Electronic Music Compositions Pre-2004
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I got into electronic music and composing with electronics in my junior year at Bard College. Until then I had exclusively written for orchestral instruments or rock band arrangements. Then I heard Morton Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon and it changed everything for me. From that piece, I understood that, with electronics, I could craft any sound I wanted and discover sounds I never dreamed of.
The first track, Little Flowers Meaty Monsters, was my final project for my first digital composition class that I took at the McGill University Conservatory of Music. I collaborated with Alex Colwell, who did much of the drum programming, and a jazz guitarist who played the intro (but I can’t remember his name). It was fun writing the music and then experiencing digital editing and sound manipulation, as well as programming the synths. If anyone out there wants a lyric sheet for the “poem” I recite in the beginning, feel free to contact me
The second track, Porpoise, is often thought of by people as “creepy” sounding. I URGE you to listen to it with a meditative mind and I promise you won’t find it creepy, but rather deep and exploratory. I recorded three synth parts separately, attempting to remember how the first part sounded as I played the next parts. It was an interesting compositional technique to try out. The third synth part was a bass instrument, which I also edited as a fourth layer with automated delays and reverb.
