Thursday, August 24, 2006

Boy, is this Spaceship Comfortable!

Many of you know of my on-again-off-again hobby of diddling with electronic music and computer based recording. I played in a terrible little "christian band" as a teen and had a blast with the Roe Bros. who have now gone on to bigger and better things. Anyone who has ever enjoyed creating music knows that finding a group of people to get together and play music with is about as difficult as finding a group of people to get together and be married with. It's just not easy. Throughout high school I experimented with drum machine software and made painful little tracks sampling Christian Broadcast Y2K doomsayers and microcassette recorded classmate rantings. College sapped me of my time to play with such nonsense. Nevertheless, I still get the itch to sit down and concoct strange sounds (think that epidsode of "Friends" where Ross performs with his sampler keyboard) and computers are really good at simulating in a heartless, lifeless, loop-based sort of way the experience of playing with more than one sound at a time.

A few months back my friend, Alice, heard me playing with what I think was an electronic autoharp I found for a dollar at a yard sale and asked me to make some strange background music for a short film she was putting together. It sounded fun, but I didn't actually get started until about two weeks ago. The result was four tracks you you can hear at my myspace: three composed new, the fourth an old one I had lying around that fit with her theme. Click the track titles to start play. Or you can download the mp3's here: 1, 2, 3, and 4.

It was fun and I found that since I knew it had to be short and change a lot, it got a lot more interesting than my usual droning, repetitive stuff. So far, I've just inflicted this sort of thing on my brothers and a few friends but God knows they're sick of it. And after all, isn't the purpose of a blog to allow you a forum to shamelessly parade things across the web to strangers that would better be left in private?









On a totally unrelated note, my boss noticed that Eleanor's Name makes a splendid Haiku.

Eleanor Lumpkin
Eleanor Katharine Lumpkin
Eleanor Lumpkin




"The three children were so transfixed by the luminous giant before them that they never saw the hit-and-run gleam in the school-bus' eyes..."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree.
Happy birthday, Matt!
Actually, today's not your birthday so why did you lunge out at me?

Drew

The Fanks said...

For your birthday, I chose to use your songs in the most dramatic of scenes in my movie. Let me thank you publicly (on your own blog) for your compositions and for composing them so quickly on such short notice. The film is finished, edited and submitted for judging. If you and Melody aren't judges, I'll sugest there be a category for best original score. *a