#oneaday Day 774: Archiving past nonsense

Well, I went and did it. I set up a Bandcamp specifically for my old electronic music nonsense under the name "sonicfunkstars". When I feel like actually sitting down and using all those samples I spent several days copying over, I will be resurrecting the sonicfunkstars name for some new stuff — but in the meantime, you can… enjoy(?) this thoroughly silly selection of crap from 20 years ago if you really want to. Here's the link, and read on if you want a bit more context. If WordPress lets you embed Bandcamp stuff I might even embed it below, but I've never tried that so I don't know if it works as I type this sentence. I guess we'll find out in a minute.

What do you know? It works. Okay, I had to install a plugin. But that plugin works.

Here's the official first sonicfunkstars album, consisting of some early experiments using ACID Music and culminating in a thoroughly silly track composed in collaboration with my friends Woody and Edd, whose title should be fairly self-explanatory.

I was originally inspired to get into using ACID Music by my brother doing some experiments with it under the artist name "ME", and I thought it looked like fun. My friends and I had also spent some time fiddling around with Dance eJay and had developed a taste for sample manipulation, so ACID Music was a natural next step. I had great fun putting these tracks together, even if they have absolutely no concept of "mastering" and the album as a whole has no real concept or theme holding it together.

The title "some vapid fool" came from the University Theatre Group's obsession with the words "vapid", "facile" and "asinine", which we used at every opportunity. Making an album seemed like a prime opportunity to do so, particularly when combined with that cover art — which, yes, is me, aged approximately 18 years of age, drinking in Chamberlain Bar, our nearest halls of residence-based drinking establishment. It was '70s night when that photo was taken, and I am sporting some charity shop specials.

Much like the first album, this second one was largely experimental — though this time I incorporated a combination of MIDI sequenced tracks and live-recorded keyboards on top of the samples. There is a vague concept to this one — it's supposed to be a sort of reflection of the hormonal turmoil of my mind during my university years, and I think the somewhat… back-and-forth nature of its emotional core reflects how I was feeling at the time rather well. There's some tracks among this lot that I really like, and a few that I'm mildly embarrassed by. I have left off the one I am most embarrassed by, in which I attempted to rap. That one is never seeing public release.

This short little collection of tracks was composed for a Klik and Play project I had been working on, in which a London bus repeatedly attacked a taxi for no real reason whatsoever, other than the fact we thought it was funny and those were two of the default sprites in Klik and Play. The… album, EP, whatever you want to call it, was an attempt to remix a single track into multiple different styles, with the exception of The Bus Shop, which is loosely (all right, quite heavily) inspired by the first village theme from Xenogears.

Finally, we come to probably my favourite collection of tracks, composed for my "Gold Edition" remake of a Klik and Play project we had made at sixth form. The original game used MIDIs we'd downloaded from the Internet, but for Gold Edition I wanted to compose an entire soundtrack. So I did!

NOTE: The first track, Pie-Eater's Megamix, contains some naughty language. Sorry about that. It was more than 20 years ago. We are better people now. Probably.

I've also just noticed that I hyphenated "Pie-Eater's" in the first track and not any of the others. I must now correct this.

I have now corrected this.

Then there's this, which was the result of watching Shrek multiple times in one weekend (including playing with the "dubbing" feature on the DVD) and then getting roaringly drunk. The storyline was entirely improvised. You can't really tell.

And finally, this, which consists primarily of samples recorded during rehearsals for our 2002 trip to the Edinburgh Fringe to put on Alan Ayckbourn's Round and Round the Garden.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the tracks and the albums. Please do not feel obliged to buy any of them, as you can stream them for free; I only put a nominal price on them so it doesn't eat into an allocation of free downloads per month. If you really want to own a copy of these, though, I won't stop you.

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