Released 31 October 2023
Recorded November 2022-February 2023, October 2023
Metal, progressive rock, new wave
13 Tracks (1h 8m 20s)
Track listing
1. There's a Tesla on My Tail | 2. Jules Sucks (Tom Is King) | 3. Bad Sectors | 4. Looks Like It's Someone Important
5. Integer Overflow | 6. Delta Q Delta | 7. Room Over Room | 8. One-Time Pad | 9. James Isn't Here | 10. Monsters Mashed
11. Source Port | 12. Looks Like It's MIDI | 13. The Next Step Up
As early as October 2022, I knew I wanted to do something special for Doom's 30th anniversary. My original idea of "map pack" got stuck on E1M3, so I wasn't really sure what to do otherwise; but the obvious thing would be to write new music. That seemed like kind of a lot to do, but I figured, I had a year to sort it out. Anyway, at around the same time, someone dredged up an old meme on Tumblr about a nonexistent Martin Scorcese film from the '70s called "Goncharov" and wrote some lore for it. As is always the case with Tumblr memes, you can't predict them; they just sort of happen. Well, I'd just written a nifty little General MIDI prog-rock chune in FL Studio and... you know, I always have the worst time with titles. I've written about 15 hours of music in my time, and I've spent that same amount of time thinking of titles. Well, I wanted to save this file so I could get on with my life; on a whim, I called the project file "Intro to Goncharov". The final title, of course, ended up being "Source Port", but if you open the FLP, the project title is "Intro to Goncharov". It really had nothing to do with the meme; it didn't sound Russian, it didn't sound like '70s film music, it sounded like Doom. Nonetheless, I decided, "hey, here's an idea", and I used it to add to the meme. I gave it a bogus title, composer credit, and Super NES cartridge art for some reason, adding a Wolfenstein-like FPS game to the lore.
I decided this was going to work. I could write a whole album of Doom-style music for DOOM30TH and it wouldn't even take me a whole year. Of course, the system I developed for writing these songs ended up being a little too efficient, as I finished the project in February. I decided to release it in March and damn the consequences. Back then, I was still on Bandcamp, so that was the record's first release venue. After Epic sold Bandcamp to Songtradr, I hauled ass off that website and onto Itch, where Source Port was my first release there.
Taking its principal inspiration from Doom, there's a lot of '90s-style metal in here. I decided to branch out after a while, taking inspiration from other sources, such as Castlevania and various turn-of-the-millennium reality shows. All the FOX ones seemed to take themselves way too seriously, using all this overblown Logic Pro stuff—blatty trombones, synth pads, and staccato strings mainly. "Delta Q Delta" and "Integer Overflow" definitely would not be out of place on such a programme. Talking of Castlevania, there's more of Super Castlevania IV than Doom in "Monsters Mashed"; and it's also the only song on the record to use Spitfire Audio's strings. I tried to use what would have been available to a composer around about the time Final Doom was released; that meant a lot of Proteus, Emulator III, and Roland SoundCanvas stuff.
Five song titles come directly from Doom. "Jules Sucks (Tom Is King)" is named after an infamous Easter egg hidden in the game's earliest tech demo by Tom Hall. "Integer Overflow" refers to the game-breaking bug in the game's universal timer that John Carmack discovered only minutes before the game was set to release on Usenet. "Delta Q Delta" is what iddqd stands for. "Room Over Room" refers to a limitation in the Doom engine, wherein linedefs cannot be drawn to create overlapping room geometry. And "The Next Step Up" is a reference to the NEXTstep computers that id actually used to create Doom. Incidentally, "The Next Step Up" was a new track that I wrote for Itch; it was never released on Bandcamp. I had hoped to write 4 more songs, but an obligation offline prevented my writing any more than this.
"Looks Like It's Someone Important" was actually just me being a lazy composer. I was running out of ideas, so I decided just to do a metal re-arrangement of a song I'd written for @kaasiand's "Jankies" art project on Tumblr around the same time. The title comes from the fact the song originated as the theme for whatever the Jankies equivalent of the Elite Four is and my own internal self-talk whenever I met midlevel boss trainers in Pokémon: "Who's this trainer blocking my path now? Oh, the music changed. Hmm, looks like it's someone important, then."
My favourite track off the record would definitely be "James Isn't Here". With that one, I decided to ask myself how it might sound if Bob or Jerry Casale wrote a song for Doom. I have a private alternate version of this song where I use the Linn LM-1 to play the drum loop from "The Super Thing", one of my favourite Devo songs. Obviously, for legal reasons, the LM-1 plays an original loop on the record. The title, "James Isn't Here", comes from the fact that it starts out sounding kind of stealthy, like James Bond. But, since even punching the air will alert everyone in Doom, stealth isn't possible. James isn't here. Oh, sure, you can use a mod like Project Brutality that lets you put a silencer on your pistol or sneak up behind a guy and chop his head off with a machete; but this is Vanilla Doom. Version 1.0. The December 1993 Usenet version. You can't do that here.
The album's cover is the only holdover left from the "map pack" stage of DOOM30TH celebration. The linedef data displayed here is from a map I called "Chateau", which would have occupied MAP02 of Doom II: Hell on Earth. It's actually pretty good, if I do say so myself; I've tested it in Vanilla, Brutal, and a slightly older version of Project Brutality. It's way too easy in Brutality, because of the ledge-grappling thing you can do there and the weird hitboxes that the torches have. Maybe I'll release it someday, if I can figure out the best way to do it.