soundsmush

SMUSH #12 - i am sick

Hello again!

I have been quite sick for the last few days, so here’s something short and not very good. Sorry!

Download?

Hopefully next week’s is better :)

SMUSH #11 - finity (extended version)

Hey there! I realize it’s Sunday… however, I consider Monday the first day of the week, so it works.

I’ve been rather busy working on my new album lately, but I still managed to get something unrelated to that finished: an extended version of the track “finity” from my recently-released début album :>

Download?

This is a long one for sure. I extended it from around eight minutes to twelve! And I also made a few mixing tweaks. Not too high-effort, but I still think it was worth doing. This will be up on my Bandcamp later today, if you want to support me :)

Thanks for listening.

SMUSH #10

Welcome back to the machine. We’ve hit double digits! Woohoo!

Over the past few days, I’ve worked on and off on this little ditty, so I hope you like it :3

Download?

My main goal here was to try and make something more interesting and varied, and less repetitive. I think that ambient music and, to a lesser extent, electronic music as a whole is generally pretty well-suited to repetition, but I want to head in a more varied direction. For this I mainly listened to the album Ember by Kubbi (which is a fantastic listen by the way) and it’s actually been really helpful to… you know… actually pay more attention to how music I like is constructed.

I still don’t know how to end these blog posts!

SMUSH #9

Ho there, traveller!

It’s been a hot minute! Sorry for my delay, I’ve been out of town for a family function :) But I still managed to get something rough and dirty out! It’s—and this is a running theme lately—rather… experimental. Or, in other words, really weird. Again, it’s very rough and unfinished, but I like getting ideas out and into the airwaves; I think I’ll probably revisit it. I like the sort of harsh synth feel.

Download?

Unrelated tangent: I’ve recently rediscovered The Alan Parsons Project, and I completely forgot just how spectacular this music is! There isn’t a song of theirs that I don’t enjoy. Lately, I’ve been both re-listening to albums I’ve heard before and listening to some I’d never given a chance. I can now say that I believe I have listened to their entire discography, and I’ve been… acquiring… all the most complete versions I can find of every album for my digital music library. It’s fun, it almost feels like curating a collection! Just… without the expense (and clutter).

But, my lord, I cannot express how much I adore their sound. It’s often catchy, usually profound, and always beautiful to listen to, so, if you haven’t heard of them before… give it a shot!

In any case, that’s all I have to say for today. Quoth the raven, nevermore!

album release: transience

Big news! My first album, transience, is out now on Bandcamp!

This album has been in the works for over a year, and is the culmination of my progress as a producer since I first began to play around with Beepbox. It relates to some of my personal journeys over the past year, and it means a lot to me, so I hope it can mean something to you too <3

If you decide to give it a listen, let me know what you think! I’m really proud of this.

Also, I have a CD release coming soon! So if you’re interested in that, stay tuned :)

I think that’s all for now. Thanks again for stopping by!

SMUSH #8

Twice in three days? What’s going on here?

Well, I decided that I want to try something. So… here’s my first attempt at breakcore. I think? I think this would be considered breakcore. Anyway, I like the genre, but I’m not particularly adept at it, so bear with me; this isn’t very good! But I can’t deny just how much fun it is to cut up and mix around drum breaks.

Download?

In other news, I’ve also updated the site to display a post’s date on the post page itself rather than only in the list. That was an oversight.

Have a wonderful day!

SMUSH #7

Whew, just made it! I cut it real close this week, but it’s still Sunday here, so it counts =)

Sorry for the delay! I’ve been really busy lately adding the finishing touches to my album (it’s coming very soon!). This is just a small thing I managed to put together today—it’s a little unmixed and repetitive—and it mainly serves to allow to me to play around with making some new patches. But at least it’s something.

Download?

Happy Sunday, and thanks for stopping by.

SMUSH #6

Here’s something I’ve had sitting around on my hard drive* for a while, unfinished. I had a basic concept of something in 7/4, but I never developed it. Until now! So here’s a sort of rough first pass. I think I like how it came out =D

Download?

It was really hard to make something in 7/4 that doesn’t sound… off. But after a bit of trial and error, I think I managed it. Here’s to hoping. I realize this is pretty repetitive; if I keep iterating on it that will probably change.

As always, thanks for reading and for listening (=

*Note—actually a solid state drive—see skeuomorph

SMUSH #5 - rhythm

This one is… weird. Really weird, and maybe a bit lackluster. But it was fun to make, and therefore worthwhile =)

Download?

I made this one using only 606 samples from BPB’s Cassette 606 plugin (and some effects, of course). Even the “melody” is just toms. I’m not sure exactly what I was going for here… but it’s… interesting. It builds slowly.

Anyway, enjoy it—if you dare. Thanks for your time, have a wonderful day!

Is this a cult?

I have created a webring! There is no real particular theme, but so far our two other members are both electronic musicians and fans of C418, so we can go with that for now. But honestly, the more the merrier, I say (for now)! The webring is called rosefield and its members for now consist of snowdon and timetoexplode.

If, for whatever reason, you would like to join the webring, simply e-mail me at mayonayzal@gmail.com and I’ll add you! Then, just copy this wherever you want the webring widget to be on your webpage:

<div id='rosefield'>
        <script type="text/javascript" src="https://nayz.neocities.org/onionring/onionring-variables.js"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript" src="https://nayz.neocities.org/onionring/onionring-widget.js"></script>
</div>

And this to the page’s <head>:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://nayz.neocities.org/onionring/onionring.css">

…if you want to use the default CSS I made. If not, you can copy the CSS and style it however you’d like!

That’s all for now. Thanks, as always, for reading!

SMUSH #4 - audio clutter

We’re in the fourth week of Soundsmush, and here is my fourth Soundsmush Sound Experiment Track Music Thing. Hope you enjoy it =D

Download?

For this one I wanted to encapsulate a sort of synthwave-y feeling. Not sure I succeeded, but I like how it sounds, though it is a bit repetitive. When I was making this I was thinking a lot about the VR game Aircar. The game is small, but its ambiance is impeccable! The ambient sounds, the radio chatter, the light patter of rain on your hovership’s windshield… I can sit in that air car for hours. It’s so relaxing. I guess my point is: if you own a vr headset and a somewhat vr-capable PC, go play Aircar. It’s free and excellent.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun with the sound design in this one. My main goal was a sort of “auditory clutter”—as the title suggests—so I included lots of building ambient samples and such. If you’re curious, the background chatter in this is actually taken from an Alberta Forest Service VHS tape I got at a garage sale, haha. I couldn’t find it anywhere online, so recently I bought a cheap composite capture card and digitized it, then uploaded it to the Internet Archive. It’s about a half hour long and pretty interesting, if you’re weird like me ;).

I think that’s all I’ve got to say today. As always, thanks for checking in, and have a good morning, afternoon, evening or night!

SMUSH #3

Number three, coming right up! I tried something a bit weirder and more experimental for this one, so I hope you like it =3

Download?

Sorry for the wait between #2 and this one, I’ve been rather busy lately (moving house) and had a bit of a music/art block to boot. But I’m still managing to keep to my once-a-week minimum!

SMUSH #2

Here’s number two. I downloaded a bunch of sample libraries recently and I wanted to use them, so here’s something that’s pretty different from my usual :-)

Download?

The first 40 seconds or so are a little empty, but… I want to try not to strive for absolute perfection with these. It’s more fun that way.

Thanks for dropping by!

awww yiss

awwwwww yisssssssss

I bought an iPod Video secondhand a while ago, but the audio jack was broken. Today my replacement jack arrived, and it works perfectly! I’ve now installed RockBox on it, and I’m very excited to use it to listen to some C418 :D

I’m currently looking for other themes for RockBox; I really like the naranjada theme, but It’d be cool if I could find some more colourful ones =3

Oh, and apparently this thing can run Doom??? I guess that makes sense

In other news, the site’s changelog for today:

• The sidebar’s archive now groups posts by category! Hooray!!
• Added the lynxfyre button to the footer (go check them out!)
• Removed the RSS feed button from the footer, as it seemed redundant (since there’s another RSS feed button in the sidebar) and made the arrangement less pleasing for the time being, what with it being the only button on the third row.

That’s all for now. Stay safe, and don’t forget to listen to HMS1 today ;)

WOAH COMMENTS

Hey, so you may or may not have seen before that I was using commentbox.io for comments here—which is good, don’t get me wrong—but today I found something phenomenal. It’s called utterances, and it uses Github’s own issue commenting system for comments on static sites like these! I just think this solution is so cooooooool… it makes my brain happy. Anyway, now, instead of having to sign up for a commentbox account to comment, you can just use your Github one! Hooray! Anyway, the single previous comment that existed before (thank you, time to explode):

That’s all for now. I’ve been having a lot of fun developing this little site and I hope you’ll follow me for the journey!

UPDATE: So it turns out that there’s actually an EVEN BETTER tool for this called giscus. Yes, I know, I am changing everything FAR too often, but this should actually be the last time for a while. I hope. Anyway, I realized that utterances just has a few issues and hasn’t been maintained for a while, whereas giscus solves those problems and has some more nice quality of life features :) Okay, that really should be all for now.

SMUSH #1

Here’s the first one! It’s a little messy and not very well mixed but I think that captures the spirit of this blog pretty well. The next one will be better, I promise (I don’t promise).

Download?

In other news, I’ve been playing a lot of Mario 64 lately. Great game but I’ve gotta say, the wing cap controls are really hard to use well. I’m sure skilled players can work it like nothing but it took me like an hour just to get the red coins in the wing cap stage, haha. But man, the game is phenomenal… you can really see why it’s stood the test of time so well. I’ve also been playing it on my little Trinitron CRT, and seriously, it looks so much nicer than on a modern display. Almost like it was made for them or something, heh.

At any rate, thanks for stopping by and have a good day/night :)

Hello!

Welcome to my new blog, soundsmush. The plan is to post at least one (1) thing that might be considered “music” every week.

This post is just to test the waters before getting started. But expect the first official soundsmush post soon!