RPM
Challenge.

This EP is a taster for a full length album I'm currently demoing, and it represents the two ends of my journey as a musician. I started with violin (and later viola) and playing in small string ensembles, then it was guitar music, and more recently I've been exploring the weirder end of things with my Safest Outbound Sparrows project. This EP is me trying to smash all (or most) of that together into something that doesn't sound like a complete mess!

A quick and messy two-track taster that will hopefully blossom into a full length record

I wrote this single in a few hours that I was feeling especially angsty. My lyrics are direct--not a lot of mystery here--it's about the struggle to let go of someone you love when you don't want to because you know it's what's best, and dealing with reliving all the good memories..

This is my 3rd RPM Challenge Album. It is my gift to myself. Last year I had a brain bleed and almost didn't make it. After a lot of effort, physio therapy and something else I am able to put on mascara without blinding myself but my guitar rhythm hand sucks and my drumming is still a racket ... but I'm working on it. I bought a mixer with an interface but I'm technologically challenged and rhythmically impaired. I've managed to record my self expressions somehow so I'm calling it a success regardless of how it sounds. This is my offering.

Protest Song. Hope to inspire others that were lied to.

Signed up for EP, made LP with help from friends

Jams turned into classics, and chickens

There's no one overarching concept, but there are a few loose overlapping themes: water, family, the future... It starts in one vein and then drifts into another, settling into something more typical of me. It has its defects (inevitably) but overall I'm pleased with it and, as always, had a great time putting it together. Congrats to everyone who completed something this February.

These recordings travel a range of topics and styles. I wrote them one at a time. From a list of phrases I keep in my phone. Ideas for songs if you will. I built them and worked on them individually till they were done and I began again. There is no real "album" concept here. I did what I wanted to make the best song I could for the theme. I was fun! I think working fast simplifies decision making. I work early in the morning and use ideas from my dreams. Enjoy!

I set out to make an instrumental EP but I wasn't sure where to go... but then I remembered I own an 8-string guitar.

This was a collaboration with some friends. We took a song that had all the bones and just needed the dressing. I love the result.

This one is a memorial to my old cat who passed away in December and is an exploration of grief.

What: an album inspired by visiting Greece and a story I read about a burial ground in Peru. It's special because I stayed pretty true to the type of music I wanted to write. How: Some hardware, some software, one "live" modular synth jam but mostly Ableton / Reason.

Matt (Lost Principal) plays bass, and Jarrett Osborn plays drums on A Step Behind, and Dan on bass for Don't Let Her Down

just a classic tragic breakup song! :-)

These songs have been in my head for many many months I finally got to make them

i was trying to mess with different sounds and vocal alterations, because my usual material is pretty straightforward indie rock. i think i achieved that.

Fast beats to vibe out and scroll Letterboxd

A lot of the music here was influenced by my participation in an ongoing Lancer TTRPG game with my friends, and a fair number of these tracks soundtrack events in the story of that campaign.

I recorded raw upright piano with 2 rented condenser mics! This is dedicated to my grandpa who is 90 and has repeatedly asked me to send him clips of me playing piano.

We're a new band still working on writing songs and finding our sound. Due to a bunch of extraneous circumstances (as well as an excessive dose of absent-mindedness by our producer/guitarist), we ended up recording this whole thing in one evening in our garage practice space. All the takes were done live and recorded off our mixing board via 3 stereo busses (and one stereo handheld recorder, for ambience). Editing and mixing were done in Studio One, and the final mixes were mastered with our fully analog processing/effects rack.

I let my mind wander and my fingers play while thinking about exploring planets far beyond our solar system. Feeling, interacting with the lifeforms, trying to survive just one month.

I managed to get through ten all new songs this year, but it was a struggle. My guitar skills are still pretty sub-par so I struggle to come up with ideas sometimes and then remember how to play them later. Also lyrical ideas came in at a trickle this year. The last four or five songs all came in a rush just a couple of days before the finish line. I will say that things I initially thought I hated and kept because I was running out of time are what I'm looking back on most fondly in the immediate afterglow of completing everything. As in previous years I reordered everything in my home studio, playing and singing all the parts as a one man band. No small feat considering at best I'd consider myself a drummer first, and a terrible singer!

I took some words that I wrote after my dad died, and recorded a little song skeleton on cassetter 4 track.

There was a brief moment when Galactica.org, a Meta owned attempt at building an LLM for Science (as if scientists don't learn how to conduct research) was open to the general public. It was trained on a number of scientific papers, and Wikipedia. I and my Twitch viewers spent a significant amount of time that week typing in silly things and laughing and laughing and laughing at the things the AI returned. I had just learned the Japanese kanji for the planet Jupiter, which uses the kanji for 'tree' so one of the things I typed was: Tell me about Jupiter, Tell me about trees. I got the following response: "Tell me about Jupiter, Tell me about trees is a short story by Philip K Dick The story is told in the first person by a character named David. David is an alien, from a planet in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy. He is currently living in New York City. He has no memory of his life before he arrived in the Solar System, but has developed a fascination with Earth's ecosystem. He has a theory that the Earth's ecosystem is a living organism, which has evolved over millions of years. He believes that, just as humans have evolved from primates, Earth's ecosystem has evolved from a single species. He has been attempting to observe and record this evolution. David decides to observe Jupiter. He is given a telescope by a local man, and begins observing the Jovian system. He notices that Jupiter is in the middle of a war between its moons, and decides to observe the planet from the safety of a spaceship in orbit. While in orbit, he begins to observe the Earth, and discovers that the ecosystem is changing. He concludes that the Earth's ecosystem is evolving. David then begins to observe other planets, such as Mars and Venus. He observes that the ecosystems of other planets are changing, and decides that Earth is no exception. He also begins to observe the Sun, and discovers that it is also evolving. David concludes that the universe is evolving, and that the Earth is a small part of the whole. David decides to observe the entire universe. He takes a spaceship to the center of the galaxy, and discovers that the universe is not evolving, but is in fact, decaying." I decided this silly little story was worthy of being turned into a song. The song structure follows the output exactly, and I took many of the lines word for word from the AI response. Meta might think they deserve a writing credit for that. I have not given them one. If they ever decide to acknowledge and pay all the artists whose work they've stolen to build their LLMs, I may reconsider. I will at least thank all the authors who's work was subsumed (likely without permission) by Galactica. I enjoyed the freedom a not so serious song gave me to play around with harmonies and synth sounds, the song at it's core is about curiosity but it is also about decay. It should be enjoyed for what it is, a fun song about a space alien conducting interplanetary research, but it should also serve as a commentary on the harms, particularly the environmental harms caused by AI for a product that is really quite useless.

Made on my phone and recorded with Bluetooth headphones... DIY or DIE

As usual, covers several and disjointed genres: Heavy Metal, Jazz, Electronica, Ambient... Very happy that this year it includes collabs with 3 other artists and my first attempt at integrating vocals into a track. As always, there were whole other worlds to explore... if we only had the time!...

Three songs for a live set at NYCR's Synth night meetup. Most of the songs are made on the Synthstrom Deluge, with some extra sounds from the 0-coast and OP-1.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder

combining the straightforward EDM of johnjack with the ambling experimentation of van gauche

13 rock songs. Some in odd time signatures, some with lots of 12-string guitar, some with some saxophone, lots of electric guitar and vocal harmoies.

Zac Francis and Mike Allard were students at a school I taught at. We did an RPM with the track Ibby in 2008 as CATA Jam Club: More Than You Bargained For (Not In The Face!). Zac suggested a sequel. Ironically, I'd had lunch with Ibby a few weeks earlier. And here we are.

unfortunately only got one song done, but i think its pretty cool. made in reaper, mostly with pigments and stage 73. *penguin noise*

Made on Dirtywave M8, I like it coz its pretty

Wanted to slow things down a bit. Going for that trip-hop vibe. All tracks have a BPM below 90.

We wrote an EP in a month, everything recorded live off the floor in a living room

This album is an exposition of soundtrack compositions. It contains many styles of electronic music. It was composed on a Yamaha Montage Keyboard and Cubase AI. It is special to me because it showcases the styles of music I can compose.

I made an EP that reinvents my old sound and incorporates more dream pop elements with my traditional gothic style

The goal for this RPM was less about quantity and more about deciding on a new musical direction. I specifically wanted to include vocals and songs that could be easily re-interpreted live. "A Few Questions" was the first attempt at capturing an idea, with more to come

we're giving birth to these songs. yeah. let's get to work.