We Are the Music Makers
For as long as I can remember, I have been into music. I can remember getting my first cassettes around the same time that I started programming (1988). In particular, I remember Weird Al Yankovic’s “Even Worse” and DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince’s “He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper”. I also remember making my own mixtapes by recording music off of the radio. When I moved into high school, I got my first Discman and my first CD, the Above the Rim soundtrack.
The most I ever got into writing my own music during those years was writing what were certainly whack-ass rhymes and starting to toy with making beats for said rhymes. I briefly flirted with learning to scratch records. After high school, I started getting into a broader range of music and got my first piece of music software (Mixman) from a friend for my 20th birthday. That changed everything.
Dainja! Dainja! High Voltage!
I quickly started using freeware drum software, synth software, downloaded samples, and self-created samples to write my first album - The Dainja Zone. ‘Dainja’ was my handle on IRC for a few years so I just used it as the name of the project. I was just getting into alot of electronic music at the time. The result is an album that is extremely dated but I’m still fond of just for the memories of getting into writing music. It was released on mp3.com and a few friends took pity on me by purchasing a copy.
The Time Has Come… Kill!
After finishing the album, I put the Dainja project to rest. I began to get into industrial music very heavily. In particular, a band named Front Line Assembly. I quit using Mixman and starting using Cubase to arrange and mix my next project - Japanese Death Machine. I still used many of the same tools and methods to create the music. The entire album, The Japanimated Series, was heavily influenced by the industrial music I was listening to at the time. This would be the only album I’d write under this project name. It was never released and only one CD-R exists!
Booting into Safe/Mode
Shortly after putting the JDM album up on the web, a fellow by the name of Scott Baker discovered it. We quickly became friends and collaborators on music. The first project that resulted from this partnership was called Safe/Mode. We wrote a ton of songs but never really with an album in mind. Both armed with Quasimidi Sirius synthesizers, we began cranking songs out left and right. This is also when I started using Orion and VST instruments to do all writing and mixing. This was a huge period of growth in writing music for me. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I started to get less interested in writing music and more interested in just hanging out. Ultimately, we put together a number of the tracks and released them for free on the web. The album is called Collection 0:1.
In the Trees
Somewhere in here, I would meet my wife and quickly have my life turned upside down. All would go quiet on the music front for a bit. Once my daughter was born, I found myself in a whole new world. I started taking the time during late nights to write a new album. The whole thing was a bit tongue-in-cheek. I gave the album a storyline and chose the name of the Thunder Ninja Kid. The album, In the Trees…, was written in a little over a month and was completed just before my daughter was hospitalized for a week. It is very experimental and heavy on drum programming. After this, I did not work on any music for a long time.
In Your Action, Making It Better
After a long hiatus from music, Scott & I got back together under the moniker Underscore. Once again, we quickly would knock songs out of the park. This time we went into the project with the aim of writing an album. We easily started twiced as many songs as were on the album - narrowing it down to the tracks we liked best and then refining those. We tried adding vocals for a few months and ultimately decided it was better without them. On an off chance that they would like it, I submitted the album to en:peg digital. They got back to us very quickly and in April of 2005, The Conspiracy of Silence was released. We actually got some college radio play out of this one which was neat. We also got a very nice review from Igloo Magazine.
We decided to do a remix contest a few months later to see what people would do with certain songs. We gave away an iPod to the winner. It was very cool to hear what everyone did with the songs. Even Bitcrush got in on the action (talk about awesome!). We took a handful of the remixes that we liked and released them as Triangle: Remixes on en:peg as well.
Unfortunately, life has intervened more than we’d both like and we haven’t gotten to do any substantial work on new songs since. I hope to have some new music cropping up here soon as well as some other music projects.
