John) (… yes, that Magnatune), saying he liked my music, and he would be happy to release my album.

HOLY CRAP.

Ok, it’s not out of the blue, I did send in demos a couple of weeks ago, and John has to personally like the music to be accepted. But still! Little old weird-ass me, I have a record deal with one of the most remarkable independent music labels on the planet. One that actually pays real money.

Of course, it’s never that simple. The first thing I need to come up with is a name for the album, and I have no freaking idea what to do here. I just submitted a bunch of my favorite tracks with no real concept of how they went together. Not all of them made it in, but the tracks that will be on the album are:

Instant Space Orchestra
14 Space 1
Vistas
Summer Solstice
Drone 6
Ambient Strings
Surely
Neur 7
Yettu
Chickabom

I think it’s neat that these tracks cover the entire 4 years I’ve been doing this podcast.It’s pretty balanced, I think, somewhere between ambient and drone, light and dark.

Anyway, I don’t know what order they’ll be in, but those are the tracks. So what do I call this? I need an album name so I can fill out the contract and send it back and make the whole thing all official. The only idea I’ve had so far is “Reaching Out In All Directions”, because, lets face it, my sounds are all over the place.I also want to avoid the ambient tendency to have really sappy, sentimental album titles, and I think that title achieves a certain thoughtfulness without being syrupy.

So what do you think? What should I call it?

Heh, see what I did there?

It’s repetitive, it’s maddening, it stretches (dunno how that happened), and if you’re patient, you’ll see why I called it that.

Music To Go Crazy To(tm).

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