Miscellaneous MIDIs from my Tumblr page
Track listing
Please Remain on the Line | Much to Tell in the Citadel | You Reached the Ping-Pong Chamber
Unexpected Plot Twist | Your Call Did Not Go Through | Daddy's Selectric
My Tumblr account tended to be a dumping ground for my one-off ideas, covers of stuff, and tracks that I didn't feel were appropriate for sale. Since MP3 is easier to create than MID (at least, it is for someone who occasionally can't be arsed to click on things), and Tumblr wouldn't accept them anyway, I usually just used Fruity LSD and Audacity to make an MP3 that sounded like a MIDI file. Anyway, isn't that what visual artists do? You can't upload a PSD or a painted canvas to Tumblr; you have to turn it into a PNG or a JPG first.
That always annoyed me a bit; people would say "art" and have it mean "visual art". As a composer who works exclusively in electronics, it feels like people still think all I do is click a button marked "Make It" and another button marked "Sell It". I can spend days at a time on a single song, depending on factors like equipment, whether the VST instruments are working out, and how I feel like the song is progressing. In this day and age of AI-generated everything, that "Make It" button exists now; and, I guess now I know how it feels to be a visual artist who spends days on a piece with slick shading and spotlighting, only to have people accuse it of being AI-generated. Granted, "Make It" doesn't work too well at the moment, but I don't feel threatened by it. Music has the interesting property of appealing to a very narrow scope of individual tastes. Some outsider might come in and say that Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, and Yellow Magic Orchestra all sound the same, but to people familiar with those bands, they all have individual styles. Sure, there might be a bit of borrowing going on; a leitmotif here, a drum pattern there; but what composer doesn't do that? So, I live in no fear of being replaced by a computer.
There was usually a story behind each of the audio files I put on Tumblr. Later on, I would start to find song inspiration in people's posts, like @kaasiand's "Jankies" pixel art, @chassdraws's drawing of a pair of nature-themed skating disco dancers, and someone's odd Zillow point-and-click that proceeded through a suburban house, into a cave, and finally to a ping-pong table in a fallout shelter (from @bogleech? I think? or @slimetony? Someone). "Please Remain on the Line" was the result of finding a soundfont version of the Roland MT-32 and deciding to play around, writing telephone hold music from the early '90s. I created a whole lot of offline lore around that project, even going so far as to write a complete album of just MT-32 music. The lore went that it was written by an office worker-turned-composer in 1989 after his firm decided to replace the Votrax speech synthesiser reading the Book of Genesis to keep callers engaged during holdtime. That one's a bit complicated, but it ends with the composer's death in 1999 during a botched attempt by the Chicago PD to rescue hostages in a bank robbery. No one ever said your OCs have to still be alive, did they? (read more about Joshua Notaro)
Actually "Much to Tell" doesn't have much to tell. It's a holdover from an album idea I had that would have used only the Proteus 1, 2, and 3. "Unexpected Plot Twist" was similarly me just messing around with techno. I appreciate composers who write that kind of music, but it isn't my favourite genre; to listen to or to write. Possibly because all my techno songs are love songs. Don't ask. Though, I do like the way the GM1 violin takes the place of the buzzy, stupid synthesiser I selected from FLEX for the MP3 version.
"Ping Pong Chamber" came from a photo series of offputting Zillow property pics, presented as an '80s point-and-click. It started at the top of a staircase in a suburban home, leading down into the basement. One side was made up to look like Clown World or something, the other side led into a cave. Proceeding through the cave, we end up at a rusty metal staircase on a scaffold, then a fallout shelter with a ping-pong table in it. You Reached the Ping Pong Chamber. The song was inspired by some old Mac OS X edutainment software about ancient Egypt where, in order to leave the painfully SGI-generated simulation of Abu Simbel, you had to beat Rameses in a game of mancala. The music that played during that, I recall, took itself way too seriously, with strings and horns and drums and shit. So, we arrive at the Ping Pong Chamber. You can't leave until you beat the ghost of Chairman Mao in a ping-pong game. The only things that don't translate well into MIDI are GoldenEye 007 64's Bathroom Pong and Toilet Brush (the Proteus/2's brass tambourine sample and the Proteus/1's Metal Vapor patch) in this song. They're only here because I'd just finished watching the GE007 XBLA leak longplay for the 10th time before I wrote this and I thought "hey, here's an idea".
"Daddy's Selectric" was actually my first attempt at disco. I'd started a disco song in FL Studio last winter, but I never got back to it. But then, here comes @theunfairfolk talking about Mother Nature having a counterpart named Daddy Electric, and @chassdraws turning them into a rollerskating science act. You think you can pass that kind of thing before my eyes and not expect me to write music about it? I like disco as a genre because it provided a radio-friendly outlet for queer people, coloured people, and women back in the '70s. And, since the rise of disco intersected with the rise of portable studio electronics, like the Minimoog, it had been part of my study of electronic music back in 2011. Writing "Daddy's Selectric", I was able to give the Linn LM-1 Drum Computer the disco song it had always deserved. While the disco and motown drummers were certainly competent (e.g. Clem Burke of Blondie, Russell Dabney of the Village People, Dennis Bryon drumming on "Stayin' Alive"), I always felt like disco would have gone to the next level if the conservatives had allowed it to exist long enough to intersect with the rise of music sequencing and sampling. Back to my song. The strings ramble a bit and I forgot to put a brass section or electric piano, but I can always write another song. I should. I should write more disco.