RPM
Challenge.

This was pretty haphazardly thrown together while I was in the middle of a country and job move! Started the album as an exercise to just do really short tracks that keep rampin up, but at some point, I guess I ended up in a diversion because I got really into the Hyper Light Drifter OST so ended up going into some darker territory somewhere in the middle.

This is a self-remix. I don't know if that's allowed, but I did it anyway. It came surprisingly easy into being, it was fun.

The initial idea was restraint. I wanted to decide on a set format for the "band", in this case bass, drums, one acoustic and electric guitar, and one vocal. All the sounds were set at the beginning and stayed constant throughout. The thought was like capturing a band practice in my attic where the group was being shown the songs for the first time. All the performances are one pass with no punches and nothing was more than one or two takes. The result is that a lot of mistakes made it to the final product (especially in the vocals!) but what I was hoping to do was capture some sense of spontaneity, or at least as much as one person pretending to be a full band could muster up.

Due to touring, we had to FINISH this record by February 16th. The Entire EP was recorded on the evening of February 16th. We're happy with these live, acoustic demos, and can't wait to flesh out the material in the studio over the coming 6 months.

This EP details the Russo-Ukrainian war of 2022-2023 from different perspectives. Also, a couple of songs related to life and death. It‘s pretty much all ballads composed with Chordbot software and using the an old IPad Pro, (depending on the circumstance) an Audient Echo 4 interface or a Rode AI-Micro interface, and a couple of condenser and /or transistor microphones

We spent the weekend of February 25th-26th crafting our submission(s) for the 2023 RPM challenge in one house with several recording setups running simultaneously. The result is a lot of different songs in a lot of different styles made by a lot of different people all appearing on the same record

Had lots of fun making this beast.

Just a few solo acoustic chords and riffs! I will be putting them on bandlab for people to add to if they want! under the same name. :)

I made a nine song album, I did it on purpose.

Before starting work on this project, I decided to employ granular synthesis to generate the material. Coincidentally, I started reading Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music by Joanna Demers (2010: Oxford University Press, USA) very shortly after that initial decision. I finished reading the book at about the same time as completing the raw material. The examples presented by Demers seemed to validate my decision to study granular synthesis, and inspired me to push a little deeper into acousmatic and musique concrète principles.

Echoes of Dreamscapes is my first full ambient album. I've really dug into the exploration of ambient music in the last few months. Composing ambient music creates an exploratory atmosphere for me to escape the hecticness of everyday life. I hope this album gives peace and serenity to those that listen to it. This album was made by a combination of synthisizers and effects pedals.

Assembling keys and guitar parts that led me to a lot of experimentation

I combined a bunch of genres I like and smashed them together. It's messy but I had fun making it.

Happy to create another RPM with dear old friends

The album consists of a number of improvisation approaches. As the title implies, this is an attempt at wrangling the possibillities which abound in the Universe. The pieces mainly used multitracking with Cubase, but also some of the rhythms generated were created with Python and translated to MIDI where they were later executed for a given virtual instrument. There are also some live takes that were integrated within multitracks.

I started every song on the Model:Cycles groovebox and then finished up in the DAW. I had never really used the groovebox much before, so it was a real experiment and a challenge. So happy to have made it through and finished with something I felt even better about than I expected.

Imagine if you awoke in a dream and you met a woman and this woman kissed you with the loving warmth of a million suns and you instantly felt you were in the one place you belonged. She told you she loved you. And she told you to find her as the dream faded to blackness and you couldn't shake the feeling that she was real and this was not. You realized that you were living in a simulation. Maybe you have lived through thousands of simulations, and worse, maybe you are simulated too. You are Frankenstein's creation, you are the monster, the experiment that wasn't considered a success, but she loved you. And now you know she holds the answers and you must find her again. You must escape this simulation before you are deleted entirely, before they delete her too.

i started writting a totally different record until i found out my singer couldn't do it, so i wrote an entirely different record, mostly using Logic sim-instruments and guitars and then found a singer who crushed it. mixing took very short time this year and i'm very happy with the final results.

I'm so tired my eyes can't adjust to the environment but Marlon continues with the help of a computer and A.I.

Ok so I didn't make the electronic record again, but hear me out. I was insanely busy this month and put my record off to the last week, so at this point I'm panicking and decide to take some half-written tunes I already had and just stick to what I know so I could get this thing OUT. Then I couldn't get any time to get proper vocal takes (I have 7 roommates and I am afraid) My entire process this year was a disaster, and yet, I have never felt so alive.

I've written symphonies before, but I wanted to write one for full orchestra, as best I could. Plus a few extra instruments, because no one said I couldn't.

Do we have to answer the essay questions?

Imagine 2 tape machines, one running slower and one running 61.8033989% faster. Their relationship is governed by the golden ratio. A single piece of tape, takes its journey through these 2 tape machines. A single piece of music, drawn from the golden ratio, is then transformed by the golden ratio, becoming faster, becoming slower, becoming more complex, and becoming sublimely long.

I've completed every single RPM Challenge since the very first one in 2006. That makes 18 successful years of this madness: the streak is alive. Every year is special, rewarding, and challenging in its own way, but this one was a vicious undertaking! It was an ambitious vision, it took a tremendous effort, and I am very glad it now exists.

This EP helped me find my voice again and helped me better define the type of music I want to share with the world.

DASH is an EP we made with shared guitar files and arrangements. It is an exploration of time and a balm to a time of grief. It was mixed on Garageband by Glenn using keyboard tracks and also guitar sounds by George.

It's a collaboration between Guy and Nate.

I had no idea I had this in me!!

I recorded 2 new tracks inspired by a prolonged stretch of insomnia in February. I gravitated toward an e-bow guitar tone to define the character of each song. One more brighter & melodic, the other darker & atmospheric.

This is my debut album. I made it using a keyboard, synthesizer and drum machine.

i set out to make something country inspired, but for the apocalypse. so acoustics and drum machines. I ended up writing one of my favorite songs ever.

Story for another day 😊

I love this record. It's 4:30 am in New Orleans. Mardi Gras is over and now so is RPM. I hope you all enjoy this. Thanks for listening.

Tried to make a heavy psychedelic rock album with my own style in a couple weeks. Stoked I finished for the RPM.

After a bunch of false starts during 2022, of albums that were started and abandoned and an ever-growing pile of WIPs, I finally stayed focused long enough to make a new album. It's called Kill Screen and is heavily inspired by ambient jungle/liquid DnB, which I started getting into at some point last year and haven't stopped listening to since then. It was a huge part of my formative years, mainly via video game soundtrack, that I'd never gone back to and properly appreciate.

This EP is the result of my exploration of my inspirations and influences! I tried doing a good portion of my own sound design rather than solely relying on presets. However, beyond that, my main goal for this year was properly structuring the songs, which I believe I managed to do in varying degrees of success.

Made In Heaven takes the six 'soft' songs from my Album - HyperSonic Bird - and shares them without the drum tracks. It's just me, my guitar, interface, mic, laptop, and the DAW.

no two songs alike. gimme all yr 20s.

Recorded simple, low-fi acoustic guitar riff and build a very long instrumental around it.

I really wanted to make an album with lyrics and "songy songs" this year, but I also had a truly wacky February that made cohesive thoughts or time to work on stuff impossible, so I made this album of instrumental pieces that are all at least partially improvised in a day. Oops!

Abalone's first single released March 1st, 2023.

I had a bunch of friends give me lyric prompts, which made the basis for a bunch of the songs. The rest are random weirdness.

An experiment in using only (virtual) modular synth gear and samples to construct and album. Further aided and abetted by being done only three days a week.

Recorded 10 songs but only had time to edit and mix 5 of them for March 1st. These songs have been written in my head for a while but never captured, so it felt great to finally do it. Played every instrument, sang all the parts, recorded it all with a 2 channel interface through a few mics, and obsessed over the mix late into many nights. Worth it!

I wanted to incorporate what I've heard and love from hyperpop into Midwest emo. I also wanted to solidify myself in emo by studying it's origins and structure and think I really achieved that.