About this album:

Songs in order of oldest to newest:
1. eyes are rigged (nov 29 2021)
2. knee pain relief official (dec 11 2021)
3. i'll be there in a day (jan 3 2022)
4. sent from my (jan 3 2022)
5. first name basis (may 6 2022)
6. unintended interlude (june 16 2022)

Songs in order of most improvised to least improvised:
1. I'll be there in a day (no edits from original take at all)
2. sent from my (no edits from original take at all)
3. unintended interlude (live mixing of two improvisations)
4. eyes are rigged (stacked/spliced moments from one improvisation)
5. knee pain relief official (some stacked moments and significant splices taken out of a longer take)
6. first name basis (stacked improvs, post-hoc mixing/looping, punch-ins, etc)

All sounds produced in Max/MSP by Dear Daniel except for unintended interlude which was remixed through a Technics SH-DX1200 mixer























About each track [spoilers]

eyes are rigged
This song was originally 16 minutes. I liked a lot of the places it went, but the beginning was by far the strongest section so I decided to cut it short and use it as an intro. Sample is thinkin bout u by frank ocean. i would do this thing with my channel orange cd in the car where i played with skip and fast forward to make patterns out of the first four notes and that is where the idea for this piece came from.

first name basis
i made this song by going through my "improvisations" folder where i throw all my max/msp takes and layering the first few things i found in a pro tools session. the vocals were an outtake from a forthcoming track (I decided to leave that song off this project for several reasons (not fitting sonically, using diff gear than everything else, wanting to release it in the summer, wanting to keep working on the mix indefinitley, not wanting two songs sampling the same track on this project)). the drums were distorted post-hoc using the lo-fi plugin that comes with pro tools.

unintended interlude
when i got the technics dj mixer that i use on this track, i was experimenting for a while with bouncing my laptop improvisations onto cassette tapes and djing with them through the technics. this is a live take of one motif i explored with that setup. one tape with the random drums (these drums were achieved with a max abstraction that randomly plays a drum sound out of a folder with only controls for "range" (randomize files x through y out of z total files) and a probability gate (probability of "play" or "hold" on each beat of the metronome) that are then ran through a delay to create the impression of call-and-response patterns) and the lead (this was either a sample of ave maria or kiss me more i honestly can't remember). i did 2-3 takes and this was the first. i absolutely could have gotten a better take in terms of playing with the filters on the mixer but i got lazy.

knee pain relief official
this is an on-the-fly remix of bombastic love by britney spears. i spent quite a bit of time arranging this composition out of the original take which was about twice as long. i generally refrain from "looping" parts when i go through post-production/rearranging of improvisations. i find that when i start to think that way—looking for sections to loop that didn't originally loop—i end up over-editing what was originally a very varied take into something much more normally-structured. but i ended up cracking down and looping two progressions one extra time in the second half. i found it to be absolutely necessary to maintain interest and make the meander more of a success.

sent from my
the pleasing progressions of this one I generated by changing the speed of a sample with a very slow, intense oscillator followed in the signal chain by a retune effect. first sample is an 808 bongo then donda chant by kanye west (guess i took a little too long to release this one, haha, but i enjoy that pop culture samples can change in meaning even after i'm done working on their host piece). the drum sequencer generating the drums is changing patterns of some tracks every 4/8 bars. i am on the fly dragging the new audio files that pop in throughout the track into this drum sequencer and the main audio sampler.

i'll be there in a day
this was recorded immediately before the previous song. both recorded in a single morning just with laptop trackpad while listening out of its built-in speakers. I was kicking myself for not setting up a midi controller or grabbing my headphones the whole time but inspiration had already struck. this uses the same signal chain of a drastic speed control oscillator on an audio waveform followed by a retune effect with additional developments coming from changing the length of the waveform, delay, reverb, and changing oscillator dimensions.