This is a song I “composed” (I use that word loosely) roughly 10 years ago, before I moved to Asia, and when I lived in Brooklyn. I had a copy of SoundForge, which is a sound editing program, and I started f’ing around with it one day, and became intrigued by what I could do by splicing out sounds and repeating them. I did whole compositions that way, until I got a hold of Vegas Audio, which allowed me to overlap tracks. This was probably my most ambitious attempt at a piece of music. It incorporate my voice (doing a funny Martian impersonation), acoustic guitar playing (not that I was any good at that), and endless splicing and tinkering with sounds on the computer. At the time I didn’t know anyone else that was doing quite this sort of thing, and the fun of it was experimenting and coming up with stuff I’d never heard before. Recently, someone pointed out that my musical “compositions” sound a lot like a really lame ass versions of Karlheinz Stockhausen.  I hadn’t listend to Stockhausen when I was making this sort of music – I think radio stations were boycotting his music since his offhanded comment about 9/11 being a great work of conceptual art – and the upshot is that nowadays when I DO listen to Stockhausen it sounds like stuff I did. Of course, he was using all sorts of equipment, and is a real composer, and I was just messing around on the computer, but some of the process and results are similar enough that I “get” his music.

I made several pieces and spent countless hours late at night with headphones on making my own brand of music, until I did some computer upgrade and lost my audio editing programs. I’ve never got new ones with that kind of flexibility. I also decided I was much better off doing visual art, where I had a lot more training.

If you decided to give this a listen, it’s best to use headphones. I did little tricky things like taking individual guitar notes and playing each one backwards and forwards at the same time, and also panning one left to right and the other right to left at the same time. So, there are little sound collage things that are interesting. For me the best parst is just after the voice says, “A man from Mars”.

15 replies on “I Am Not a Monster: Experimental music.”

  1. You lived in Brooklyn?!!! Before it became a cool white/artists’ enclave? That’s where we lived when we first moved to the U.S. i hated it!!!
    Music collage? What don’t you do?

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    1. I loved Brooklyn. I lived in Park Slope close to the park, and worked in Manahattan. It was the best of both worlds. If it was a cool artist’s enclave, I wasn’t part of the scene. And I worked in the belly of the financial beast, though as a “Graphics Specialist”.

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      1. The world of the “West Indian” immigrant was quite different than Park Slope. I loved Park Slope. Still do. The new, hip scene is around the Jay Street area (DUMBO). I hated Brooklyn because it was segregated. I was bused to school (I arrived in the States for 10th or 11th grade), over in Bay Ridge. Racial divides everywhere you turned in Brooklyn and quite alien to this country raised girl.

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      2. I thought NY was much more integrated than LA, where I come from, and that the subway was the great leveler of society. Perhaps I overestimated how intregrated NY was.

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  2. Haha. You believe the history you learned in school. The North is nor as innocent as it proclaims. Did you know, for example, that there was a black community in what is now Central Park? It was poor and it was segregated and it was leveled to make way for the park.

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    1. I didn’t know the history, and didn’t make assumption on North and South. I just noticed how things were different from LA when I got to NY. For example, there really was no comparable race mixer like the subway in LA. Also, early on, there just didnh’t seem to be the same racial tension.

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      1. Yes, LA is in your face, at least that’s how I found it in San Marino and downtown too. NY, in some places, is more subtle. You get turned away from housing, for example, in lily white suburbs. I loved NY but decent housing and decent paying jobs for blacks and such, was and probably is, still a big problem. If you think back to your days living in Park Slope, how integrated was it? Did you see any or many black residents then?

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      3. You may have come onto the scene way later than me. We arrived in NY (Brooklyn) in 1976. I left around 1984 and moved to Westchester county. Apart from the segregation that I experienced, there weren’t enough wild places for me. A park here and there, some trees lining my block.

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    2. I forgot to say i enjoyed the music. The shifts from the left to right ear is fun. If you closed your eyes and paint to the sounds, you could come up with some interesting, probably dark, moody art.

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      1. Yeah, I did all thos little stereo effects somewhat meticulously on the computer. There are about a half dozen more songs, but I think this one was the best. I haven’t done any recently, mostly because I don’t have the software.

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