hey volume warning this is louder than other stuff we post (if you have listened to our other stuff here) because im not going to add even more compression artifacts to this 128k mp3 to normalize down the gain.
this is the first full track we ever made. it's pretty cool honestly? at the time i think we were really iffy about sharing it because we assumed we couldn't be proud of things until we Got Good (and because it didnt sound anything like our music idols at the time).
rambling about skill below
But like, there's a lot to like here. there's a variety in the song structure that we fell out of for quite awhile when we got stuck in Da Loop Zone for a few years (those dastardly loops). There's some cool stutters i remember we hand-programmed in. There's a good ol "drop everything suddenly for dramatic effect". There's a neat moment at the end i remember was us trying very hard to convince a synth to sound like an impression of an animal crying out. There's some abstract plotline running through it that i dont really remember the details of.
The actual sounds i think were us noodling around with VST knobs after selecting a preset, not really sure what anything meant, but going for whatever sounded cool. Im very certain the sub-bass you can't hear without headphones was actually an extremely harmonically rich bass that got massively low-passed to cut out all of that stuff (understandable have a nice day).
What's interesting to me is how the state of being a complete beginner imposes both restrictions while also granting freedoms. We didn't know how to even begin conceptualizing song structure, so the structure is purely just vibes (and it turned out pretty cool!). We didn't know how to even begin conceptualizing music theory, so the notes are entirely moving stuff around until it stops sounding bad and starts sounding good. We didn't know what sound design or mixing was, so we couldn't get stuck spending all our time in that, all we could do was write the song, and that's what we did. Can't convince yourself you'll fix it in the mix if you don't have a mix beyond volume levels!
All in all what matters most is that in terms of capturing like the feelings we were feeling at the time, damn does it do it. We were pretty fucked up, and i think it carries that.
So those are the freedoms. The restrictions set in after. Iterating on this was incredibly hard, because we didnt know how we'd done what we did. Lots of half finished things we didn't know how to complete because as soon as you try to make a second thing you realize that a structure exists, that notes have meaning, but you don't know anything beyond that. Suddenly we need to think about frequencies and what parts of the spectrum things are taking up and masking and however the hell percussion works (not even any drums in this!!!)????? And so we had to grapple for years after with trying to figure out how to write parts and sections that went together at all.
Or did we?
Well, eventually, yeah. It's a lot easier to make the things you want to make when you know what you're doing. but I think we could've spent less time feeling stuck if we hadn't let it get in the way of just writing some shit however it turned out. For us, once we realized that some things worked better and some things worked worse, we were too put off by anything that wasn't the best that it drained our motivation to keep working on things, and so we gave up early on a lot of projects because of that. Hadn't learned to just put some shit down and accept that the melodic structure was gonna be funky sometimes. that the chords would sound like ass sometimes and we could go change them until they didnt. and so we have so much more after this that is just 30 second loops. And I appreciate those loops, oh so much more now than i did then. But it feels good to go beyond that. The times when we did manage to were always our happiest, then.
in conclusion: lol this is jsut me rambling im not making a point. but if you want a conclusion: uhhh, perfectionism kinda sucks and we've spent years trying to undo its patterns within us. been hard. been worth it tho. if u relate my heart goes out to u
also i still have no idea how to make that synth sound for the animal-cry part lmao