Floodwaters by canton

Finished this during a moment in history when 2,000 Pakistanis have died and 20 million are injured or homeless as a result of massive flooding which in many ways is eclipsing the last three major natural disasters combined.

If this creative-commons released free tune gets your head bobbing and heart throbbing, I gently ask that you consider making a donation to one of these many four-star charities providing relief to those displaced by the waters.

“Il y’a un truque que m’a frappé: Tu a quatre-vingnt ans, il y’a des vins que tu ne boiras jamais.”

(This is the thing that struck me: You’re eighty years old, there are some wines that you’ll never drink.)

This afternoon I was digging through my collection of digitized cassette tapes as part of a journaling / diary project I’m looking into. One of the more precious things I stumbled on was this song I made during a music composition course while I was a sophomore at Northwestern University in 1993. The professor’s instructions were to “compose something of personal and emotional significance.” You can hear the song I composed below.

Nineteen-ninety-three was the year in which I was saddened to learn that a close family friend had died, Monsieur Du Serf. This was a gentleman I had known and loved since early in my childhood. During summer visits to my grandmother’s home in France, Monsieur Du Serf and his dog — a high strung Daschund named “U.F.O” (but prounced “ooh-foh”) – were regular visitors. He always treated me with great kindness and generosity.

A few years prior to this music composition assignment, I had started making sneaky recordings of conversations people had around me on a tape recorder. So as it turns out I was able to find a fairly recent recording of Monsieur Du Serf for the project.

The voices you hear in this composition are primarily those of my grandmother, Lucienne Bert (1912 – 2003) and Monsieur Du Serf (19?? – 1993). This pair liked nothing better than to sit around the dining room table and argue about wine and food. Discussions even about seemingly small things inevitably rose to fever pitches punctuated with table-slapping and disgusted exclamations of “baaaah!” and “ecoutez! (listen!)”. If the conversation got too quiet, Monsieur Du Serf would slip a bit of sausage or cheese to U.F.O I think just to elicit a grunt of disapproval from Lucienne.

Listening to this song again today (for the first time in the 17 year interval since it was recorded to a 4-track cassette recorder) I was moved by this conversation in which these two old friends, now both dead, were discussing what it meant to be eighty years old and buying wines that wouldn’t be ready to drink for ten or fifteen more years. In recent holidays, my mother and I have enjoyed drinking some of the very wines they discussed in this conversation.

Du Serf: This is the thing that struck me: You’re eighty years old, so there are some wines that you’ll never drink.

Lucienne: I bought some yesterday. I bought some yesterday because it gave me pleasure. I know I won’t drink them either.

Du Serf: When you’re old… when you’re old you buy wines for your <<héritiers>> (those who will inherit from you.)

This morning I flashed back to 2006 when video game maker Konami hired me to compose a dance remix of Toryanse for their Xbox release of Dance Dance Revolution. Did you listen to the melody in that video above? It is plain eerie – a definite timewarp into feudal japanese history – and making it danceable at all was a huge challenge.

All in all I think I went through 13 rounds of remixes back and forth before Konami finally settled on a techno genre tempo-warping version of the melody. Here’s an early draft version of the final mix (to which Konami still has exclusive rights):

Toryanse Techno Mix © Copyright 2006 Konami

While digging through my files this morning, I rediscovered three completely different remixes I composed that Konami didn’t like. I’m releasing the following three tracks under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. This means you can do almost anything you like with these songs — download them, remix them, mash them up, extend them, even sell them — provided that you give me credit and link back to this website.

Toryanse Urban Mix

Toryanse Dark Children Mix

Toryanse Broken Children Mix

It’s been years since I’ve played around in the 90-bpm breaks range. Having that extra time/space between the beats makes it possible to play with wicked bass sounds and long cymbals – things that are hard to squeeze into my usual 140-175bpm range. This is also the first song I’ve mastered using Logic’s built-in multiband compressor and adaptive limiter (instead of an off-the-shelf mastering tool like Yamaha’s finalizer or T-racks.) I think the Logic plugins preserved a lot of the crispness and space that would have been muddied up by the other harder-edged mastering tools. What you hear below is the final (13th) mix of this song. 

Listen:

174 BPM d’n'b, growly nasty bassline, occasional explosive speaker-ripping kicks, and an acid synth line that snuck in from my techno personality.

The “This song is a serious song, isn’t it?” sample is from this very silly record.

Listen here:

A while back I was hired to compose two songs for Konami’s DDR UltraMix 4, and they sent me some free copies of the game… but I don’t have a console to play on (or stomp on or whatever it’s called when you do the blinky-light DDR thing.)

They bought all-out rights to the songs I made so I can’t post the DDR editions here. However one of the songs was a remix of an older drum ‘n’ bass tune I wrote called “Indian Summer” which I can reproduce in full here:

Listen here:

Listen: