Monthly Archives: December 2017

Met Office Forecast

[play]Met Office Forecast

There are two versions of Bing Crosby singing ‘white Christmas’ on YouTube. One is an older recording, full of hiss and pops and the other is the official version put up by his record company. The official version is much shorter and, despite being remastered, is a lower-effort production.

This is a remix of both versions. The vevo recording has been run through Paulstretch. The older version I manually cut up into 1 or 2 bar phrases. I wrote a SuperCollider script to loop the phrases, cut them up and navigate through them. This is all of that mixed together, plus one word from the song.

The song was originally about nostalgia and climate change – he used to know Christmases with snow. Now the song itself is laden with a nostalgia and wording that has been troubling co-oped. I think it’s important to keep the climate aspects central to the song’s ongoing meaning

All of my Christmas songs this year are to fundraising for the Hackney Night shelter, which my wife has been volunteering at. There are very few shelter beds in East London. This roving shelter makes up a large percentage of them.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:40 — 6.0MB)

Have Yourself a Scary Christmas

[play]Have yourself a Scary Christmas

Once again this year, I’m doing a series of Christmas music where every piece is written within a few hours. All of the pieces this year will be at least loosely based on the Vaporwave genre. Today’s song is a remix of Judy Garland singing ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.’

She sounded like she was already a bit merry to me on the recording, but then I ran it through Paulstretch and expanded it by 8 times the duration and it became suddenly clear that this song is actually made up entirely of existential anguish. This remix uses an 8x stretch, a 30x stretch and a little bit of normal speed, all assembled in SuperCollider.

This year, I am fundraising for the Hackney Night shelter, which my wife has been volunteering at. There are very few shelter beds in East London. This roving shelter makes up a large percentage of them.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:30 — 8.2MB)