The first version of “Occupy” didn’t turn out quite as well as I had hoped it would.  Something about its mix was bothering me.  Later on I finally nailed down the main problem areas and decided to rework the song to get it closer to how I originally envisioned it.  This is the result of my work ^_^

There honestly isn’t too much that’s different aside from a few swapped out background parts and some additional sounds added for ornamentation.  The biggest change is in the mixdown, which was completely redone from scratch using a different technique than before.  Things now sound more balanced and the rhythm section feels more driving, at least to my ears.

Anyways, enjoy!  Please reblog this to share it!  The lyrics are still available in my previous post.

This is “Occupy”, a song I wrote in support of the Occupy movement, and a song off of the upcoming album, 63.  It’s more of an EBM-influenced song than some of the other stuff I’ve been writing, and as such it will appear on disc two of 63.

The song started life as an experiment to create a more “traditional” EBM bass sound and just sort of took off from there, with me just adding one harsh part to it after another.  Although I had been wanting to write a song about the Occupy movement, I didn’t originally intend to do that with this song.  But since Occupy seems to be so upset with the way the system is (at least that’s my view of it so far), this song just felt like it fit.

The lyrics are intentionally distorted almost to the point of being unrecognizable.  I’ve posted them below.

Enjoy!

Occupy
By Alexa Jones-Gonzales

Can’t get hired
No health care
Food or rent
Lose a home

Send it all
To the top
None for you
None for me

Laws that harm
Wars that kill
Markets that
Suck you dry

Uncle Sam
In on it
Welcome to the
Police state

They’ll kick you out
Seize your stuff
Don’t give up
Go back in

Show them who
Owns this place
Demand change
Occupy!

I didn’t expect this to happen quite this soon, but the new Partition 36 album is now about 25% finished.  This is the same one titled 63 that I mentioned in my last post.  With two CDs, intro tracks, and an accompanying art/writings book (yikes…), this album will likely be my most ambitious project yet.  And if the tracks I recently finished mixing down are any indicator, also my best sounding one.

The idea of the two CDs came about because of the thematic and stylistic differences between the tracks I have both written and planned.  Although Inside The Beat turned out really well, I was never all that happy with how it wasn’t that cohesive.  The title track was a banging industrial-inspired song, while the song right after it was influenced more by jazz, synthpop, and J-pop.  But by splitting the new album into two CDs, and throwing on a few extra tracks, things should sound like they belong together, and the overall theme will be much more apparent.

As far as releasing it goes, this one will definitely be available for purchase, but I’m debating if I should have both digital and physical releases.  If I do end up doing just a digital release, the art book would just be a downloadable PDF.  But I also like having that physical copy in my hands because then it feels that much more real.  I guess we’ll see how things go.

This is a downtempo track off the upcoming album, now tentatively called “63”.  It was heavily inspired by Boards of Canada, Jean-Michel Jarre, Metroid Prime, and some of the Serial Experiments Lain soundtrack.

Wired Jungle by Partition 36

About six months ago, I wrote about a Python script I made that made my life easier when it came to encoding files.  Well I made some simple changes and updated it to v1.1.

Changes include:

• Ability to override the default tags
• Command line option to change the Ogg Vorbis quality
• Somewhat cleaner output
• Verbose output for debugging or embedding this in scripts
• The program can optionally create the destination folders if they don’t exist
• Better handling of directories
• “Dry Run” mode to see what would happen without actually encoding anything
• Other minor changes and bug fixes
• The script can live in any arbitrary location (the previous one might have been able to as well, but I never tested it)
• License changed to GPL v3

The big one is probably the ability to override tags, which is what I was needing specifically.  Eventually I’ll add the ability to check date stamps on files and only encode files older than what gets specified.  But not tonight :)

Again, this is just a small bit of insight into how I handle my music.  It may not seem like much, but having this script actually saves me a lot of time and headaches.  You can download the script here (right-click and Save As).  To run, you need Python 2.6 or 2.7; and lame, flac, oggenc, and id3v2 all located somewhere in your PATH.

I run this on Slackware Linux.  I highly doubt this script will run correctly in Windows, but you can try.  It should work on Mac OS X, but I haven’t tested it.

My studio is set back up!  Ok, so “studio” is a bit of a stretch.  It’s really just a computer desk in the corner my basement with some synths next to it and some studio monitors.  But hey, whatever works!  Being back and working on music feels great.  It’s always been a creative release for me, and so not being able to work on music usually leaves me feeling bottled up.  My first two priorities since getting things set up are working on treeFungus stuff (the joint project my friend started), and finishing a new Partition 36 song tentatively called “Alice”.

The new Partition 36 song is part of the new album, which I briefly talked about back in this post.  As I mentioned there, the album is sort of a reverse Inside The Beat, where it starts as a very inward-facing, personal album, and then moves outward.  “Alice” fits the introspective side of it perfectly.  The pseudo-lyrics I’ve been working on for it are based on a poem I wrote at the beginning of the year, and deal with my feelings as I came to terms with being transgendered.  What I’m thinking of doing is recording them in either a whispy/whispery voice and then applying some effects to make them sound ethereal, or doing something on the verge of spoken word and then doing some heavy processing.  Either of these should fit well with the song, which is already pretty atmospheric sounding.

Aside from that, I’m thinking I may do some remastering work with some of my old pre-Partition 36 pieces in order to practice some new engineering tricks I’ve been researching.  Furthermore, some of my old master CDs have been scratched, and I don’t have the original master files anymore, so making new recordings will also serve an archival purpose.  These shouldn’t take long at all since everything is written really just needs to be re-recorded into a multi-track master, and they aren’t a priority.  But expect a few to be released here through the blog.

As you may have noticed, both this blog and the Partition 36 Facebook page have been pretty quiet lately.  Unfortunately this is because I’ve been in the middle of moving my studio and have hit some unexpected delays.  So while I can sorta use my laptop to work on side projects (such as the Japan Aid Collaboration CD and a joint project my friend started called treeFungus), I can’t really work on Partition 36 stuff.  I have been using the time to do research and work on some writing that might turn into lyrics, though.  So all is not lost!

Hopefully things will come together in the next few weeks and I can get back into full swing.  This is one downside to doing everything on my computer, from the composition, to the synth programming, to the engineering.

In the meantime, why not head over to my discography page and take a listen to a few tracks (remember, they’re all online for free)?  Or visit the Facebook page?  Or better yet, order a copy of Inside The Beat?

Music is the salt that cleans the wounds of the soul.  It’s the reflected image we see when we look at our inner self in a mirror.  It’s the scalpal that we use to perform surgery on our inner selves.  And it’s the map that guides us on our toughest journeys through life.

You may not have noticed, but Inside The Beat had an interesting flow.  The songs at the beginning of the album were more “shallow” sounding, and were more focused on simple beats and rhythms rather than meaningful timbres and arrangements.  I think I mentioned it before, but this was all done on purpose.  Inside The Beat was meant to be a journey from the outside inward, where you’d get a sampling of all the different rhythms, beats, sounds, and themes that constantly bounce around in my head.  But what I didn’t mention was that, with a few exceptions, the songs are mostly arranged chronologically by the order they were written.  “Chrystallis” was composed very early on in the album’s life, while the remixes at the end were literally the two last songs I completed.  Truth be told, this was an accident that happened to work.

I did quite a bit of introspection in my personal life as I got closer to finishing Inside The Beat.  In a way it was ironic.  While the album was meant to move from the outside-in beat-wise, it was also moving outside-in for me personally, and I think it got reflected in my writing.  Pretty much everything after track six reflected the start of a journey I took inward.  Things slowed down and started sounding more contemplative.  Inside The Beat was really going inside the figurative beat of my soul.

The first paragraph of this entry, the one in the block quote, is something I wrote as a “working premise” for my next album.  Where Inside The Beat was about moving inward, my next one will be about working through what’s inside, and then emerging.  To put it another way, Inside The Beat moved outside-in, and the new one is moving inside-out.  I think this is already reflective of the first few test tracks I’ve written for the album.  Both of them are quite introspective and contemplative (think along the lines of “Face Toward The Horizon”).  I’ve also been working on writing something that resembles lyrics, but isn’t quite the same thing.  These vocals will hopefully add some new depth to my music and really emphasize the “inside-out” journey theme that I’m working from.

So… yeah, we’ll see where this goes.

So The Optic Nerve is finished!  It took quite a bit longer than I planned, but I think the extra wait has been worth it.  The single consists of four tracks: the original song, the “Near-Sighted Mix”, the “604 Mix”, and a new remix of “Cyberpunks”.  All of these total up for a length of just under 30 minutes, which is a bit long for a single, but I don’t think that matters much.

I’ve already written about the original mix of “The Optic Nerve”, but I figured I’d offer a few more thoughts on it now that everything is complete.  As I mentioned before, the new age 2012 vocals were not the ones I had originally planed to include.  Instead I had come up with a cyberpunk-inspired story about a guy living in a dystopian future who had just purchased new optic nerve implants from a large cybernetics company.  Upon leaving the building they start to malfunction, sending way too much information to his brain and ultimately sending him into a state of panic and psychosis.  Unfortunately I had to leave out the lyrics I had written since I couldn’t get the recordings to come out right, which still makes me sad to this day.  But maybe I’ll still use the concept in a future song.

Musically “The Optic Nerve” was influenced by both Skinny Puppy and KMFDM, and so it has a more industrial feel than many of my other songs.  In fact the entire concept was sparked by the song “Worlock” by Skinny Puppy, in which they sing the words “optic nerve” through a harmonizer.  This and the bitcrushed/aliased bell sound were basically the starting points for “The Optic Nerve”.

The “Near-Sighted Mix” is really just a dance-oriented version of the original song with a few structural changes.  It’s also was what held up the release of the single for so long since I had an INCREDIBLY hard time getting the mix to sound decent enough for release.  Things either sounded too bassy, not bassy enough, too bland, or totally off balance.  In the end I finally got so fed up that I put it on the back burner and went on with other work.  This proved to be the right decision since I was able to come back later on and actually get the mix where I wanted it.  Still, I feel this is the weakest track on the single.

The “604 Mix”, which is a goa trance remix of the original song, is probably my favorite.  It came about when I realized that I could easily make the original song sound even more trippy if I sped it up a bit and added some squelchy synths, which are a staple in goa trance.  The subject matter also fit quite nicely into that genre, and so I set about restructuring everything, adding new synth lines, and swapping out a few other sounds.  In the end the track has a very nice set of build-up-break-down sections that provide movement but still manage to keep the rhythm going.  I am also especially happy with the way the new goa-like melody turned out.

Finishing up the single is the new “Leaky Mix” version of “Cyberpunks”.  If you’ve heard the original then you’ve probably know that the song is about distrusting “the system” due to its attempts to control us with (mis)information.  You might also be aware of the massive leak of 250k+ US Embasy cables by Wikileaks that started last November.  Well, the “Leaky Mix” is sort of my way of showing support for what Wikileaks is doing.

I didn’t want to change as many things in this particular remix as I did in the “Anti-System Remix” on Inside The Beat.  Instead I saw it as a way to blend the expanded “speech section” of the “Anti-Syste Remix” together with the original song, as well as an opportunity to flesh out and improve things.  The biggest changes are definitely the intro and outro sections, which now have samples taken from a speech given by John F. Kennedy, and the completely rewritten drum lines.  Also - and this is probably something very few will care about, but I was really happy with it - I swapped out the synth that creates the bass sound.  The original one was being produced with Arturia’s Jupiter-8V software and was the exact same patch that I used for “I Love Penguins”.  But I was never really happy with it in “Cyberpunks” because I felt like it always lacked a bit of an edge.  Well it turns out that the same sound I used for the harsh saw in the chorus of “The Optic Nerve” (which was produced by my PolyEvolver keyboard) was very close to the original bass sound in “Cyberpunks”.  It was bassy, warm, and still had an edge.

So yeah, that pretty much sums up The Optic Nerve.  The only thing that hasn’t been done yet is the cover artwork, which will be shot soon.  Once that’s finished I’ll be uploading all the tracks.

Warning!  Geeky post ahead!  I wrote this post to offer some insight into how I handle the preparation of the .mp3 and .ogg files that I use on the website, as well as the .flac files I keep for archives.  So, it’s a bit jargon-y.  Sorry.  But I figured someone would find it interesting or useful.

Sometimes I can be a bit OCD about the files on my computer.  Everything has a certain place, and every folder has a meaning.  The same holds true for the music files I’m working on.  When I’m nearly finished with a song, I start exporting .wav files and encoding them to various formats, including mp3 for the downloads, Ogg Vorbis for the streaming, and FLAC for my own archives.  On my file server here at home is a special folder I keep all these in called Recorded Files.  In here are four other folders, one for each type, named new waves, new mp3s, new flacs, and new oggs.  The idea is that I drop new .wav files that are candidates for release into the new waves folder, then place the other formats created from it in their respected folder.  It’s a bit convoluted, but I do have a reason for doing it this way.  In the past I would have trouble keeping track of which wave was the latest file, and knowing if the mp3 I had was from that latest wave file or not.  Now I know some of you would say, “well, why don’t you just add dates to the file names?”  I could, but when I first started working with this layout I didn’t have a lot of extra space to work with to keep multiple versions.  Plus, I already “versioned” my source files in Sonar, so I can always go back in time with those instead.  So it just made sense to do it this way instead.

Anyway, I do all my mp3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis encoding directly on my server, which runs Linux, since it’s a bit faster than my desktop and all the tools are there in one location.  Well one day I realized that I could write a simple shell script to automate creating all these different files from the original .wav files rather than doing it by hand.  Doing this would also further help prevent a situation where I’m left going, “Is this mp3 from the latest .wav file? Is the .wav file even the latest one?  Grr, I’m going to have to re-export and re-edit.”

So I wrote a script one day to do just that.  For a long time the script worked, but it wasn’t that robust.  While it did know how to recreate only the files missing from the new mp3s, new flacs, and new oggs folders, it didn’t know how to overwrite specific files.  Plus, it didn’t really handle command line arguments very well, and it didn’t handle any metadata.  So, I decided to rewrite it in Python and make it better.

The new script can look for .wav files to encode in any arbitrary directory, and can also output each format in any arbitrary directory.  It also knows how to insert some default metadata tags into each file it encodes (the defaults can be changed in the script), figure out the title and track number (if it exists) from the file name, and how to work on individual files.

So there you have it.  A small bit of insight into how I handle my music.  It may not seem like much, but having this script actually saves me a lot of time and headaches.  If you want, you can download a copy of the script here (right-click and Save As).  To run, you need Python (2.6 and newer, though an older version might work); command line tools for lame, flac, and oggenc; and id3v2.