LCI Music: Mint In Box

Released 12 March 2024

Recorded August 2021-June 2023

Synthpop, new wave, orchestral

16 tracks (58m 50s)

I released loads of singles on Bandcamp; I felt like, if I released new stuff all the time, I might end up in the New category on the homepage for a couple of seconds and someone might decide to buy something. Well, that never happened. I released single after single nearly every Bandcamp Friday and I never sold a damn thing. Anyway, all of this "performing animal" style composing meant I abandoned quite a lot of music when I shut my account down. I decided at a very early stage that I didn't want to release singles on itch, but I also thought that most of my old stuff was pretty good and deserved another chance. Ergo, we arrive at a compilation album. Nearly an hour's-worth of singles.

And one EP. You'll notice that the entirety of Okay Millennial is on here, too. That's because I never thought of that album as an "album"; probably because none of the songs keep to a theme. So, that's on here, too.

"Tech Startup" and "Some Vapid Billionaire" are actually discrete songs in my Composing folder on my computer, and they have separate FL Studio project files. "Tech Startup" is an operating system startup fanfare, if those lasted into the 21.2nd century. I don't know about Linux distros, but Microsoft quit using startup fanfares in Windows 8. "Some Vapid Billionaire" was written to commemorate the shutdown of the trustfunder/techbro bank, Silicon Valley Bank, that happened exactly one year ago yesterday (you'll notice how both names initialise to "SVB"). Everyone on HackerNews at the time was convinced that we would see the end of the technology sector not too long after SVB went into receivership. Sadly, that never happened, and trustfunders and techbros are carrying as normal into 2024. Anyway, the Devo influence is pretty blatant here, with a single guitar accompanying a bevy of synthesisers and a Linn LM1 (which I discovered, only after I had finished this song, has no capacity for playing closed and open high-hats—oops), alongside my traditional driving cello section and pizzicato contrabasses. I love the bass strings too much, I think.

"Monty Pythagoras' Flying Theorem" actually began as a rough MIDI sketch on my old Yamaha arranger that I'd called "Turn Head and Cough". Since the PSR-290 doesn't have a quantiser to speak of, and the only way I was able to record the song was in analogue through the speakers as it played back, that song never left MIDI memory and eventually ended up getting deleted for a new sketch. I rediscovered "Turn Head" a couple years ago and decided to redo it with higher-quality instruments; Spitfire Audio ended up making it sound way more like a NOVA documentary than the original, so I decided on a working title of "Pythagorean Theorem". Of course, that name wasn't quite compatible with my titling standards. Its final title sounds much better and less full of itself, don't you think? The B-Side (if you can call it that) of MPFT was "Port Forward". It's no coincidence that it sounds like Hans Zimmer pirate movie music, either. The title is a play on words; it can refer to the front-left quarter of a ship, or it can refer to port forwarding; a computer networking term and the necessary component in operating certain Torrent clients. The project filename is "TORRENTS.FLP", if that tells you anything.

"Daddy's Selectric" was a holdover from Tumblr, as I discussed before. I decided people might want to listen to that song outside Tumblr, so I put it into Okay Millennial as the first track. I guess what I said about that album having no theme wasn't entirely true: the overarching theme of the project was successive generations of popular music. It started with disco and ended with a modern acoustic ensemble; "Daddy's Selectric", of course, was the entry for disco.

"Process Magenta" is Okay Millennial's entry for new wave and synthpop. It was the result of my discovering the soundfont version of the OMI Universe of Sound library and the Emulator II factory disks on the Internet Archive. I found that I was recognising a lot of sounds in that library from the work of Jan Hammer, so I decided to write a song that sounded like him. I was surprised at just how archetypal 1980s this sounded, without a single analogue synthesiser or Roger Linn drum machine. And, yes, that is the Fairlight CMI's famous "SARARR" sample in the Emulator II factory disks. I guess E-MU wanted to pull in customers who couldn't afford what Fairlight wanted for a CMI IIx back in the day. I'll admit, I cheated a little—the electric bass guitar is actually the E-MU Proteus/1 "Thunder Bass" patch. Who can tell? It's nearly inaudible.

"Broadcast Night", our entry for early '90s R&B, happened at the same time as a discontinued single I'd rather not discuss. However, it's the perfect application for Jim Palma's iPhone Drums; a sample pack from the amateur samplists collective, Pianobook. It's an interesting juxtaposition; these lo-fi bedroom studio drums with the industry leaders, Yamaha, E-MU Systems, and Fairlight Instruments. The "guitar strum" is actually a Fairlight sample of someone (probably Kim Ryrie) playing a pizzicato open A on a violin, which I combined into a strum in Hydrogen and added a lot of room reverb onto. The "Kung Fu Fighting"-type flute is a Yamaha DX7 panflute, the muted trumpet is from the Proteus 2000, and the strings are from the Proteus/2.

There's not much to say about our millennium song, "Dried Fruit". It was the third-ever song I wrote using FL Studio, back when I was still testing out features. The strings were different back then because I hadn't bought a license to the software yet, so I couldn't access FLEX's Essential Strings. When I registered it, though, the first thing I did was download that one, and I replaced the rather wanky GM library strings with these when I decided I wanted to use the song on Okay Millennial. Frankly, it wasn't my first choice. I had wanted to use "Unexpected Plot Twist", but I forgot that I'd released that one under CC0 on Tumblr and it didn't feel right trying to sell it at that point. Fortunately, "Dried Fruit" meant I didn't have to do any additional work, because I'm a lazy composer who can't be arsed to write music sometimes.

There's also not much to say about "Windows XP Laptop". "Okay Millennial" is the only song I've ever written that uses only the Chart Topper chord progression (1-5-m6-4). I decided to use it here because, for a start, I hadn't written anything new that used it. I'd done a pop-punk cover of "Overkill" by Men At Work on Tumblr once that used it, but I hadn't actually written anything original in it. Initially, it had a high-pitched synth bass playing the melody, but when I was preparing it for the album, I changed that to a guitar. It's also the only song I've ever released that uses Spitfire Audio's LABS Drums. They're just too damn soft for most applications, and I tend to write rather loud music. But, other options didn't have that same "Sirius/XM acoustic channel" sound I was looking for. Is it just because I use FL Studio and not Kontakt that all the Spitfire stuff is so soft like that? I mean, I have to jack the channel volume up to 100% before I can even hear any of it in a project. Sure, LABS is free, and free is good, but seriously. Mix. Volume. Louder.

Getting away from Okay Millennial at long last, we arrive at Two Hairs and Some Air b/w Patronise These Merchants, and we return to The Sims again. "Two Hairs and Some Air" was inspired by The Sims 4 and SimCity Creator for Wii, along with some LABS Peel Guitar action and a nifty new upright piano VSTi I'd found online. That piano—the VSCO 2 Upright—ended up getting major use on Real Life Fast Travel. The title, of course, is a reference to The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross, where he used that phrase to suggest extremely light contact between the brush and the canvas. Just use two hairs and some air. As it happens, the original coverart on Bandcamp was a 12x12 painting I'd done in Bob's style of a misty forest. Maybe you remember it.
Two Hairs and Some Air. Tina Rosenthal, 2020. Oil on canvas.

"Patronise These Merchants" was the second-to-last song I ever used my Fantom X6 for. It features my custom piano, fretless bass, and marcato strings, as well as the Linn LM-1. As you can see, it was originally the "B-Side" to Two Hairs and Some Air. Understand, I'm not opposed to using my Fantom X6 as an instrument as opposed to a MIDI controller, it's just that most of the crucial buttons that I need to actually operate the workstation have lost all their sensitivity and I can't afford to get it fixed, so... there we are.

"Sit Up Straight" is the short form title of "Sit Up Straight (Armchairs Must Offer Negative Gratification Unless Seated)", which acronymises to "SUS (AMONGUS)". This is because Bandcamp Friday had the audacity of being on April Fool's Day last year. I decided that the title would be a joke, but the song wouldn't be. This one sounds a little too much like a sound-good-ified song off Newsbreak (my first album of production music, back in 2017; I'll put it onto itch one of these days), but it's not a joke. It's real. So is its "B-Side" song. "Eine Kleine Mutatomuzik" had first appeared as "My Application to Mutato" on Greetings From Tornado Alley back in 2017. I discontinued that album because I decided it wasn't working as a unit, but it would work as its own base parts. The only song from there that ever got re-released was "Eine Kleine Mutatomuzik". Perhaps it's for the best... as time's worn on, my interest in most of those songs has worn off. "Mutatomuzik" is the only one I still like.

"Gopherspace", "Mint In Box", and "All the Necessary Supplies" are new songs that weren't released on Bandcamp. Well, "new" as in "they were done a couple years ago, but I never got round to releasing them for one reason or another". "Gopherspace" actually provided the inspiration for the Real Life Fast Travel project. In fact, the way the song is structured, it can have tracks mute and unmute according to what's going on in a videogame, but the intial loop is just way too long. If I were to format it like a song from that album, it would probably take 45 minutes to play through, and I don't have enough RAM to render that much data.

"Mint In Box" is about as near to New Age as I want to get these days. I used to fancy myself a New Age composer, with stuff like "Pangaea", "Pothole Patcher's Paradise", and "Solar Wind". The Fantom X series was really well-suited for New Age music... FL Studio, not so much. I mean, the tastes have moved on, really, haven't they. New Age was really popular back in 2003, when the Fantom X's patch library was being developed. Now it's lo-fi music, vapourwave, chillwave, shoegaze, that kind of thing. Space music isn't coral anymore. That doesn't change the fact that, when it comes down to it, I'm a production composer. I write music that's supposed to blend into the background. My instrument is the piano, and I like strings, deep basses, synthesisers, and drum machines. Production music is sort of at the crossroads of all of those genres.

"All the Necessary Supplies" is a rare instance of me using an oboe from a sample library that isn't the Proteus/2. It's still an E-MU instrument; it came from the solo woodwinds disc of E-MU Modern Symphonic Orchestra. It's okay... more modern, certainly. Less like Stargate SG-1 or Thomas the Tank Engine. The song was supposed to be for a bike-themed project that never really went anywhere. "Real Life Fast Travel" (the song) was part of that project, but I just couldn't make that idea work. "Necessary" is supposed to evoke the emotions of riding through a bit of rural Nebraska (what part of Nebraska isn't rural, though?) on one of our rail-trails around here, like the MoPac or the Jamaica North. You've got a backpack full of provisions, bike tools, and maybe even a change of clothing, so you can just ride all the way down to Marysville if you fancy it.

Longwinded page a bit, isn't it? Anyway, this album represents all of the singles and EPs I released on Bandcamp that I think are worth anyone's time and money. There were others, but I'd rather not discuss them. They're in a much better place now.

The Recycle bin

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