The title of this album, Melody Processing in the Secondary Auditory Cortex, was taken from an article I came across some years ago, and actually has no bearing on the music in the album…as far as I know. I just liked the title. I do that a lot, mostly for song titles, but…
Back before I started using samples of real instruments, I worked with synthesizers of one sort or another. The pieces on this album cover a period of about 5 years, starting in Texas and finishing up in Germany.
Generally speaking, I don’t like synths anymore, and rarely use them. There are exceptions, of course. I like “The Long Wait” synth in VacuumPro and the “Tief” synth bass in Loom, but even they are not used as much anymore.
The pieces on this album are the least melodic of all my album releases, but they do fall in line with a lot of my earlier work, which you may or may not be subjected to at a later date. I’m not sure why this exists at all, considering my previous album released a few months before this one, which I’ll be presenting next week. Maybe it was a case of vamp until ready or taking a step back while deciding what I wanted to do next.
At any rate, I am loathe to remove possibly embarrassing efforts from my catalog. Why hide wrong turns while on a journey? They’re still part of the journey, right?
This one could easily have been a part of the Kopfino album, since it is very much a soundtrack to a non-existent horror film. I guess it’s a bit of a precursor.
I used to use the Sound Blaster SoundFonts which came built into the Sound Blaster audio cards. They all had a patch called “Goblins”, and this piece uses the different-sounding Goblins patches from the different models of the cards. I could call it “experimental”, but really it was just messing around.
Another experiment. If you listen carefully to the other pieces on this album, you’ll notice the different background sounds underlying the main instruments. I took those different backing tracks, transposed them so they’d all be more or less in the same key, then played them all at once.
Created from a photo of yours truly, one of three pieces which were based on a selfie, with the others appearing on later albums. This piece has a ridiculously wide dynamic range, so don’t turn it up if it seems too quiet. Overall, it’s not.
Playing around with arpeggiators, very popular with electronic music. Bouncy. This piece was from a photo of my wife standing out in the snow. Brrrr.
These three go together and were kinda sorta named after the 1959 Science Fiction film The World, the Flesh and the Devil, starring Harry Belafonte. They’re another instance of using titles which bear no relation to the music. Unless something is an actual song, with lyrics, it’s difficult to come up with meaningful titles…so I don’t. I suppose it’s better than “Opus 37” or some such, however.
I went back and forth with this one, sometimes wanting to include it, sometimes not. I still don’t know if I made the right decision.
Anyway, this album is the second-to-last album I’ll be presenting for a while. Next week will be The Vineyard, my very first album release. Very piano-centric, with all the tunes created from photographs.