audio by artist fs8gbe

new track. experimenting with a live setup, this became the focal point of the experiment. not sure if this will morph into anything else or not. all programming was done on the fly and looped if needed. enjoy invisible.

a track i did for my birthday. it's really how i was feeling at the time. sort of jumbled, but in good spirits. my dog makes a guest appearance in this one.

coming out on an atlanta metal compilation soon....

so i want to sort of add to the track that i posted today, and i want to do this with the next few tracks i post. we'll call it "vault friday" ok? great...

i was on the beach, my aunt rents a beach house every year and i have a standing invitation to hang out for a night or two. i wasn't overly intoxicated, but a good buzz had washed over my brain. the moon was out, and the waves were just beautiful. it just felt like a good time to noodle around.

i had a loooong extension cord, a minidisc recorder, and a korg prophecy keyboard. little monophonic guy with cool little buttons and ribbons and knobs to tweak. i just settled in on this meandering arpeggio and played around for a while, until it had sort of washed into noise. at that point i lowered the tempo and made this sort of floating pink floyd phrase.

fast forward a couple years, and i find this minidisc. as soon as i listened to it it all came rushing back to me. so i decided to create a song out of it. i wanted to make a track that sort of buckled you in for a ride, as i often like to do, so i added some looping phrases that with each passing would change ever so slightly, so you wouldn't even notice unless you were paying attention. i even took a conversation i was having with my sister and turned it into a beat, and you can hear that periodically throughout the song.

i think what i like most about the song besides the personal aspects of it are how a phrase can continue to move, and change, and develop, until it actually made the format of the song change from one of an upbeat nature to that of a downtempo trippy sort of dirge.

what do you like about it?

so this edition of vault "friday" feels a bit like cheating, but hey, you get two this week.

i had a dream one time, and for some reason i remembered it in great detail. i actually woke up and did the thing you always read about, i wrote it down first thing while it was fresh. here, is my dream entry for that day...

"me and the lady were watching the world as it was. we were at the desert. it was very bright and golden. thousands of primitives stood around as if in a trance. there was a dog there. the lady took the dog and sowed and stitched it into the ground and it grew large and sprouted wings. it took forever to depart from the ground and indeed it looked as if it was in great pain writhing around. when it rose it flew into the sky. she said to me "this was the first year the dragon was seen."

this is my interpretation of that dream. if this song were an object, it would be symmetrical in many ways. but the point is that if you listen, you will hear a different song coming out of it than going into it. but you have to listen. it's one of the many secrets this song holds. it's a pretty simple song too. i layered some strings on top of each other and time stretched them out pretty far. i took a fairly simple house lock and pushed about 5 or 6 percussion loops underneath. the vocal sample is from thx1138. the last bit to this song is various sounds from one of my first keyboards, the kawai k4. enjoy.

so for this edition of vault friday i figured i would pull out a track a few of you have heard, some haven't. it's old, the 3rd or 4th "fs8gbe" song created. so this dates it at about 2000,2001. nothing really too deep about it's meaning (other than the title references some crap i was going through at the time), it's inspired by sci-fi, old school space rail shooter video game i had for the sega cd. i wrote something that i would want to hear while playing that game. in fact, if you own an xbox 360 and have grabbed a copy of every extend extra on xbla, you can import songs into that game. i highly recommend that you import this song into that game and play, it really really complements the gameplay.

what i like about this song is the driving ability it has, it just keeps you going. what do you like?

VAULT FRIDAY!!!! see i told you would get you something today. and on time too, how proficient.

so i wouldn't normally do this, but i feel bad for not getting anything out last week. this track has one foot in the vault and foot in the lab. i made this for the sole purpose of playing every extend extra with it. and that is fine. but i think it could be better. sad thing is i don't know how to make it better.

i've done so many damn things to this track...it's called bb25 for a reason...there's been 25 versions of it. atleast. i care about this one. it's like my little autistic baby. i don't know if i am being too critical here or what. i've even thought of offering the souce material up, having a remix competition, where everyone has the same building blocks, and everyone creates a song, and comes back at the end to see how different they are. and then i would steal the best one. haha. just kidding.

so...let me know what you think, and if you think you could do it better, let me know, i'll give you the parts. we'll make it a collaboration effort.

just know that when you listen to this song...in my eyes, it's only 80% cooked.

just in case you wanted it...here is the unedited music for Andrew Kemp's The Uncanny Valley podcast...

you guys get lucky because this month i am feeling generous. you get the bonus round! this is a set done entirely with the korg kaossilator.

if you look through my blog you will see my notes on this little yellow guy. now omn to the technical details...

everything is done on the kaossilator. i did not use any samples or any other devices or sound making things of any kind. this is 100% kaossilator. all of the songs were recorded live, and on the fly. so what you are hearing is the actual song making process in action. now i did use a tiny bit of studio trickery in so much that i blended the songs together to make a continuous soundtrack.

keep in mind that while i adore this box, it does have its limitations, and i still view it as a toy. that being said this isn't an oh my god what the fuck barbeque session. but it was fun and i figured, why not.

since this isn't your standard style set, i did encode in 96kbps, so if that bugs you let me know, and i will give you the url to the high quality version.

with that i give you - Live From The Cocoon - Bonus Round - Sunny Days