New song time!  Listen to it in the embedded player above, or click here to download the mp3 directly.

“The Optic Nerve” is a trippy industrial song I’ve been working on since last November.  Originally it was going to be about constructed reality with a cyberpunk theme layered on top of it, but my original lyrics just weren’t working out.  So I placed it on the back burner until I could come up with something.  I finally revisited the song earlier this month when I had the idea of scouring archive.org for trippy vocal samples (this is also where I found the vocal files for I Love Penguins).  During my searching I came across a recording of Rodleen Getsic giving a talk about the 2012 prophecy.  While I don’t personally buy into the whole 2012 thing, the talk did seem to fit with the music, and her pacing was just right.  The recording was under the Creative Commons Attribute-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license, and so this song shares the same license.

I’ve also been working on a more dance-oriented remix of it, though it isn’t quite ready yet.  But this actually brings me to my next point: where Partition 36 is going now that Inside The Beat is finished.  “The Optic Nerve” will actually be part of a new single, and will have the original track, a “vocal-less” mix, the remix, and another completely new track.  I hope to release it by the end of February or early March.

Aside from this… a new album is underway.  There’s not much to say about it yet, except that it’s going to be awesome.

For now, enjoy the new song!

PS: if you follow Partition 36 on Facebook or Twitter, and were expecting this post a day or two ago, sorry.  Blame StarCraft 2 :)

Late last year, not too long after I had released Inside The Beat, I started working on a new song that I called “The Optic Nerve”.  It had a much more noisy sound to it than my previous work and would probably be described as some sort of industrial music.

For the longest time I was stuck with what to do for a melody or verse section.  I knew that I wanted it to have lyrics or some sort of spoken word section, but I just couldn’t find anything to fit.  Searching at archive.org (which, by the way, is where I found the audio for I Love Penguins) didn’t turn up anything worthwhile, and my attempt at writing lyrics wasn’t going so well, either.  But it was still a good song, so I placed it on the back burner and decided to come back to it at a later date.

I finally revisited it a couple of days ago after finding recording of a woman giving a talk on the whole 2012 thing.  It had a really trippy feel to it, and her pacing actually matched the song’s BPM quite nicely.  But my initial enthusiasm waned after I played around with it for a few days.  Thus I forked the project, removed the vocals, and went back to the drawing board.

We’ll see what comes of it within the next few days.  I’ve since gone back to my original lyrics and have started rewriting them yet again.  But I think it’s for the best, as they’re taking on a much more cyberpunk feel that’s closer to what I originally imagined for them.

If you’ve been following Partition 36 on Facebook or Twitter (and if you don’t, you should), then you’ve probably read that I finished a new track recently.  It started out as an experiment with FM synthesis to create a slappy bass sound similar to what I used to hear in Sega Genesis games growing up.  Unfortunately the experiment itself failed, but I still managed to pull a new song out of it called “Midnight Highway”.

The song has a strong soundtrack-like flavor to it and, to me, sounds reminiscent of the track “Face Toward The Horizon” off of my last album.  During production I had a heck of a time finding a good bass sound to use for it.  In the end I found that a subtle yet deep sound worked best for what I had in mind, and so programmed one into my Moog Modular V software.  I also had a hard time deciding whether I should keep the chorus effect on the main melody, but ended up sticking with it in the end.

During production it had the file name of “Whoa 80s” due to the use of a bell sound that sounds an awful lot like something off the classic Roland D-50 synthesizer.  But as it got closer to being finished I decided to change this to its current title based on an image I saw in my head.  I could almost picture Priss, a character from my favorite anime, Bubblegum Crisis, riding her motorcycle on a highway late at night.  As she stops for a rest and looks out over the light laden city of Mega Tokyo.  Although the style of my song is quite different from the soundtrack in the anime, they still share some of the same timbres.  Thus, I decided to name it “Midnight Highway” based on this image.

I’ve attached a short clip of the song to this post, so please check it out!  I’d love to hear what everyone thinks of it.

Looks like my last album, Inside The Beat, got a review!  It was written my a friend of mine and posted on her blog.

Be sure to click the link above and check it out!

Well, after taking a week off, I’m back at working on music.  Sadly the short break didn’t bring any new ideas to the songs I was working.  However…

It did bring an idea for another new song, which is actually about 1/3 finished already.  Well, it’s not a totally new song.  I took a fragment of one I had started a few weeks ago that wasn’t going anywhere, gutted it, and turned it into something else.  This is something I do often…

Anyway, this all started with me playing around with FM synthesis, which I understand the theory behind but still have a hard time putting it into practice.  There’s a really good introduction video here, but to sum it up the idea is that you take two sound waves (usually sines) and have one modulate the other.  This is similar in concept to an LFO, except that the modulator’s frequency actually goes up into the audible sound range.

Each pair is known as an “operator”, at least in Yamaha’s parlance.  Giving each modulator and carrier (the wave being modulated) a volume envelope lets a sound change timbre over time, effectively replacing the need for a filter with its own envelope.  By layering multiple operators together you then get all sorts of dynamic sounds.  Need an example to listen to?  Check out this video, which shows off the legendary Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, and prepare to be immediately transported back into the 80s.

Getting back, the reason I started playing with FM synthesis tonight is because I wanted to create a slappy bass sound, sorta like what I used to hear in video games on my Sega Genesis.  Unfortunately I never got Reaktor’s FM4 module to sound like I was wanting, so I instead came up with a quick bass in Moog Modular V.  But this worked out in the end since it actually went really well with the other parts I have going, which include some FM-sounding bells.  The result is something that sounds sort of like the start of Die Hard Arcade’s snow level with some Escape From New York thrown in.

Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure some of this came from all the J-Pop and anime soundtracks I’ve been listening to for the past two weeks…

After thinking about it, I decided the easiest way to keep my old blog posts around was to simply move them to a different subdomain.  So they can still be accessed from oldblog.partition36.com (which is also a link on the right).

Aside from that, I’ve been bouncing between a few things lately, trying to decide what to work on next.  There’s two new songs in the pipe, one of which is more of a trance song, while the other one is more of an EBM/electro-industrial track that draws influence from Skinny Puppy and Front 242.  I’ve also been playing around with some more downtempo stuff.  Nothing concrete yet as to what these songs will end up being part of, but maybe something will develop.

I’m also still working on plans for doing a live show.  Work on that got to be a bit slow since I was trying to finish off Inside The Beat, but now that it’s out the door I can work more on how I’m going to play this stuff live.  In truth I’m torn between two approaches.  Do I make it where it sounds closer to the CD, but with more structural changes/surprises, or do I do almost a live PA thing?  Or both?  There was also talk between a friend of mine about making the first concert a fund raiser for Wikileaks, which would be awesome and support something I firmly believe in.

Either way, there’s some great stuff coming up from Partition 36.  In the meantime, you can still show your support by purchasing my latest album, Inside The Beat!

(loop for c across "Hello, world"
  counting 1 into spaces
  do (format t "~{~a~}~a~%"
             (loop for s from 1 to (1- spaces)
               collecting " ")
             c))

;; You didn't think I'd have a *normal* first post, did you? ;^)

So…obviously the Partition 36 blog has been redesigned and moved to Tumblr. I’m still in the process of fixing stuff up, including putting the old blog posts in an archive, but everything should be up before Monday.

The main reason I’ve switched to Tumblr is so that people can follow Partition 36 and comment on entries. But I also wanted an easier way to post entries so that I can get more things written and out there. So enjoy for now, and watch more a more steady stream of posts :^)